ENDLESS, BOUNDLESS: ULTIMATE

And on the second day, we rested. It wasn't our decision. Instead the Tournament Director stepped on the field, waved his hands in the air and called a halt to the action. There were discrepancies involved, controversy that had to be resolved immediately. We were in the midst of playing our second game in a double elimination playoff bracket to advance out of our New York section to the Northeast Regionals, but another team, also vying for a spot to Regionals, hemmed and hawed to the Tournament Director about their seeding and bracket placement and how come one team was a free bye, and the other a tough & unfair match & why couldn't they play us, instead of us playing the team we were now playing? Shouldn't the loser of match E play the loser of match G instead of the winner of Match F having to play the Masters squad, whose division wasn't equivalent to ours and was thus not in the running to qualify for Regionals, meaning their games were automatic byes for the opposing team? So why couldn't we just switch it all up in midstream and change the format, with X playing Z and Y playing W?

I mean, why not?

So we sat around for 30 minutes while the dispute was resolved. Welcome to Ultimate Frisbee.

Ultimate: the free spirited scourge of the sports world, halfway between novelty and competition, firmly rooted in individual expression borne out by college geeksters and sports' stoners across the nation in hundreds of tournaments a year. Some wonder what exactly drives nominally intelligent men and women towards such a frivolous yet enormously competitive activity. Unlike the rigid uniformity masking Baseball players' dull personality and the personification of war manifested in Football player grunts, Ultimate players are supremely individualistic. In this way, Ultimate is uniquely American, unbounded by adherence to one way of life. When you play Ultimate you are challenging yourself and challenging others.

The challenge this weekend for Mandible, a new Brooklyn-based Men's Club team, was to beat a host of local college teams in an effort to advance to the more competitive Northeast Regionals. Mandible was cobbled together this summer by area veterans Eli Neugeboren and Pat Stoltz as an alternative to the ultra-competitive, top Ultimate squad in the city called Bomb Squad. There are several tiers of talent in Ultimate circles, ranging from those who play in Tennis shoes to dedicated athletes who train three days a week and compete on weekends. Mandible is somewhere in between.

One of our early Saturday games of the two-day Sectionals tournament was against NYU, still a ragtag bunch not quite up to the level of more serious college teams. Before the game, I offered their captain Dusty Rhodes a bowl of weed if he could get his team to tell me what they thought of Ultimate and why they play. The refused the herb -- it is somewhat out of fashion to get stoned before games these days -- but answered my questions.

First guy: "Ultimate is about Zen. It's a state of mind."
Second guy, interrupting him, "What? What the Fuck is wrong with you?"
First Guy: "It is. Its Zen. You don't think when you play."
Third Guy "Yeah. When I think, I fuck up."
Dusty: "I play Ultimate to get out of the city. You get to see grass in other states."

Poor kids. Mandible defeated NYU easily enough and faced a tough test against Wesleyan, the liberal university immortalized in Ultimate lore as the basis for the hippie frisbee plot in the movie PCU. Wesleyan has a very competitive team with a pair of 6'4" monsters and a small army of capable disc-handlers. They surprised everyone last year and finished second at this very tournament. They looked to repeat that magic, but we stopped them on defense behind several layout blocks en route to winning 11-8.

On the other fields, the women's and co-ed divisions were also competing. I met one of the spectators at the tournament, Diane Straus Tucker, Publisher of the Westchester County Times. She was there to watch her daughter Becca guide the Yale 'Ramona' Women's team.

"It's a great sport for women who have come out of other varsity sports," noted Tucker. She should know, having been the captain of the first-ever Women's varsity Sport, Tennis, at Yale in 1974.

She also knows that Ultimate has always been about self-motivation. There are few coaches in the nation and fewer (thankfully) administrators.

Says Tucker, "It's great to see the people building Ultimate. It's really up to the girls and not the college to make a team come together."

Mandible came together after the long wait between play on Sunday. After losing to Yale Superfly, those darned hard-running college kids, we regrouped and pasted a team from Rockland County 13-5, qualifying for Regionals.

Soon, another tournament and more waiting around on fields, enjoying the weather and the challenge to shut down the man you're guarding. The competition is great and the laid-back perks are even better. Maybe that's why the high schoolers who founded the sport in 1969 dubbed it Ultimate.

A teammate of mine on Mandible, Taylor Pope, was interning over the summer at the Voice as a photo assistant. He encouraged me to write a piece on Ultimate and submit it to a Voice Sports Editor. I did and they promised that it would be published, but never ran it and after September 11th it clearly had no spot in the paper.

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