The year: 2006. The place: Siberia. The time: 4-5:30 p.m. Mon. thru Fri., 2-4 Wed. No, I’m not describing campus drug deals, or the class schedule and meeting places for Ornithology 101. I am attempting to tell you about the newest Varsity sport on campus, the one they call Frisbee – Ultimate Frisbee. You may wish to ask questions such as: Who plays this sport? Does Ultimate Frisbee recruit PG’s each season? Is it a Frisbee, or is it a disc? The answers to these three grueling questions, my friend, are, in order: animals, once, and no one cares. Would you like more detail than one-lined, single-minded responses? Well then, as an avid Frisbee-goer, I can give you that. To address your first question, the sport is played by hippies. I know, I said animals last time, but screw you. They’re both right. Oh, and weaklings. Weaklings play Frisbee. I’m not quite sure how you would define a weakling, but they’re what you could call the third party. Not political or anything, just…weak. The nature of the Frisbee player is relaxed, yet ravenous – hence the hippie-animal hybrid I was describing earlier. This makes sense – the sport was born in the 60’s, so naturally the only people who play the sport must be hippies. And animals. Have you ever watched a game of Frisbee, or shall I say, Ultimate? A team throws a piece of plastic to another team, and then they fight each other for it. At least, that’s my understanding. I’m more of a second-string guy, so I don’t believe I have ever seen an entire game, but eye-witness accounts tell me it’s quite frightening. As for your second question – you jerk face! You know quite well that PG’s don’t play Frisbee. They beat up Frisbee kids, and eat the small ones, like me, at dinner parties. The only PG we ever had thought he was signing up for Lacrosse – he was illiterate. You stoop to that level, and it hurts, man, it really hurts. But I guess you still want an answer to your third question, the one about when to say “Frisbee” and when to say “disc.” Seriously, I’m just gonna repeat my initial answer. No one cares. To prove this, I sat down with an unnamed, average Phillips Academy student, and an unnamed captain of the Varsity squad, so I could have a little chat with him. When asked about the names of the eight dollar pieces of plastic, our captain responded, “The word Frisbee is exchangeable with the word disc for the common person, but a knowledgeable Ultimate player will refer to the object as a disc, for Frisbee is a trademarked name of the Wham-O Company. Wham-O came about in – ” I cut him off. I was falling asleep. I then asked the unnamed student for his/her reaction to this. He/she responded, “I do not care.” Case in point. Ultimate Frisbee may look easy from the sidelines, it is nothing of the sort. The training for Frisbee is tremendous: it requires hours upon hours of runs and workouts, usually done in the remote jungles of northern Madagascar. Pre-season training is more a test of survival than of fitness. During the midwinter breaks of our school year, Frisbee players wrestle bears on Fridays, and Sundays are the only off-day, with 9 p.m. arts and crafts workshops. Then, that’s it. This is not a sport for the weak. Wait, no, scratch that, I’m contradicting myself. OK, seriously, training is just throwing a disc around and pretending to run. But I assure you, we’re intense. Like that one time when we ran before practice. They called it a “warm-up”. Yeah, more like a “make you throw up,” guys. Man, it was…tough. Now, I know some kids play football and bench press stuff, and others run more than a mile at a time, but as for me, I have no questions. I play Frisbee for the love of plastic, the gazelle-like way I am able to prance across the field, and that tremendous feeling of diving head first 3 feet in the air to catch the disc (“getting HO,” as the hippies call it) only to break both my shoulder blades. I do not revel in the art of Yoga, nor do I find joy in beating people with sticks or playing with balls. I play Frisbee, that’s right, Frisbee, and I am an animal.
