Ultimate: There’s a sense of spirit

Thriving local league includes players from all walks of life

I’ve been searching the culture for small, almost hidden, ways we are resisting Trumpism and Fordism.

This week I have seen the resistance clearly, not on the streets or in the press, but in sport; in a game. Ultimate frisbee, better known as Ultimate.

Twenty-five years ago, our middle son met the woman he was to marry, a social worker from Moncton, while they were playing Ultimate Frisbee on the Halifax Commons. Their favorite wedding gift was an antiqued disc from their friends, which hangs today on their living room wall.

So I have had a soft spot for this game, the most democratic and alternative team sport I’ve ever seen. Seven players a side, usually four men and three women, throwing a 175-gram plastic disc, short or long distances, with huge curves, unexpected trajectories and soft landings.

The Ultimate thing persists for that son and his wife, now with three teenagers who all play, and I seek to more fully understand its appeal. Two weeks ago, I felt some of it in Brampton as I trudged in the heat around a play field, Sandalwood

Park, which has 20 spaces big enough for an Ultimate game.

I was at the National Championships, where, for three days, 2000 teenagers from all provinces, and later hundreds of older folks, threw their hearts out. There was a marchin and a welcome banquet, and a heartfelt farewell one, too.

Then I made my way to Holy Cross field here in Peterborough to take in a PUL (Peterborough Ultimate League) game the following Tuesday. All I saw was joy of movement, laughter and smiles, body types of all heights and sizes and great cardio fitness. And small kids playing along the sidelines.

It is the ethic and the behaviour of competitors that so impress one. Shouts of “nice try’ and “good throw” and “well done” resound. Opposing players’ hands stretch out to give an opposing player a hand-up. Everyone gets to play equal time. It is co-ed, non-contact, social and affordable. “All you need is some green space, a disc and some friends,” says my grandson.

“Oh yeah, said my neighbor, “Ultimate, that’s the hippie game!” Actually, it was founded on a college campus, Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1968 and came to Canada in 1979. In Peterborough, the league was started in 2004 by Stephanie OgilvyKing, and has grown steadily, now up to about 200 people, mostly ages 20-45. High schools and even elementary schools here are quickly taking it up.

Who plays Ultimate in the PUL? Teachers, mechanics, political staffers, salespeople, my physiotherapist, an emergency-room physician, longhaul drivers, young mothers. It’s a sport that is highly participatory, low-organization and low-tension.

Summer league games are scheduled three nights a week, and in winter, the Spiplex, an air-supported dome near Fowlers Corners, is home.

Peterborough has developed an original idea called the “carbon flip” that is spreading across the region. If you have arrived at the playfield by bike or car pool, you have earned the right to pick which end of the field you start on. That’s the flip.

Counter-cultural to its core, Ultimate has no referees: you just sort out, as reasonable people, what just happened: if the disc went out-ofbounds or you took too long to launch it, or bumped someone too vigorously. Talk it over, decide quickly, and if all else fails, take it back to where the play began.

There is an explicit SOTG, “Spirit of the Game” in Ultimate, which includes these qualities. At game’s end, originally, the losing team had to compose an honour song for the winning team and go over and sing it to them. That nice touch seems to have been supplanted by a circle of all players, arms linked, and a discussion of the many incidents of spirit shown during the game.

Hardly mentioned in the sports pages, I nonetheless maintain that the virtues of Ultimate are the ones needed for our future.

“Oh yeah, said my neighbor, “Ultimate, that’s the hippie game!”