Does that sound familiar?
That is the slogan of an organized group that ushered
in an completely new genre of games that were designed
to imbibe a new spirit of cooperation and inclusion
rather than the mentality of win first, ask questions
later. The genre of games was cleverly called
New Games.
The spirit in which these
games were intended to be played by was such an
important factor that in
fact, some documentation refers to the slogan as the
'Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt Spirit'!!
or this:
"New Games Spirit: the positive experience of playing
together is more important than winning or losing; the
rules of the game are always flexible. What counts is
the enjoyment of playing" [7]
or check this quote:
"Ultimate Frisbee - one of the few sports organizations
to successfully embody the spirit of New Games"
[6]
For one to understand and
appreciate the origins of Ultimate Frisbee's ideology, it's
critical to place the game in context of the sociopolitical
milieu of the country (United States) at the time
to fully grasp philosophically what kind of thinking
went into the development of the rules.
In 1966, two full years
prior to the creation of Ultimate Frisbee,
Stewart Brand
(The Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Well and
alumni of the Merry Pranksters) spearheaded a
movement against a backdrop of dramatic social and
economic change fueled by
the Vietnam War,
NASA Lunar Missions,
a looming energy crisis, environmental activism, civil rights, assassinations of MLK, JFK and RFK, feminism,
Richard Nixon, unhealthy widespread drug
abuse, free love and the Rock & Roll revolution.
(photo of record setting 309
people in The Lap Game, 1973)
In late 1966, as the
American commitment to the Vietnam War was ramping up,
the
War Resisters League at San Francisco State College
asked an itinerant multimedia
artist named Stewart Brand to stage a public event on
its behalf. Brand, who would
soon become famous as the founder of the Whole Earth
Catalog, gathered a hundred
or so pacifists into an open field and with their help,
inflated a 6-foot-diameter medicine
ball that had been painted with continents, waterscapes,
and clouds—an “Earthball.”
He then took up a
megaphone and announced,
There are two kinds of
people in the world: those who want to push the Earth
over the row
of flags at that end of the field, and those who want to
push it over the fence at the other
end. Go to it. (New Games Foundation & Fluegelman, 1976,
p. 9)
[1]
The crowd on the field
charged the ball from all sides. The ball began to roll
toward one
end of the field—yet as it did, members of the pushing
team defected, rushing around
to the other side of the ball and pushing it back the
way they had just driven it. When
they reached the other end of the field, they turned
around again.
Glimpsed from half a lifetime away, this hour-long
runaround may look like little
more than the most ephemeral of countercultural
happenings. Yet, over the next 10
years it gave rise to an entire New Games movement, with
publications, organizations,
and events held around the world. For the members of
this movement, as for the War
Resisters at San Francisco State, to play a new game
meant far more than to amuse
oneself. Pat Farrington, who would help organize the
first New Games Tournament in
1973, explained that “By reexamining the basic idea of
play, we could . . . [create] a
sense of community and personal expression. People could
center on the joy of playing,
cooperating, and trusting, rather than striving to win”
(New Games Foundation &
Fluegelman, 1976, p. 10).
Because the
competitive “win-at-allcosts” model was blamed for being
destructive to children’s development, the New Games
movement developed as an alternative to competitive
sports. As the New York Times (1973) reported,
“the occasion [New Games] may be to a change in sports
what the storming of the Bastille was to the French
Revolution”
(Fluegelman, 1976, p. 10).[2]
Like-minded
contemporaries R. Buckminster Fuller (World Game),
Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), and Christo and
Jean-Claude (Valley Curtain) responded in kind to these
environmental and sociopolitical quandaries with their
"earthworks." Stewart is widely credited with the
creation of a new class of socialistic games that were meant to be
friendlier and non-competitive.
The New Games Foundation
By the mid 70's, Brand,
along with the addition of George Leonard* and Pat
Farrington,
incorporated the movement's organization under the name
of The New Games Foundation. Workshops were given
coast to coast and around the world in an effort to
teach a new form of play that focused on togetherness, non-aggression
and non-competitiveness and by 1976 (three years before
the formation of the UPA), The New Games book was
released [1].
The turmoil that was
ripping the country apart at the time created a segment
of the population that would strive for a better way of
sustainable living, with an emphasis on cooperation,
community, inclusion and well being.
