First Steps

The year 1989 was full of highs and lows.

Sandy, the college girlfriend that I had moved out to California to be near, was leaving. She was heading off to the Peace Corp for at least one and a half, maybe two years. We had discussed this possibility before we even left college, but the reality of it still surprised me. We certainly hadn’t been spending much time together since I had moved to the Bay Area - graduate school for her, new job and ... well ... ultimate for me, had been virtual wedges in our bonding. The Peace Corp was basically the final, splitting, blow.

Ultimate had been a less than satisfying mistress. Sure, I was always excited to play, I even searched out off-season pick-up games in Berkeley, Oakland, and Palo Alto, when there wasn’t a dependable game in San Francisco. I was hooked, but not completely infatuated.

The end of the previous season had soured me a bit. All the team talk, all the personal sacrifice, and at the crucial juncture, I felt I had gotten pushed aside for a poorly conceived and eventually ineffective campaign of old guard versus new blood.

I played at least once a week in a pick-up game somewhere during the winter. The Golden Gate polo fields game had grown large and relatively competitive. Now that I was single again, I was particularly interested in the number of women that were showing up for the Sunday games.

As suggestions of Spring began hinting around the edges of things, I got a call from Gary back in Boston.

“Well, it’s that time of year again.” He was referring to getting the ShortFatGuys together for another tournament. Not only had “No Borders” back in 1987 not been our last tournament as players, we were still getting together as a one time a year team. Basically, ShortFatGuys had become a Washington University reunion team with assorted invited others joining in. What had started in Ottawa in ‘87, had continued in Gainesville, Florida the next March at the Frostbreaker tournament. Gary had thought it would be a good excuse to get out of the cold and to renew bonds with the small, but quickly dispersing crowd from college.

We lost most of our games that year, but we had fun and there seemed to be a general consensus that this could be an enjoyable thing to do every year. One notable moment from that otherwise forgettable tourney was the fact that my father came out to watch.

My parents had split when I was seven, but I had yearly contact with my father since then. He had moved to Tampa when I was still in elementary school, so many of my summers had been spent in the sandy, humid, hot confines of the paradise that is modern Florida.

He, personally, had not played sports since a less-than-enjoyable year or two in little league baseball had convinced him that physical exertion was not his ticket out of small town Vermont. He worked and studied his way through three stellar years of undergraduate work, three crushing years of medical school and ten subsequent years of combined Phd. research and multiple renowned fellowships in sub-disciplines to earn his fame as an eye surgeon.

He regarded his son’s involvement with sports as a minor distraction at first. Then, when my college grades were less than outstanding, it was a serious impediment. Finally, with me at the ripe old age of 24 and with the Lifetime Achievement Stopwatch ticking, this association with a hippie non-sport could barely be tolerated.

Needless to say, I was surprised when he mentioned he was going to be in Gainesville the Saturday of the tournament (he was giving a keynote address at an eye conference). I casually mentioned that he should swing ten minutes out of his way to see us play. I was shocked and a little dismayed that he actually said he might.

Towards the beginning of our fourth game of the day, I returned to the sidelines after yet another successful defense and score by our opponent. As I reached for a bottle of water, I recognized my father standing off to the side, sunglasses on, sport coat unbuttoned, tie loosened but still in place, arms folded across his chest. It was at least 85 degrees.

I downed the mouthful of water, walked over and shook his hand.

“Glad you came out.”

“Well, I was here anyway. Figured I might as well see what this sport was all about.”

I briefly explained the basics of the sport to him, trying to use the happenings on the field as illustrative examples.

It is at times like this - trying to introduce the sport while using a poorly played, B bracket, spring tourney game contested at the end of an oppressively hot day - that ultimate often seems silly to me. The spectator is usually completely unfamiliar with the most basic terminology that ultimate players breathe every day. They are often not even accustomed to watching live amateur sports of any kind. NFL Monday night football and Major League baseball, replete with slow motion replays, insightful color commentary, and backed by massive databases of statistics all highlighting the accomplishments of the top-most one percent of one percent of athletes - this is what the vast majority of America thinks of when the word “sport” is uttered.

That is not what my father got to witness first-hand that day. ShortFatGuys lost badly. If that wasn’t bad enough, neither team was very good. We had women on our roster, actually playing against the men on the other team. To top it off, what I had always thought of as a cool and witty team name sounded childish and ridiculous when explaining our scrubby, cotton t-shirt uniforms to my father. ShortFatGuys? Hell, the only team my father had ever rooted for was the New York Yankees. The mighty, serious, legendary, adulated, rich and successful Yankees.

What the hell was a ShortFatGuy? Why would you want to be seen wearing that on a shirt? The subtle humor and self-deprecation was just too much for me to explain. The question lay out in the open, observed by all and answered by none.

I had run myself ragged and launched heedlessly for the disc a dozen times. Although I did manage to get a number of blocks and a couple of highlight-type catches, I have to admit my motivation was as much to impress my father as it was to contribute to our losing cause.

As I recall, my father’s only comment at the end of the game was, “Your teammates don’t seem to be trying as hard as you. You should evaluate your level of effort with that in mind.”

With that, he left while we still had another game to play. He has watched a total of about an hour of my ultimate life. Despite the fact that he lives about a half an hour away from the Sarasota Nationals site, I have always been more relieved than disappointed that he has never managed to make his way over to watch a game or two.

