GETTING FIT:While many of us have opted out of team sports and become alienated couch-potatoes, this Frisbee-throwing sport has players flying high, writes ANGELA RUTTLEDGE.
ONCE UPON A TIME, when this little home-bird was quite far from the nest, completely out of her comfort zone, a wise, yappy and very round American named Thor Hesla told me to get over myself and get into the game. Because, he guessed, I had made a choice to be where I was, and now I needed to get the most out of it. I had been X-rayed by Thor and he had found me out: a team sports scaredy-cat.
The “game” Thor was pushing, with his in-your-face enthusiasm, was Ultimate Frisbee. Back in Ireland, I was surprised to discover that there are Ultimate Frisbee societies in colleges around the country and there is even an Irish Flying Disc Association (IFDA). Makes it sound like a homing beacon for UFO-spotters, but it’s just that they don’t call it “Frisbee” because of the trademark.
Stephen MacDevitt, who has been playing the game since 2001, says Ultimate began in US universities, kids messing around with pizza trays. It is still very much a university sport, but he hopes that as third-level students graduate, new crops of Ultimate teams will emerge. All that charm employed by Frisbee Society recruiters in freshers’ week will pay dividends.
The first thing that strikes me about the game, the rules of which are set out in detail on the IFDA website, is that there is no referee. “Yep,” confirms MacDevitt, “the idea is that people are fair with it, one-up-man-ship will come back to bite you. If you feel you’ve been wronged, you call it. If the other person disagrees, he ‘contests the foul’ and you go back to the last point. It is a nice idea and it works on most levels.”
MacDevitt explains, “Ultimate is rather like American football. There is a pitch with two end zones. To score, one of your team has to catch the Frisbee in the end zone. Like in basketball, you can’t run with the Frisbee, but you can pivot. You have 10 seconds to throw and someone on the other team marks you and counts down the time. There are seven players a side, but you’ll have 18-20 on a squad; there’s lots of substitution because there is so much running involved. You’ll have some guys at the back called ‘handlers’ and four or five ‘mids’. It’s a non-contact sport, you can’t tackle, but there is a natural amount of contact with everyone running after the same thing.”
Stephen’s brother Brian MacDevitt is even more involved in the game; he was the captain of the Irish team in 2007. Right, I wonder, is it a Venus and Serena thing you have going on? “Not at all,” laughs MacDevitt, “Brian is the one who works hard at it, training regularly, I enjoy the social life. Brian’s team is called Broccoli; they’d be our main Dublin rivals. But my team has a strong home record.” And what is Stephen’s team called then? “Johnny Chimpo,” he says, “we got the name from a film called Super Troopers.”
There are “pick-up games” in Dublin and Cork – these are open games and training sessions – and the IFDA encourages the establishment of flying disc teams (details and tips are available on its website). “The idea is to get more teams into competition, that’s the only way to improve, otherwise the game will become stagnant . . . the rivalry is good craic as well.” Tournaments take place over a weekend, Saturday morning to Sunday evening. Internationally, there is a four-year cycle, with a big tournament every year. This year, it’s the Eight Nations taking place over a week in Girona, Spain, in July.
Sounds ripe for a takeover in the Irish workplace: cheap and cheerful team-building with work colleagues, the new tag rugby? But if the sport has been here for nearly a decade, why are there still only a few hundred players dotted around the country? I asked Thor’s friend Ronan Anderson, an Irishman who picked up Ultimate in Belgium and Kosovo, why we are slow on the flying disc uptake in this country.
“It’s very popular across North America and continental Europe but there’s maybe a stigma about Ultimate Frisbee here,” says Anderson, tongue in cheek, “there’s a perception that if it’s not football or rugby, it’s probably dodgy. They see someone sporting a bandana and they think ‘no way!’ Which is fair enough actually. But it’s an awesome game; great fun, technical and a hard workout. You cover a lot of ground marking and scoring and end up shattered after just a few minutes’ play. Although you often get different skill levels, after a while it gels and the game starts to flow. It’s really fast paced and people’s hand-eye co-ordination rapidly improves. It also pretty much always attracts a nice relaxed crowd.”
According to the IFDA: “There’s no dignity in choosing to break the rules when the opportunity arises, or respect for others or yourself in arguing, not to be fair but to gain advantage.” Now that I know more about its ethos, a game where “Chilly” is a technical term meaning “be patient, wait a moment”, I realise that Ultimate captures Thor Hesla’s attitude to the world and his attempts to understand it.
Not long after I returned to Ireland, I heard that Thor, that crazy American with his lust for Ultimate and his X-ray perception; had been killed in Afghanistan. He had been using a hotel gym, the only way of exercising and socialising as an international worker in Kabul, when it was attacked. If even the brightest lights can be knocked out at any time, hadn’t the rest of us better get into our game?
Learn more about Ultimate Frisbee on the IFDA website, www.irishultimate.com. A Frisbee can set you back as little as €3.40 – or €12 for an Ultimate Frisbee, available online at www.mcsport.ie and in sports shops.