"Everyone can play New Games
regardless of age, ability, size, or gender. They
require little or no equipment and are presented and
played in a safe manner that encourages participation,
creativity, and personal expression. New Games offers a
new direction for traditional sports, physical
education, and recreation. Ultimately, by cooperating in
play, we learn to live together better." [3]
And read this:
"Anyone who has played
"New Games" knows that the games aren't really new.
What is new is the spirit in which they
are played -- a spirit in which it is clear that fun is
more important than winning, the players are more
important than the game. Though many New Games can
be seen as "cooperative", the truth is that
just as many
of them involve competition -- a competition that is
held in check by the Spirit of New Games
and the overriding mandate for universal fun.
These competitive New
Games (like Dho-Dho-Dho, Smaug's Jewels, Tweezly Whop,
Slaughter, Dragon's Tail, Hug Tag, Lemonade and
Ultimate Frisbee) were selected because they
were not only fun, but also funny. They included
silly names, silly rituals, silly noises, silly
performances, because, as long as they were seen as
funny, players would not take them too seriously, and
hence be able to keep the competition in check and in
appropriate perspective" [4]
Sound familiar?
Silly team names, hat tournaments, ro sham bo for conflict resolution,
guys wearing skirts (ultimate in the 80's), energy
circles (most of you probably don't even know what those
are). The New Games Movement provided the original
"dogma" that was then directly or indirectly
indoctrinated into the very fabric of Ultimate.
The Author
of Ultimate's Spirit Of The Game
Dan "Stork" Roddick
(pictured below in this photo he sent me of him fouling
the crap out of some player--nice spirit there Stork) is the original author of
the Spirit of the Game clause in Ultimate. Dan was
familiar with the New Games movement in as early as 1975,
is good friends with
Bernie DeKoven, a key figure in the movement and
Ultimate Frisbee was a mainstay in the New Game
Movement's tournaments throughout the 70s.
While Ultimate Frisbee
was not directly one of the New Games Foundation's
creations, it was germinated out of the very same
sociopolitical soil, is listed on some New Games
websites and is very commonly referenced in research
papers and studies regarding the basic premise of the
creation of games that are focused on fair play for ALL
participants in a friendly, cooperative,
non-competitive, non-aggressive atmosphere.
The Spirit of the Game in
Ultimate is only an adopted child of the Spirit of New Games and
if you do even the slightest bit of research and
evaluate the documentation, the evidence is astounding
and jaw dropping. It is incontrovertible.
"In New Games, there
are no rigid rules; rather players are encouraged to
make up their own rules [an apt description of the
UPA], to create their own games. The object of New
Games is not rigid adherence to a prescribed set of
regulations, but imaginative play in an atmosphere of
spontaneity and fun. The emphasis in New Games is the
cooperation and participation of all players, regardless
of age, sex, or ability.
While there is an
emphasis on cooperation, New Games does not deny the
need to compete or the need to release hostility;
however, the player's competitiveness is usually
directed against his own limitations and his hostility
is released without harm to others. In New Frisbee, for
example, the player concentrates on perfecting his own
skills, not on defeating his partner. While New Frisbee
looks very much like Old Frisbee, it is philosophically
quite different. The player gets no points if he catches
a good throw; on the other hand, if he catches or even
misses but makes an all-out attempt for a difficult
throw, he gains a point. Since the catcher calls his own
points, each player is competing against the limitations
of not only personal skill but personal integrity."[5]
The idea behind New Games
was that through an atmosphere of playfulness, fairness
and cooperation, participants could develop
interpersonal and social skills through having fun on a
leveled playing surface. Games were specifically
designed to be fair irrespective of age, race, gender,
build (fat or thin, tall or short), athleticism,
intelligence and handicaps.
Think long and hard about
this. Is this what you signed up for when you
began playing Ultimate Frisbee?
At long last, I finally
have an answer to the question "Why is Double Teaming
illegal?"!!! Double teaming is illegal because it's
not universally fair. Picks are illegal
because they are not universally fair. Out
of bounds isn't really out of bounds because it's not
universally fair. No penalty for excessive
fouling or traveling is because it wouldn't be fair.
George Leonard*, one of the early pioneers of the
movement had this to say:
"The New Games
Movement was less about the design of individual games
and more about the development of an ethos intended to
alter the way people interacted with one another. Its
goal was to transform culture by creating opportunities
for people to play collaboratively.
Play hard. Play fair.
