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.