Flipped Disks

The name of the game is Guts Frisbee, and to a growing number of serious competitors it is the greatest sport around. Two five-member teams stand on boundaries set 15 yards apart and take turns hurling a Pro Model Frisbee so hard, or on so tricky a trajectory, that no opponent can make a clean one-handed grab. It sounds easy, but catching the acrobatic platter can be as difficult as catching Vida Blue fastballs without a glove. Points are awarded to the throwing team if the receivers muff a catch, and to the receiving team if a throw goes too wide or too high. The first team to score 21 points wins. Desperate lunges, volleyball-style tips to keep the darting disk in play, skinned knees, mashed fingers and bloody noses are all part of the game.

There is even an International Frisbee Tournament held annually in the isolated Michigan Upper Peninsula community of Copper Harbor (pop. 50). Two weeks ago, several thousand spectators came to watch 36 teams bearing such titles as the Function Junction Double Suction Pump Five and the Humbly Magnificent Champions of the Universe compete for the world's Guts Frisbee championship. Some of the players came from as far away as Canada, Germany and Australia. And though the tournament's atmosphere of low camp was clearly a spoof on all organized sports, the matches were fought in dead earnest.

"We play this game seriously and I think scientifically," said Roger Barrett, a member of the high-ranked Fuchsia team from Berkeley, Calif. He and his cohorts had practiced such exotic deliveries as sidearms, thumbers, under-hands and upside-down wrist flips no less than three hours a day for months --but to no avail. They lost in the finals to the defending champion Highland Avenue Aces of Wilmette, 111., who had coolly scouted out the weak spots in the Californians' game. During the match, the winners destroyed Fuchsia's confidence with a steady stream of verbal taunts. The Aces' reward: the Julius T. Nachazel Memorial Trophy, made from a couple of tin cans and some cut-glass jewels and named after a retired Michigan Tech professor whose name had appealed to the tournament's director, Jumbo Jim Davis.

Wham-O. Even if Frisbee eventually becomes a professional sport, as some observers fear, there is still likely to be more money in selling the disks than in flipping them. Twenty-four years ago, a Los Angeles building inspector named Fred Morrison invented the Frisbee after studying the airworthy pie pans used by the now defunct Frisbie bakery company of Bridgeport, Conn. In 1956 he sold the patent on an improved design to the Wham-O Co. (those wonderful people who brought you the Hula-Hoop), and since then the royalties have been sailing in: about $800,000 to date.

Dr. Stancil Johnson, a long-haired Santa Monica psychiatrist who serves as Frisbee's official historian, has an apparently sober explanation for the disks' popularity. They are, he says, "the perfect marriage between man's greatest tool--his hand--and his greatest dream --to fly." But even Johnson is hard-pressed to account for the latest development on the Frisbee front. Among the crowds at Copper Harbor was a bevy of "froupies," short for Frisbee groupies. They too seemed to want to have a fling.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.