Nobody hurt. These three core principles order
the design (and play) of any New Games game. The
movement organized festival-like 'Tournaments' that
brought people together to play cooperatively, erasing
(if only for a brief time) barriers of race, age, sex,
size, ability, socioeconomic background, and creed.
Values of freedom and the creation of community through
game play were woven into a utopian rhetoric that
advocated new forms of player empowerment.
If you played with
a parachute in your elementary school gym class, you can
thank the New Games Movement, which helped transform the
traditionally sports-based curriculum of phys ed into a
more play-centric, cooperative learning experience. Much
of the success of the New Games Movement emerged because
of its relationships with other forms of counterculture.
New Games 'Tournaments,' for example, mixed the
communality of a peace protest with the cultural
nihilism of an art happening.
There is no doubt that
in many ways the New Games Movement and its game designs
emerged out of a particular cultural milieu. But the
uniquely transformative agenda of the movement is truly
inspiring. Playing with the codes and conventions of
gaming and social interaction, the New Games Movement
sought to create positive social change through play. It
did so not by creating games with explicit political
content, but by designing play experiences that
intrinsically embodied its utopian ideals." [1]
When the emphasis of a
game is placed strictly on maximizing fun for the
majority of participants, the end result will be a
framework that lacks the requisite foundation for true
competition to occur and without true competition, true
innovation can also not occur.
Think of it this way, in
order to create a game that was the most balanced and
fun for everyone, an apparatus had to be built that
could best be thought of in terms of training wheels.
Now picture this; a small 20" bicycle with training
wheels on it and Kenny Dobyns racing around the block on
it screaming "It's FCU. It's ICU". And worse
yet, he's spent the past so many months doing wind
sprints in the cold and rain to prepare for the event.
In light of the
information listed here and the entire emphasis of the
New Games Movement, watch this video and you'll agree,
something went completely wrong with the intention of
revolutionizing sports with an emphasis on fun and fair
play. You know? What's wrong with this
picture?
It's schizophrenic.
It's no wonder the culture has such an identity crisis.
Ultimate Frisbee is a New
Game. It was purposefully created to be a utopian
anti-sport. It came out of a mentality that
craved a recreational activity that could be enjoyed by
all, not those of us fortunate enough to be blessed with
superior physiques. There can be no debate about
this.
The Underlying
Beliefs of The New Games Movement (are you a believer?)
The New Games
Movement originators based their theories on
the premise that competition in sports is inherently a
bad thing.
When Abner Doubleday or James Nesmith
invented baseball and basketball, those sports were fine
as competitive recreational activities.
Competition helped evolve those sports to the point that
within a few decades, they were filling up large
stadiums.
That sports in America
evolved into a win-at-all-cost commercial and
materialistic obsession was more of indictment about
modern society than it is about competition itself.
The exclusionary aspect intrinsic in sports is exactly
what propels athletes to perform at their very best.
Competition is as natural
and evolutionary element to human existence as is
natural selection. Competition in sports is
survival of the fittest at its very finest. At the core of the nervous
system, the hypothalamus and cerebellum work together to
sharpen man's reflexes and abilities to help him adapt
to environmental dynamics. Without this inherent
drive at our core, mankind would have never evolved out
of the caves. While the win at all costs mentality
is the ugly side of modern sports culture, competition
is a good thing and the element in games that drive
innovations and excellence.
When a person plays
Ultimate Frisbee, they are rewarded with many, many
false positives due to the "fair and balanced" doctrine
from which the rules were created, not to mention that a
disc can also be extremely forgiving (the Discraft
Ultrastar only making this worse). Extra steps to
account for momentum (even out of bounds), no double
teaming, no boxing out, no penalties, 9000 square feet
endzones, etc.
Why are
these considered false positives
?
If you put your hand on a burning stove, you learn not
to do it again. When you snowboard, you learn the
hard way that if you don't maintain balance, you end up
on your ass. However in Ultimate, the artificial
nature of rules that were designed by non-competitors
for non-competitors has created a sense of success when
in fact the player has failed.
If you
went to Vegas and were assured of a 60% chance of
winning playing the slot machines, you would find it
extremely
addicting.
When looked upon in this light, the entire framework for
Ultimate Frisbee reflects an attitude of permissiveness
and forgiveness ostensibly brought about to make the
game more fun for beginners, at the expense of
eliminating the need to evolve the game for experts.
Ultimate Junkies
It is exactly this
experience of addictive attachment to these false
positives that has created an environment that is
stagnant and unchanging. The exact same things
that make Ultimate so addicting are the same things that
make change practically impossible.
The lab rat when
presented with the choice of sex or heroin chooses the
heroin and similarly, Ultimate players are hooked on a
game that in fact is not very nourishing to their own
technical development, as opposed to the way that conventional sports
encourage greatness. Most 'Elite' Ultimate Frisbee
players are fairly mediocre with their disc handling
skills and this is as a direct result of a framework
that was ironically intended to place fun above all
else.
Probably the saddest part
of this addiction factor is that established players
don't even get any joy out of the game anymore and don't
even know why they are addicted to it but they just keep
on playing anyway.
Another bit of evidence
regarding how the community perpetuates a socialistic
belief system upon it's participants is this from
Skippy Jammer (who began his Frisbee 'career' in
1974) in a letter to the editor he wrote to
The Metro in response to the Ultimate Controversy
Article.
The sentiment Skippy
espouses here is straight out of the New Games
Foundation's bible. He states unequivocally that
Frisbee has a founding principal that is based on
mutual inclusion and 'can't we all get along' mentality
and that I have somehow violated that doctrine by
implying that in fact that a 'one size fits all'
approach to designing a set of rules for a sport wasn't
such a good idea after all.
What is so
inappropriate of being divisive in a culture that is
craving exactly that? To have a division created
between those who prefer to retain the status quo and
those who prefer a game that is designed from the bottom
up to foster competition at the highest levels? Is
is so wrong to polarize a community between those who
prefer to take sport seriously and those who just want
to have fun?
Is one to
assume that just because a person doesn't agree with the
New Games credo and publicly lobbies against it's
appropriateness in organized sports that that person is
intentionally alienating anyone?
The Books
"Tweezly Whop Techniques and Tactics", the classic
hard cover coffee table photo book "Earthball,
The First Four Decades" or "Hug
Tag, The Greatest Sport Ever Invented by Man" were
never supposed to happen and neither were their Ultimate
Frisbee counter parts. Ironically, any book on the
History Of
Ultimate is absolutely incomplete without the
inclusion of any findings on the New Games Movement as part of the
pedigree of the sport.
Imagine
what kind of person went about creating a genre of games that
leveled the playing field so that a physically superior
person wouldn't have an advantage!
I'll give
you a hint, he wasn't the quarterback for your high
school football team.
Dogma
(founding beliefs)
We've
known for years that one of the beliefs woven into the
fabric of the game is the belief that penalties exist in
sports exclusively to prevent cheating (this is in the
preface).
But now we
know without any reasonable doubt that another
cornerstone in the Ultimate Frisbee beliefs is that
ultra-competitiveness stems from games with firm,
consistent and rational boundaries. This is a
proven fact.
Furthermore, again without any reasonable doubt, it is
obvious after reviewing all of this research that
Ultimate Frisbee was created under the belief that
learning would happen best in a friendly and fair
environment.
And of
course the grand daddy of them all, it has been written
clearly in the rules for over a quarter of a century, is
that Ultimate Frisbee is a non-contact sport.
Do you
believe any of these tenets?
In light
of all of this new information, what happened at the
2007 National Championships to Ambush was completely
against everything the sport was founded on. It's
completely insane.
You can't
have it both ways. Either you have a game that is
fun and fair for all or you have a sport that is
designed for excellence at the highest levels.
The dogma
that was the cornerstone of the game of Ultimate Frisbee was also the
precursor to the house that made up how the sport was to be played.
There are a great many beliefs for 'how the game is supposed to be
played' that make absolute no sense. This too is dogmatic
From Dictionary.com:
re·li·gion;
–noun
1. [I've
cut this definition out as it pertains to God]
2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed
upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the
Buddhist religion.
3. the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and
practices: a world council of religions.
By this
definition of religion out of dictionary.com and based on the
information gathered in this report, Ultimate Frisbee is undeniably a
religion due to the fact that it is body of persons based on a belief
system, or dogma.
As
Karl Marx
is famous for saying, Religion is the Opium of the masses. Opium,
as we all know, is an addictive sedative.
"The
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized
habits and opinions of the masses is an important
element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this
unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible
government which is the true ruling power of our
country.
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes
formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have
never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in
which our democratic society is organized." - Edward
Bernays
The
saddest part of this quote by Bernays is that the unseen people who
formulated many of the underlying concepts and beliefs of Ultimate
Frisbee had nothing to do with the sport and are long gone from a
defunct and misguided movement and yet their legacy lives on in
perpetuity by a Frisbee playing constituency who neither understands
their heritage nor cares about it.
Proofs
Beyond a
reasonable doubt, this report has proved that:
a) That
cross-pollination occurred between The New Games
Movement and Ultimate Frisbee.
b) That
The New Games Movement was propelled forward by
individuals who were not athletic or competitive and so
therefore their bias was towards creating a genre of
games that they could enjoy.
c) That by
making fun for all and friendliness paramount, they
developed games that consequently and coincidentally
excluded competitive personalities.
d) That by
making Ultimate Frisbee 'fun' for all, the game would be
made to be easier for weaker players (no penalties,
double teaming illegal, huge endzones, no hard cap on
traveling, no roster limits, no penalties for Out of
Bounds).
e) That
these rules created artificially false positives which
had the effect of inadvertently reinforcing
fundamentally unsound techniques and mechanics.
f)
That these false positives created an extremely
addictive environment.
g)
That this additive nature has prevented evolution from
occurring (the UPA's culmination of a year long Ultimate
Revolution resulted in a roster limit cap of 27, a
ridiculously large and meaningless adjustment to the
current game).
Conclusions
The conclusions here are
inescapable and undeniable. If you are athlete, a
competitor, a jock, a player or anyone who has trained
hard to excel at your finest, no only was Ultimate
Frisbee not designed for you, it was specially
designed for NOT you. The game was
simply never meant to be taken seriously.
You're not supposed to
have taken the game up with the passion that you have.
You may have just as well taken up the Three Legged Race
or Dho-Dho-Dho.
Ultimate Frisbee was designed from the bottom up to
cater to the lowest common denominator, for the person
who couldn't play all the other sports, it was for the
survival of the weakest. Referees
are no more the solution to normalizing Ultimate than
adding referees to Dragon's Tail.
I had asked an old
Ultimate friend the other day after I came across all
this information whether or not she'd ever heard of the
New Games movement and her response was "yeah, that old
'everyone wins' crap? that stuff is all bullshit"
but when I told her that same 'bullshit' was the seed
from which Ultimate grew, she wouldn't hear of it.
Will you?
I'm not
against "New Games" and the notion that playfulness is
an extremely important quality and even a virtue but you
can't have a competitive sport based on the kind of
ideology that creates a level playing field for the
weakest player to have a fair shot at winning.
That's
CRAZY.
Epilog
This all begs one final
question. What if you normalized Ultimate Frisbee
and took the New Games Foundation doctrine out of the
rules?
My answer is this.
Ultimate Frisbee is a rickety old bicycle with training
wheels on it. You take the training wheels off,
you still have a rickety old bicycle. By virtue of
the fact that players have been riding the bike for so
long with the training wheels on, they have never
learned how to play the game properly and even if you
took off the training wheels today, it would take years
for them to advance their games to where they should
have been long ago.
Once they arrive at that
point, they'll also come to the conclusion that Ultimate
is just a rickety old bike. Dischoops is a Harley,
designed from the ground up to create a competitive and
fair game for the highest common denominator. Play
it. It's
fun.
References
[1]Andrew Faunergate
New Games, 1976
More New Games, 1981
"The New Games Book and its
companion, the More New Games book, were
resources developed for the "New Games" movement to
encourage people to play non-competitive or friendlier
games. Many of the "New Games" may now be seen played,
in their modern variants, by church youth groups, summer
campers, and even [in some cases] gym students."
[2]
Why Study New Games? (an
excellent Stanford research paper on New Games)
[3]
The New Game
Foundation
[4]
Junkyard Games
[5]
1976 Article about New Games
[6]
Deep Fun
[7]
Spirit of New Games
Others References:
*The
Ultimate Athlete Ironically named book written by
George Leonard
Best New Games (even listed under a web-site called
'training-wheels.com')
Dho-Dho-Dho, Smaug's Jewels, Slaughter, etc.
Humanistic Critic of Sports (choice topical lecture
from Wisconsin university sociology class on New Games that includes Ultimate Frisbee)
Junkyard Sports (another good read regarding the
ideology of putting participation above competition)
Weinstein, Matt & Goodman, Joel
Playfair: Everybody’s
Guide to Noncompetitive Play Impact Publishers
ISBN: 0-915166-50-X.
Rethinking Youth Sports (decent article about
alternative thinking to sports)
