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This site is dedicated to Tony Alva and Jay Adams, members of the original Zephyr Skateboard Team. This site is also dedicated to Kenny Dobyns.
Jay Adams is my age and like me, he also grew up in a broken home. Both of us have spent the better part of the last 35 years trying new and clever methods of self destructing and otherwise sabotaging lives that should have lived up to their amazing potentials. When Jay was learning how to skateboard in the early 70's, I was learning how to play Frisbee and by the time I began to hear murmurs of a disc based team sport by the late 70's, I was ready to step on the field and start playing but little did I realize that I as also stepping into decades of frustration.
After watching the movie Dog Town and Z-Boys in 2002 about the birth of modern day skateboarding and how these kids went against the conventional thinking of the day and ended up revolutionizing their sport, I set out to understand why the same natural and disruptive evolutionary mutation never occurred within the Ultimate Frisbee community.
Kenny Dobyns, who's considered by many to be one of the greatest Ultimate players of all time, is also a good friend of mine. Now to be sure, I've never met Ken nor have I had the pleasure of playing Frisbee with him, but I do know that if we would have been teammates we would have quickly become the best of friends and if we would have been opponents, we would have become the most bitter of rivals. That's just how things work.
Ultimate Frisbee has experienced explosive growth over the past few years. but for the second year in a row, The UPA (The Ultimate Player's Association) has slighted Kenny by not voting him into the Ultimate Frisbee Hall Of Fame (HoF). Here's a video of him from ESPN's Cheap Seats where they goof on a ESPN production from the late 80s. This is priceless:
I remember when the original program initially aired 20 years ago about how it was really big news in our burgeoning community with everyone excited that we finally got some respect and how so many people idolized Ken and wanted to emulate him but here we are all these years later with ESPN making a complete clown out of him.
As well they should have. He had become a caricature of a caricature of the very archetype that the creators of the game of Ultimate in 1968 wanted to get away from when they designed the rules in the first place. "Play all the other sports you want, just leave this one to us". It was almost like Ray Bradury's book Space Odyssey 2010 where they received the message at the end "Take all the other moons and planets but leave Europa to us". Ultimate Frisbee was the revenge of the nerds. It was meant to be a game for all the people who sucked so bad at sports they wouldn't even bother trying out for school teams, not to mention make the cut. It wasn't meant for jocks and in fact, it was inherently anti-jock and it was most definitely not meant for people like Kenny or me. But we played the game anyway in spite of all that.
Not only was Ultimate simply not designed with the fiercely competitive athlete in mind, it was designed specifically to be anti-competitive, to be an anti-sport as co-creator Joel Silver called it (yes, that Joel Silver; look at that photo, does he even remotely resemble your High School Quarterback?).
But nature abhors a vacuum and when you lack balance in your equation, the Universe always finds a way to fill that void in order to bring things back into equilibrium. This is the meaning behind the ancient Yin Yang symbolism. Opposites are complimentary and you can't attempt to change the natural order of things by trying to legislate them through a dogmatic doctrine. Nature always finds a way. Because the game of Ultimate was designed intentionally to control the players behavior via self-observation rather than having the game itself be self-regulated through the use of an outside independent observers and a rational penalization system for enforcement, the culture never normalized and instead became very schizophrenic.
The casm between the peaceniks and the 'militants' grew larger and larger every year with less and less common ground between them. The middle of the bell curve has unnaturally prevailed in Ultimate Frisbee, successfully being able to maintain the status quo whereas in every revolution, change happens naturally from within the lunatic fringe of that collective. Sociologically, the middle of the bell curve never leads but somehow this is exactly what happened within the Ultimate community. Like a boat without a rudder or a chicken with its head cut off, the community has always lacked true leadership and direction, instead succumbing to the lowest common denominator.
There is something about Ultimate that has prevented the people outsides of the bell curve to be able to drive change. Something intrinsic in the ideology that prevents this natural cycle from occurring. What we have today is a system of band aids placed on top of band aids on top of band aids with no real thought ever given to determine whether or not the game was built on top of an unstable structure to begin with. By ostracizing players who broke the mold, the game has lost its both its edge as well as its soul.
I will tell you this. It wouldn't have mattered if I had won 15 straight UPA National Championships on the teams I was on, with my personality as it was I would never have been inducted into the UPA HoF. I was not one of them, I never wanted to be one of them and never will be one of them but it shouldn't be my inclusion into their social network or my acceptance onto their Facebook pages which should dictate my inclusion into their shrine. An institution that is based on inclusion should never fall into the trap of using exclusiveness towards people who are not like-minded because it goes against the very fabric that your shrine was based on in the first place. As soon as you attempt to put a framework around defining inclusion, by definition it becomes exclusionary.
