Haters Perspective #1

This is the first installment of a special feature here at Disc Golf Chronicle, a series of 3 articles authored by a hater of our beloved sport. Let it not be said that a free and open debate does not take place on these pages. Our guest author, who for fear of the backlash such hating could bring upon his professional career prefers anonymity, has fired off the following installment as his first salvo. Note, the views expressed below are solely those of the author and not mine. Enjoy!

Disc Golf: A Brief History (aka If You Steal It and Market It, They will Buy It)

I’ll just go ahead and put it out there. I am a hater. I am also trained as an art historian. So before tackling the question of whether or not disc golf should be properly labeled a sport (SPOILER ALERT: the answer is “no”) and why I so detest this so-called sport, I felt compelled to delve into the origins of the phenomenon that is the focus of the Disc Golf Chronicle. I don’t mean to cast a dark cloud of negativity over this happy little feelgooderie, but I am afraid, and this is not a charge I make lightly, that disc golf embodies nothing less than the loathsome big-business commercial exploitation, and thus annihilation, of a previously meaningful form of anti-establishmentarian cultural expression.

The annals of history are enlightening in this regard. Disc golf’s origins, wholly unsurprising to this commentator, are to be found in the record books of the Research and Development Division of Wham-O, the original producer of the Frisbee. Even though former Wham-O R&D director and self-styled father of disc golf “Steady” Ed Headrick takes full credit for inventing the modern Frisbee, he also baldly admits that he appropriated the concept fully formed. Where, you ask? Well, during the 1960s, hippie UFO enthusiasts could be found throwing popular flying saucer children’s toys called Pluto Platters, surrounded, one can only imagine, by clouds of pungent smoke on some California college campus (“Groovy, man, just watch that saucer fly;” “Far out, sister,” etc. and so on…). Walter Frederick Morrison had developed the Pluto Platter in the ‘50s. His failure to promptly patent his platter-shaped brainchild (the take-home lesson: you gotta patent that shit, man) was tantamount to a handwritten and perfumed invitation to a savvier and more ruthless businessman such as Headrick to swoop in and steal it. Had it not been “Steady” Ed, it surely would have been someone else.

Bingo, a craze was born, as Wham-O a) patented that shit, man, and b) marketed it out the frickin’ wazoo. This established posthaste the Frisbee’s vaunted position in the Crappy Novelty Fad Hall of Fame alongside the Super Ball (also “invented” by “Steady” Ed Headrick when he stole…sorry, “discovered”…blobs of synthetic rubber developed by the auto industry to dissipate heat generated by tire flexion and realized that they bounced!), the pet rock, and the hula hoop, Wham-O’s unsold stores of which, incidentally, were melted down to create the initial battalion of Frisbees). Wham-O’s sole contribution to the development of “their” product: emblazoning on it a black ring of flame and the Olympic rings!
Forget the iPod, ye students of sophisticated design theory; the Frisbee is where it’s at!

Why these decorations? I have no clue (more creative thinkers, please submit thoughts on the back of a self-addressed stamped envelope. Or in the “Comments” section, even. I may have admitted to being an art historian but I never said I was any good). Wham-O couldn’t even think of an original name for the product. It is widely known that “Frisbee” is a bowdlerization of “Frisbie,” of the Frisbie Pie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, popular with Yale undergraduates, who whiled away the hours throwing Frisbie’s aerodynamic empty pie dishes back and forth to one another.

In one easy move, “Steady” Ed transformed a “far out” pastime favored by hippie peaceniks into a vaguely militaristic Roswell-meets-atomic-bomb-test-ring-of-blackened-fire-and-brimstone iconography-inscribed commodity. That is, from pacifist expression of flower power to pure capitalist commodification; from the transformative power of counter-culture to the illusionary and ultimately unfulfilling so-called values of consumerism. This is the trajectory traced by the Frisbee’s early narrative arc. But what a seller it was! Like hotcakes, man!

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, “Steady” Ed dared to push the already bulging envelope even further. Risk and consequences be damned. Icarus-like, “Steady” Ed dreamed of touching that big ball of golden cash money in the sky. Or at least he dreamed of stealin… inventing a set of wings that would fly Wham-O to the sun and fill its coffers, if not his own, with moolah (It should be noted, in the interest of scholarly disinterest, that “Steady” Ed was paid only $10 compensation for licensing his Frisbee patent to Wham-O, as per the stipulations of his employment contract. D’oh!)

What else can I steal,” he likely mused to himself, “to really milk this great Frisbee idea.” Like the great Zeus’s lightning bolt, it struck from the blue. “The only thing better than stealing an extant idea and aggressively marketing it as the must-have “sporting” accessory for picnicking, dog-owning, beer-guzzling yahoos,” Headrick’s logic surely arrowed, “would be to combine it with an extant, rule-defined game, thereby lending a potentially cut-throat edge to a formerly egalitarian and non-competitive pastime.” Screw those Peaceful McPeacertons with their blissful flying saucer fun. Standardized rules, official playing venues, merchandising opportunities, marketing strategies, professional organizations, competitive tournaments, and membership fees were required, damn it! Why, it would have been un-American to ignore these kinds of lucrative marketing tie-ins.

Everyone knows that two great tastes taste great together. And sure enough, by conjoining Frisbee and golf, the centaur, Minotaur, mermaid, sphinx, and satyr of sports was birthed! I’ll grant y’all this: disc golf is, if nothing else, the Cadillac of the novelty game, the Prada of the Velcro-glove-and-ball, paddleball, and Hacky Sack set. But, sadly, it actually fares far worse upon more critical inspection. Imagine any of the aforementioned made highly competitive, and you’ll get a closer cousin to disc golf. Think competitive yoga, and you begin to approach the ludicrous proposition that is Frisbee… I mean, disc… golf. Then, imagine if, say, Nike were to market thousands of slightly different kinds of Hacky Sacks: a large-weave crochet for windy conditions; a hexagonal paneled sack for easier visibility on overcast afternoons; fine grain sand stuffing for better control, etc. and so on. (Hacky Sack, incidentally, was invented by a couple of Oregonians in 1972; they eventually sold the rights to the Hack Sack footbag to…wait for it…yes… Wham-O.)

Only then could Hacky-Sackers match the intense fetishism displayed by the average disc golfer, Saito, who collects dozens of plastic discs in the misguided belief that there is actually some difference between, say, the Shark DX, the Polaris LS, the Starfire Pro, and the Valkyrie Champion. It’s not interplanetary travel, guys. Neither NASA nor Martians are designing these flying saucers, remember. They look different ‘cos…well… they look different. Deceptive advertising has managed to convince of the desirable and tangible goal of owning a product even though it lacks the ideological meaning of the very cultural form from which it was initially pillaged. I’m no hippie, but at least those good-natured, tree-hugging UFO enthusiasts believed that their Pluto Platter playing was part of a larger revolutionary protest directed in part at the very short-term ego-gratification offered by big businesses like Wham-O. Disc golf is, quite simply, a sordid manifestation of exploitative corporate strategies and the commercialization of a once radical, but non-confrontational, counter-culture. Beyond the stupidity of the game itself, disc golfers are, I’d argue, willing, if oblivious, participants in the broad social erosion of cultural values. So there.

In the next Hater’s Perspective: Korfball, tug of war, bridge, roller-skating, orienteering, and disc golf. Can you spot the odd one out?