Frisbie: Beyond Catch and Throw

by Craig Simon © 1982

Introduction

Freestyle is like jazz--spontaneous and elastic--a cooperative art. The basis is sophisticated and complex, but forgotten in the delight of jamming.

The sport is in its infancy. The playing community is not particularly large, but it is growing and filled with people who are enthusiastic about participating in the development of a new art form. Like mechanical aviation, freestyle is possible because of modern technology. As our society left the ground to travel and to explore, it was inevitable that we would find ways to fly simply for the fun of it.
 

Flow is the peak experience of freestyle. It connects you to the disc, to your partner and to the world around you. Freestyle combines the coordinated madness of juggling, the continuity of ice-skating and the drama of surfing.
 

Organization is one of the less obvious elements of freestyle. After all, being serious about frisbie sounds like a contradiction in terms. Most people take it lightly, ranking it with Hula-Hoops, Yo-Yos, Boomerangs and Batons. The ranking is fair; nevertheless, freestylers do perform miracles. Freestyle magic does not violate any rules of science; in fact, the two jibe quite neatly. This book is a study of how the sport fits into Nature's system.
 

The written word is not the ideal medium for explaining freestyle, but I had to put all I could down on paper. The working title for this book was Freestyle Vocabulary because I thought it wise to approach freestyle as a set of definitions. Most vocabularies are arranged alphabetically, like a dictionary. This one is not; instead, words are arranged to tell a story about the sport as the definitions unfold.
 

Much of this book covers physics and aerodynamics. A good portion of it consists of the existing jargon of freestyle, which includes unforgettable words like "braineater" and "psychobash." I've added a few of my own, like "inversion cycle" and "correspondence." Also, I've come up with some ways of categorizing aspects of freestyle that make it easier to think about, as well as write about.
 

Needless to say, perhaps, this is a technical book. If you're already familiar with the sport, I hope my ideas speak to your experience. If you're new to the sport, you'll probably find it useful to read some sections twice, but the section on the flat delay is written with the beginner in mind.
 

From here on, each time I'm about to define a new term or concept, it will be underlined.
 

Fortunately, you don't need this kind of discipline to play. It all fits together by itself.
 

Freestyle Theory In 1978, Jeff Felberbaum, a freestyle champion several times over, presented an intriguing concept to a room full of players after a day of competition at the Flying Disc World Championships in Santa Cruz. It was then I first started thinking about freestyle vocabulary. Jeff said that the sport may be organized into three categories, which he called propulsion, continuation and termination. In other words, we can throw the disc, play with the disc and catch the disc. The distinction is a good place to begin.
 

Throwing has received the most attention in the literature so far, and with good reason. There are four basic grips and at least 15 different releases. Each of these releases can be executed at a variety of different angles, so the number of distinguishable throws is huge. Furthermore, freestyles use most of them while none of the other disc sports employ anything even near half.
 

Continuation is the most interesting and the most rapidly changing part of freestyle. All the skills that allow the player to touch, manipulate and pass the disc without gripping it fall under this heading. During this manipulation, the disc's rate of spin may slow, sustain, or increase.
 

Imagine being able to freestyle for over four minutes without dropping, throwing or catching the disc. Joey Hudoklin and Richie Schmitz accomplished such a feat at the 1981 California State Championships. The very idea would have been just a dream five years before and beyond imagination ten years before. Now, so much is known about disc control that anyone can aspire to catchless and throwless jamming.
 

Several skills can be applied to each place on the disc's surface. In a later chapter, I'll cover these skills one by one, explaining what they are, how to learn them, and what I mean by the correspondence of these skills. Before you reach that chapter, the term "delay" will occasionally pop up. For now, let it suffice to say that this refers to keeping the disc horizontal as it spins on the fingernail.
 

Dealing with continuation fully requires a heavy dose of gyroscopics and aerodynamics. But science doesn't tell the entire story. Freestylers have learned to combine different skills during a routine so that they flow together into an integrated whole. Players can position their bodies to increase the aesthetic visual appeal of a move or the difficulty of executing a certain skill at a particular moment. We'll have to deal with a lot of preliminaries before really getting down to the role of continuation in freestyle.
 

Catching is relatively easy to explain, because the focus is on single moments or snapshots of time. Since it turns out that freestylers use many of the same forms for continuation and throwing, we will begin our analysis of freestyle with a discussion of form.

Next: The Body--Form and Movement