by Denise Dowling
by Denise Dowling
If Ken Dobyns drank, it might have been a good time for a whiskey shooter.
His New York Ultimate Frisbee team had just lost by two points to its longtime Boston rival in a semi-final round of the 1994 national tournament. The Boston-based team, Death Or Glory, proceeded to kick enough butt in the final round to replace New York as the new national champs.
Dobyns' farewell taunt to Boston was, "Enjoy it, cause it's not gonna last."
Dobyns used to play for the local team New York New York, which ruled as world champions of Ultimate since 1989. But in the summer of last year, the New Yorkers decided to mess with success by sending several older players to the glue factory to make room for a few young thoroughbreds. The team of new and veteran players christened itself the ''Cojones" (that's ''bull's balls'' in gringo terms). They had practiced together for just eight weeks before the November nationals in Kentucky.
Wait. Can I interrupt? We're talking about frisbee, right? That thing your dog
chews, leaving bubbles of spit? That piece of plastic you throw on a beach before dusk?
Well, the disc itself is the only thing Ultimate has in common with that California image. In simplest terms, the object is to get the frisbee into an end zone. The disc is passed among a team's seven players but no player is allowed to run with it. There are no fixed positions, so everyone's a quarterback, everyone's a receiver.
The frisbee in flight is science in motion; a calculated twitch of the wrist makes it curve, hover, or dive. Ultimate players are swifter than light; dancing like boxers to block a throw, "getting horizontal" and kissing dirt to make a save and defying gravity to "catch a bird".