If it weren't the Kenny Dobyns' of the world in the 80's and 90' helping mold and form the sport, it was the Ty Cobb's and Pete Rose's of the previous generations that helped mold and form the exact ultra-competitive archetype that help give birth to the idea that a field sport could be self-governed by de-emphasizing the win at all costs mentality. You can't have one without the other and to honor one aspect of the yin without honoring the other aspect of yang still leaves the system out of balance and off kilter.
This From Ekhardt Tolle's "The New Earth" in the context of belonging to a collective of any type (of which the Ultimate Frisbee Community is certainly one):
"...what a relief to be relieved of the burden of personal self. The members of the collective feel happy and fulfilled. No matter how hard they work. How many sacrifices they make. They appear to have gone beyond ego. The question is, have they truly become free? Or has the ego simply shifted from the personal to the collective? A collective ego manifests the same characteristics as a personal ego, such as the need for conflict and enemies, the need for more, the need to be right against others who are wrong and so forth. Sooner or later, the collective will come into conflict with other collectives because it subconsciously seeks conflict and it needs opposition to define its boundary and thus its identity. Its members will then experience the suffering that inevitably comes in the wake of any ego motivated actions. At that point, they may wake up and realize that their collective has a strong element of insanity..."
Unfortunately, rather than allowing stabilization to happen naturally as happens when you have firm and consistent boundaries, Ultimate has drifted aimlessly for decades built on top of the artificial notion that a game could exist absent firm boundaries and being governed on the field by the players themselves. This created a predictable lack of awareness thus preventing a natural awakening from occurring. This unnatural replacement for a referee based system is inherently synthetic and Ultimate rapidly became the unchanging object while the people like myself who refused to buy into the system became the irresistible force. 'Agro' players were a simple and predictable outcome of a system with a built in lack of boundaries.
So defying all obstacles and in the face of insurmountable odds, I set out to change the system. To somehow bring balance to an equation that was overwhelmingly lopsided. Call me crazy; you wouldn't be the first and I'm sure you won't be the last but I've spent a lifetime perfecting my craft and it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to recognize just how out of whack Ultimate Frisbee is (on so many different levels). From individual skills to team strategies to standards to divisional play to macro decisions being made at the organizational level, most everything about the game is askew, cockeyed. When the irrepressible force met the immovable object something had to give and the resulting evolutionary burst ended up yielding a brand new sport.
I suppose that the biggest lesson I've learned in all of this regarding my own insanity is that my mind has wasted decades fixated on the things I don't want rather than putting my energy on the things that I do want. If all of your CPU cycles are wasted on grievances, there's no processing power left over for the change you desperately seek and if you know anything about the Law of Attraction, the Universe doesn't comprehent negative qualifiers such as don't and is quite happy to give you what ever you ask for. In other words, complain all you want but just know that as long as you complain, you'll be stuck living with those same situations, people or things that are bringing you the discomfort that you are wanting to escape. Complaining is a useless activity. Proactively move in the opposite direction of your complaints and the world will always be a better place. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem by applying the same thinking that went into causing the problem in the first place.
The end product has come to be known as Dischoops, a sport who's set of rules promotes balance instead of discourages it. Dischoops is every thing Ultimate Frisbee should have been & isn't and I'm very humbled by the game every time I play it. Dischoops could have never happened if it weren't for Ultimate Frisbee or Irv Kalb or the Santa Barbara Condors or Jim Herrick or Wham-O or the UPA or Kenny Dobyns and so it is for this very reason that Kenny is officially the first ever player inducted into the Dischoops Hall of Fame. The UPA made the mistake of refusing to honor him but I won't.
Within the next few weeks, I'll be hosting a series of Ultimate Frisbee related Motion Offense clinics at Stanford University that will demonstrate what a balanced game of ultimate looks like for you to judge for yourself. As each week goes on, I'll be posting videos on the specific drills covered so you can keep up to date with your own teams and clubs and progress along on your own. I invite you to stay tuned and try these tricks and tips yourself which will help you see just how off balance your game is so you can make strides at becoming more balanced, as an individual, as a team and as a collective. I'm confident that over time, these videos will be come to be known as The Bible for how to play Ultimate.
I have decided that one day I will go into the UPA HoF. I know in my heart that I belong there but if you have to ask me to explain why, then me telling you why via blog isn't going to educate you. That's a conclusion you'll have to come to on your own.
See you in the Hall Kenny!
Frank Huguenard
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