So, when Gary opened our phone conversation in the spring of 1989 with that line, “It’s that time of year again” it wasn’t a complete surprise.

“Alright. Sounds good. Frostbreaker again?” I didn’t even feign hesitation anymore.

“Yep. Florida in March. Get your ticket, I’ll handle the hotels.”

That year at Frostbreaker was a little different. ShortFatGuys played our way out of the bottom bracket on the first day. We were still sporting a co-ed team, but the women weren’t really a liability. Also, the previous roster of Wash U alumni was dwindling while being replaced with more talented players that Gary met and played with in Boston.

One of the new women on the team was Jennifer Sokoloski, an indoor league teammate of Gary’s who was finishing up her astrophysical studies at M.I.T. So, on top of being a good athlete and more than a little attractive, she was not exactly dumb. I think much of the team’s ability to exceed our seed was a collective, individual effort to impress Jen. Whatever the reasons, we did manage to move up the pecking order, and our late-night carousing celebrated this achievement.

On Sunday, our quarterfinals game was against a team from North Carolina - the Irrates. I had never played against a team from North Carolina before, but we had been given unsought advice going in to the game. Many of their previous opponents had volunteered a scouting report.

“They are physically talented, with a few tall players and a couple of throwers. But watch out for their attitude.”

What did these people mean by that? I couldn’t exactly get a grasp on what they were saying.

“They will push the rules and they play really physical. Also, they call every travel - real, close, or not.”

ShortFatGuys against the Irrates of North Carolina. They had us beat on every front. They could out-throw us, out-run us, and out-jump us. We were struggling to score one point for every two they racked up. They had one particular player that was killing us. He was tall - maybe six foot two or three - and he was fast. When he was receiving, he was catching most of the goals. When we pushed him back to the disc with a taller defender, he started throwing long scores.

Finally, towards the end of the game, out of frustration and desperation, I decided to cover him. We had managed to score, and their stud was waiting at the far end of the pull. Our team of over-achieving, fun loving, and relatively short players was deciding how to defend him. Steve Votruba, as the tallest player on the team, had been given the thankless job of trying to cover their Machine most of the game. He didn’t seem all that eager to enter the fray again - but then again, no one else did either. I looked down our line, and compared it to theirs across the field.

“I’ll take him.” Did that really just come out of my mouth? The mouth attached to my skinny, five foot six inch frame?

Our other six players just looked at me, with a mixture of relief and pity. Gary said, “We’ll give you an ‘Up!’ call.”

The pull settled down as I glided in to a three yard deep cushion on the Stud. As the match-ups resolved themselves with the first pass or two, he looked at me, looked around the field, and looked at me again. He laughed and pointed at me, “Clear the deep!” he shouted. His teammates looked up and noticed the obvious mismatch. At least I had managed to keep him from touching the disc for the first three swing passes.

He took off towards the far goal as everyone else pulled in close on the far side. I put my head down just about the time I heard the “UP!” call from down field. I was two yards behind him and holding ground. At least he wasn’t going to beat me on speed. I glanced back and searched for the oncoming disc. It was screaming down-field directly over our heads and with not much float. But it was still high and gaining altitude.

Thinking I only had one possible chance at getting the disc, I took two more steps at a full sprint and launched as high as my diver’s legs would take me ...

When I was training in college diving, we had to get our standing vertical jump measured at the beginning and end of every season. My personal best was 36 inches. Not out of this world, but for a short guy, the contrast could be dramatic.

As I had experienced hundreds of times in diving, when your mind and body are completely focused at a precise moment, time does indeed slow down. It moves with a kind of syrupy, fluid grace that can sustain reflection and dissection.

... rising, I spun a hundred and eighty degrees, left arm outstretched above my head, hoping to disrupt the flight of the disc. At the peak of my jump, I felt that almost indescribably satisfying connection of plastic disc rim to palm. My hand locked on it reflexively. I remember looking down and seeing The Stud’s eyes looking up at me with a mixture of disbelief and shock. I remember pedaling my feet, trying to reach back down to the ground. I recall wondering when - almost indeed if - I was going to land.

Time collapsed in on me again as the tip of my left foot barely grazed the grass as the rest of me came crashing chest-first back onto the sandy field. I almost had the wind knocked out of me, but I still had the disc in my hand.

Shaking my head a couple of times, I gathered myself and stood up. The Stud set up his hectically aggressive mark. I didn’t even try to challenge it. I threw an easy dump to the first teammate that made it down field to me. I think we scored the point. I know we lost the game.

In the post-game handshake, we congratulated our camouflage-wearing opponents and wished them good luck. For the most part, they simply slapped our hands with a perfunctory, “Good game” and moved on. At the end of their line, their stud was waiting for me. He smiled as he sincerely shook my hand, “Hey, when you see that six foot eight monster on your team that skied me, give him my regards. That was a heck of a play.”

To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember the guy’s name, but it was one of the best compliments I ever received playing ultimate.

Gary subsequently made a sweatshirt for me with the iconic ShortFatGuy leaping upwards on the front and “Six-Eight Chill Monster” on the back. Over the years, I wore that faded grey sweatshirt until it fell apart in the wash.