A Competitor's Perspective on New Games and Ultimate Frisbee

Joey Grey, my Ultimate Frisbee friend of many years now, sent me this link to an article titled: "The Origins of Ultimate Frisbee's 'Spirit' - Is THIS What You Signed Up For?"

I've not encountered such a deeply researched and passionately negative perspective on New Games and Ultimate Frisbee before. The main argument: that the "Spirit of the Game has nothing to do with good sportsmanship and everything to do with survival of the weakest" is, on the one hand, oddly distorted, and on the other, remarkably perceptive.

Ultimately, if you excuse the expression, this article is a real contribution to the evolution of everything that we tried to do with New Games. He has included some valuable links to scholarly and historic documents about the New Games "movement," and provides us with some major insights about why our ideas are still as revolutionary today as they were 40 years ago.

Perhaps, before you read his article, it might help to understand who the author is, and why:

"Frank Huguenard began playing Frisbee in the late 1960’s and being from a large chaotic family in Indiana, grew up fiercely competitive. By the late seventies, Frank had become fairly proficient with a disc and being athletically inclined, when he heard that there was a Frisbee-centric team sport on the Purdue campus, he immediately took to it and became involved with the sport called Ultimate. Being a square peg stuffed into a round hole (a competitive jock amongst a culture designed specifically to accommodate neither), Frank has spent decades ostensibly miserable in a environment (ironically created to emphasize fun and inclusion) that he consistently experienced as hostile and unaccepting towards him, his out of the box thinking and his unconventional throws & moves."

He correctly concludes: "you can't have a competitive sport based on the kind of ideology that creates a level playing field for the weakest player to have a fair shot at winning." Creating a level playing field for the weakest player to have a fair shot at winning - that's exactly what we did with our New Games, over and over again. We did it by not taking competition seriously. By demonstrating alternatives, by creating opportunities for people to experience "loving competition." Were we, as the author charges, "excluding ultra-competitive personalities from competition?" Why should we? Our culture has produced endless opportunities for ultra-competitive personalities to compete, like, for example, war. What we were creating were alternatives to "win at all costs" competition at a time when there were very, very few, not even skateboarding or bungee jumping.

The author has gone on to create what he considers to be a solution - a truly competitive version of Ultimate Frisbee that he calls Disc Hoops. It's not the kind of game I'd be able to play, or even want to. Me, I'm still creating alternatives of the "anybody can win" type. Not to compete with him, heaven forfend, but because, as he so clearly points out, the need for more and newer games doesn't seem to have diminished at all, at all.



from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith