Frisbie: Beyond Catch and Throw

by Craig Simon © 1982

Last Words
 

Some lines of advice for the beginning freestyler. Every skill and trick presents its own challenge, but there are four hurdles that nearly everyone must deal with.

The first is the delay. It's like learning to ride a bicycle, stand up on a surfboard, or even to walk: once you learn it, you've got it. But it takes time to get it in the first place. Don't expect to master the flat delay in just a couple of hours (though some people have done it). Persevere and you'll have it in a week.

The second hurdle is the crank. I find that many players attempt it, but don't follow it through the complete cycle. In technical terms, moving from the supinated to the inverted position is pretty obvious. The disc "wants" to go that way, so many people find it easy to try that part. Moving on to the forward inverted position and past it isn't as self-apparent so most people don't try it. Follow through and you'll be rewarded.

The third hurdle is the zing. This move is useful for all kinds of applications. There are two kinds of mistakes to be made here. Remember that zing means launching a rim delay off the finger into the air. Since the disc is precessing, you have to wait for the right moment to zing it where you want it to go. The first mistake is to hesitate a moment too long, forcing you to wait a whole precessional wobble for your next chance. In the meantime, the disc runs out of Z's. The other mistake is not too wait long enough, zinging too early and launching an ineffective pass. Make both mistakes at least once and you'll be on the way to getting your timing down.

The fourth hurdle is learning to throw. Freestyle is a cooperative game; giving good Z's is as fundamental as knowing what to do with them. Don't forget snap and angle. Yin and yang are helpful concepts also. Yin is soft and receptive. Yang is hard and forceful. Throwing smoothly is a yin experience. Still, there is always a little bit of yin in yang and a little bit of yang in yin. Learning to throw, in many ways, means pushing to the limits of your partner's patience. Don't forget to visualize the disc's trajectory through the air and to keep your eyes on your target.

* * * Moves and Combinations * *

Legovers. Once someone gets over the ecstasy that comes with the first (albeit shaky) flat delay, the inevitable question is, "Now what do I do?" Here's my answer: put it under your leg. I might add that for each of the four leg positions, there are two ways to go. You can hold a delay while passing it under the leg, and then launch the disc clear to set up another move or catch, or you can raise a leg, let go of the disc, quickly reach under the leg, and then restore the delay while moving the disc clear. Given these two types of moves, two hands, four positions to work with, and maximum Z 's, the number of combinations possible is limitless.

Walkover (or Leapover). One legover combination worth noting is similar to vaulting sideways over a fence. You start with a flat delay on one side of you, let go of it, leap over the disc with both legs and retrieve control 'with the other hand on the other side. If you do this with a rim delay, you don't have to leap as high. Start with a fourth position swoop on one side and finish with a fourth position draw on the other.

Swoop to Doublet. A good way to set up a chest roll or a brush is to swoop a Natural hand rim delay (clockwise on the left hand, etc.) behind the back, making sure to pivot your arm mostly at the shoulder. Let the disc go out to the side so that you can free your hand in order to bring it around the front of your body. The disc will be waiting for you, hanging in the air, steeply angled, ready for a brush or a roll. By pivoting your head to follow the motion of your hand, you can make the move more interesting, creatIng the illusion of a full turn.

Experiment! I could go on and on suggesting ideas for moves, but the best advice I can give is to suggest that you explore on your own. The way to put the style in your freestyle is to spend hours at a time investigating the variations of an idea, letting your imagination run wild. If you intend to be serious, it helps to be eclectic and to study other forms of movement which you can incorporate into your game, such as dance or martial arts.

Athletic discipline goes a long way in freestyle. It helps to exercise the whole body, including the fingers. Warm up before playing, and, especially, work on ambidexterity.
 

More Freestyle Terminology

Drops are diplomatically referred to as the "whoops catch." They are beyond doubt the most imitated move in freestyle. A drop is usually followed by the "observational." A drop is not the end of the world. The disc is fair game as long as it is still moving.

Save. Using flip-outs, "arbitrary" skills, and roots (letting a disc which is rolling on the ground travel into the palm or over the foot in order to brush it up), it is possible to revive the disc before it breathes its last Z. The disc could appear to be a hopeless case, out of spin and falling to the ground, but the persistent player can get under it, and keep hitting it back up, looking for an opportunity to start a roll or an airbrush, thus bringing the disc back to life. Arbitrary might look like frantic chaos, but "never say die." A save is worth the effort.

Bail Out is what happens when you cut a move short because you couldn't pull off, or forgot, what you meant to do.

Speedflow. All the emphasis on continuation doesn't mean that throws and catches are "out." Speedflow means playing without tips, delays and the like, emphasizing form, accuracy and quickness. After all, jamming was fun when they did it with pie tins. Speedflow is also the name of a game that involves throwing the disc back and forth between players who stand a measured distance apart. The goal is to make the greatest number of catches in a limited period of time.

Coloradical Weave. This is a sophisticated type of speedflow invented by the 1980 World Champion "Coloradicals." They call it a three-man weave, but women and children can do it too. The rule is that the person who just threw the disc runs toward the receiver and that the next throw goes to the person who most recently watched the disc fly by. As an example, imagine that Peter, Paul and Mary are about to do a weave. Peter throws past Paul to Mary. Mary throws past Peter to Paul. Paul throws past Mary to Peter and the whole thing starts over again. Even at the simplest levels, this is a very active style of play. It becomes much more difficult as players experiment with complicated catches and throws and as the middle players attempt to mac and deflect the disc.

Co-op generally refers to any situation in which two or more players touch the disc after it starts spinning. The simplest co-ops involve continued (not thrown) passes and shared catches. The most advanced co-ops are shared manipulations of the disc, like multiple person body rolls, two person turnovers and so on. Some freestyle teams have used co-ops in which one player does not even touch the disc, but participates in the move by creating a visual counterpoint to the player who controls the disc, either by letting the disc pass close to the limbs or by performing a gymnastic or dance movement. For example, a player could form his or her arms into a circle and let the disc pass through it, thereby hooping the disc. Choreography isn't necessary for exciting co-ops. As I mentioned at the outset, the ultimate challenge in freestyle involves continuing the disc as long as possible without throws and catches.

Moving Triangle is a co-op in which one player throws the disc to another and runs by the receiver, who passes it back. This can be done with variations of speed or distance during the exchange. Viewed from above, the disc would appear to travel along two legs of a triangle.

Macline. Three or more players form a line. The players at each end have the responsibility to throw the disc forcefully and accurately down the line so that as many players as possible get a chance to mac, skip, deflect or simply gesture at the disc as it goes by.

Micronesia. As with co-ops, the goal remains to pass the disc between players so that they can all share the Z's of an initial throw. In this case, they stand quite close together, often in a circle. If one person fumbles the disc, someone else will be close by to attempt a save.

Angle Pop. (Having not heard any other term to describe it, I'm proposing this name to refer to a co-op move that has become quite popular.) One player, usually facing into the wind, brushes or rolls the disc out to the other player, who, in turn, tips the disc so high that the breeze will carry it back to the first player, who can brush it or roll it again. Given the proper wind conditions, a series of exchanges can go on repeatedly.

Consecutive / Nonconsecutive. Moves and Combinations are said to be Consecutive, and therefore more difficult, if they are not connected to "Thes." This makes sense, because there is less risk to a skill performed in a The position than in any other. Nevertheless, there is a controversy involved here, because many people reject the notion that a move or a combination is better simply because it is more difficult. What about the impression it makes on the observer?

Environmental Freestyle. Playing in a gymnasium is not the same as playing in a strong wind. Both conditions offer different dynamics, different opportunities and favor different styles of play. Environments are not limited to just those two types. Players from the New York area were forced to deal with crowded parks and developed a tight style of play based on controlling the disc close to the body. Likewise, their co-ops kept the players close together. Players from California and Colorado had more room to play in and so tended to run more. Steadier, stronger winds stimulated more experimentation with airbrushes and rolls.

Competition. Freestyle is a cooperative "new game" in the most enlightened sense of the idea. Like other cooperative activities --Hackysacking, playing music, dancing and so on-- defeating an opponent is not the basic nature of the play. Freestyle depends on communication between players. As women's World Champion Monika Lou once said, "It's helping the other person to look good and enjoying yourself at the same time."

There is a strain between these cooperative aspirations and the realities of competition. The will to compete pervades our culture, and sports competitions are traditionally the most successful way to bring talented athletes together and to draw an audience to their performance. Dave Marini, the president of the Freestyle Players' Association (FPA), wrote that Freestylers come together to share when they compete, and they recognize the winners as the ones who shared the most.

It may sound idealistic, but the statement is largely true. In competition, freestylers not only perform for each other, they also judge each other. Tournaments are structured so that players compete in groups as pairs or threesomes in Open, Womens, and Mixed divisions. Those groups form into an even number of pools which are then paired up. Judges in the first pool score groups in the second and vice versa. Preliminary routines last 3 minutes. Semifinal routines last 4 minutes and Finals go for 5 minutes. Players eliminated in the Semis judge the Finals.

Ranking and Component Judging. In the first years of the sport, freestyle tournaments used simple ranking systems. The experience and the responsibility of judging each other led sports minded players, through their organization, the FPA, to adopt a rigorous system for quantifying freestyle routines. The three components of this system are Difficulty, Presentation and Artistic Impression. By dividing duties between the judges this way, we get a clearer picture of the final standings. This is not to say that the system is perfect. Rigor can take the freedom out of freestyle, by forcing players to live up to the judges' expectations. The judges themselves are still learning how to score properly.

Random Jams. Over the past few years, a completely new form of freestyle competition has come into being. Known as Random Partners, the atmosphere is relaxed and the players are judged as individuals rather than groups. As the name implies, partners are assigned randomly; pairs of names are picked out of a hat, usually just before the routine starts. Since players don't have a chance to work out any moves beforehand, the jamming is totally spontaneous. Traditional rivals can be paired together, and novices can wind up playing with world champions. Judging is informal, based on a "Vote to advance anybody but yourself" formula.

Product Specific Tournaments. The Wham-O Manufacturing Corporation alienated a sizable portion of the playing community by forbidding freestylers to compete with discs produced by any other manufacturer in a Wham-O sponsored tournament. This is Wham-O's prerogative, as it is a business running a commercial promotion. The question is: Can a Wham-O tournament be considered a legitimate sports competition under such circumstances? This practice is unheard of in other sports and has prompted a boycott of Wham-O's tournaments by a small, but significant group of players. Several independent tournaments have arisen to provide credible forums for disc sports competition, without any Product Specific rules. Nevertheless, as the leading "Frisbee" company, Wham-O has drawn considerable attention to its tournaments, and, as a consequence, to disc sports in general. It remains to be seen how much the negative impact of Wham-O's policies on disc sports will weigh against the company's many positive contributions to the disc community in its earliest years.

A deeper issue here is standardization. In the interests of say fairness or equality, should all competitors be limited to equipment of similar sizes, weights and dimensions? Certain regulations have already been imposed in Freestyle, for example, prohibiting the use of guitar picks, sewing thimbles and ball bearing devices as delay aids. A similar debate is now underway in Disc Golf circles; some people hope to enforce maximum disc weight standards. The decisions made, or not made, in the next five years will be significant for decades to come.

In any type of competition, striving to win will always play a part, but winning isn't the main reason to enter a freestyle tournament. For a finalist, the competition involves only 12 minutes of playing time. Semifinalists get only 7 minutes, and players eliminated in the preliminaries, about half the entrants, play for only 3 minutes. That leaves a lot of time for whatever the heart desires.
 

(friz- bë)
 

Frisbie. The root "fris" means "curly-headed" (as in frizzy) and the suffix "by" means "from the village of." Long before Roman expansion, a number of Teutons from the tribe Frisii migrated to Celtic Britain near what is now Leicester, England. Frisian, an Indo-European language, is still spoken in Friesland (the northern Netherlands) by about 300,000 people. "Frisby" means "the Frisian's village" and the personal name "Frisbie" means "one who came from Frisby." Frisbie is the oldest American spelling for the flying saucer that is the basic equipment for freestyle, as well as other games like Disc Golf and Ultimate.

Frisbie Pie Tins. The family that operated the Frisbie -Bakery in Bridgeport, Connecticut from 1871 to 1958 probably traces its ancestors back to "Frisby." The tins which held Frisbie Pies were appropriated by Yale students for the first frisbie jams in the early 1920s and Frisbie tossing remained popular through the Depression and the Second World War. Fred Morrison, a resident of Los Angeles, saw the tins flying in 1948 and decided to carve one out of a block of plastic. Before long, working with Warren Francioni, he created the first injection molded disc, which he called the Arcuate Vane Model. (Collectors would recognize this as the "Li'l Abner".) Morrison called his next design the "Flyin' Saucer" and the "Rotary Fingernail Clipper," as well as "Frisbee" (he changed the spelling for legal reasons). After several years of producing and marketing the disc himself, Morrison sold the rights to a fad toy producer, the Wham-O Manufacturing Company of San Gabriel, California.

Frisbee . Wham-O applied different names to its disc, including "Pluto Platter," " Flying Saucer," and once again, "Frisbee," which has been the registered trademark of Wham-O since 1959. As a trademark, the proper grammatical use for the word is as an adjective rather than a noun. Nevertheless, references to "Frisbee," and "frisbee" in the press as the generic name for the toy, go back several years earlier.

To the credit of Wham-O's public relations department, Frisbee became entrenched as the household name for the disc. When Ed Headrick patented the concept of flight rings (concentric circles on top of the disc) in 1964, many people wrongly got the impression that Wham-O had patented the very essence of the toy flying saucer. The conventional wisdom was that Wham-O had the patent on "Frisbee." As both a proprietary name and a generic term, like Xerox, Coke or Frigidaire, the term was applied widely and loosely.

By the late 1970s some observers felt that overuse of "Frisbee" was inhibiting the market access of other manufacturers, since anyone who asked to buy a "friz- bë" would get a Wham-O product even though other discs were available. At the same time, Wham-O began to insist that any reference to "Frisbee" should be spelled properly (with a capital F). Wham-O wanted greater precision in the use of the word in order to protect its advertising investment. Even though Wham-O had traded on the common familiarity with "Frisbie," the company didn't want anyone else trading on the popularity of "Frisbee." In order to demand precision from the media, and to comply with tradmeark laws, Wham-O itself had to take more care in its use of the term. By 1976, "Frisbees" became "Frisbee discs" and Wham-O's publication, "Frisbee World" became "Frisbee Disc World."

Frizbee. Seeking to express their independence from Wham-O and still be understood by the public, in 1979 a number of players decided to use a different spelling. Changing the s to a z made sense because the expression "Z's" (meaning spin) is so familiar to freestylers. Wham-O rejected this compromise by saying that such use of the homonym will "dilute the distinctive quality" of the trademark. The company has become very touchy, and rightfully so, because it wants to distinguish its "Frisbees" from other brands of plastic discs which now proliferate on the market. The legalistic goings on have produced a confusing identity problem within the sport and a certain amount of bitterness as well because players resent not being totally free to call themselves "frisbee" or "Frizbee" players even though no other description makes as much sense. The confusion has reached such proportions that Stancil Johnson's book Frisbee is advertised by Wham-O as Frisbee Disc, although it was never published under that title.

Sportdisc is another term that is in position to become a bone of contention between players and manufacturers. Two companies, Discraft and Floater (now affiliated with AMF Voit) claim a trademark on the term, although neither has completed the trademark process.

Flying Disc. Wham-O and AMF Voit, have settled on "Flying Disc" as the description of what's in the package and some of the media have picked it up. It is likely to replace "Frisbee" as the generic term, the same way "photocopy" replaced "Xerox." Thinking patterns don't change quickly or easily though. "Here Lies a Frisbee Player" rings better for an epitaph than "Here Lies a Flying Disc Player."

Disc is the term which is evidently most in fashion among frisbee / Frizbee / Frisbee / sportdisc / flying disc players. It is easiest to say and it looks and certainly sounds more serious than Frisbee. I have used the term "disc" throughout, but I do sometimes resort to "frisbie" to speak of the sport in a general way, stressing its historical origins, independent of any contemporary manufacturer.
 
 

Bibliography
 

Stancil E. Johnson's tome, Frisbee: A Practitioner's Manual and Definitive Treatise (Workman Publishers, New York: 1975), was the first lengthy popularization of Frisbee. Johnson satisfied popular demand for detail about the disc itself from its origins as a pie tin to its evolution into dozens of different molds by the early seventies. Johnson writes with the fanaticism of a hardcore cultist. The book is filled with humorous footnotes, "in" jokes and tongue in cheek articles contributed by physicians, meteorologists and physicists. This is a seriously nutty piece of writing; after all, freestylers can get by without knowing where the Minute Mound of Malafronte is. Still, as the author of immortal nomenclature and terms like "Mung" and "Hyzer," one can't treat Johnson lightly. Therefore, in this work, what Johnson named the "Ditch of Davis" became the "ditch" and "Morrison's Slope" became the "slope."

Charles Tips's book, Frisbee by the Masters (Celestial Arts, Millbrae, Calif.: 1977) has done the best job so far of illustrating freestyle combinations and the ranges of motion in a thrower's arm. The line drawings by Byron Sewell are superb.

Mark Danna's and Dan Poynter's Frisbee Player's Handbook (Para Publishing, 1978) is even more comprehensive in its explanation and illustration of throwing techniques. Poynter's photographs and Danna's narration provide the clearest exposition of throws that I have yet seen. The most exceptional thing about Danna's book is that it is round. This is a clever way of expressing the playing community's self-consciousness that the sport is simultaneously novel and fundamental.

Dan Roddick has authored Frisbee Disc Games and Frisbee Disc Basics as well as contributing numerous articles to "Frisbee Disc World" and "Flying Disc World," both of which he edited. "Stork," as he is called, was one of the most innovative freestylers of the mid seventies, the earliest years of the sport. Most of his writing has emphasized the basics of disc sports like throws and games rather than the detail of freestyle. Nevertheless, he has done a lot of thinking out loud about freestyle and I know that many of his ideas have been echoed in these pages.

Kevin Givens, California Freestyle Champion for 1980 and 1981 and World Champion for 1981, has published several short articles on freestyle terminology over the past several years. Most of what Kevin wrote about involved catches, difficult extensions and a few advanced skills. Kevin has left us with a body of jargon that is more amusing than descriptive. Most of it has been accepted by the playing community, so I've retained as much of it as possible.