Play Catch. Invent Games
“How far is Maplewood?” I ask.
“Not far. Twenty minutes,” my brother John says.
“Let’s go,” I declare, the moment suddenly filled with possibility. Though John’s lived in Montclair for thirty years, I’ve never been to Columbia High School where it all began. There have been opportunities, various events to commemorate the place a group of high school students decided to use a Frisbee for something more than just a fling. But for some reason, despite years of playing the sport, I’ve failed to visit the birthplace.
My father would have loved to join us for this outing, he having tossed an original Frisbie Pie tin while attending Yale in the ’40’s. A career journalist meant he was perpetually interested in the history of wherever we visited, but especially anywhere in New York and New Jersey where he lived and grew up. Despite all of these forces at work on my being, this would be my first time.
“The genius of those students wasn’t only their invention of the game itself,” I say to John. “But the fact that they convinced each other to start teams at their respective colleges. We all invented games, that’s what you do when you’re a kid, but this group played, codified, and eventually evangelized their game.”
“Anyone else want to come?” John and I ask a house full of extended family.
“Seen it so many times I think I’m good,” John’s wife Cheryl says. “Seen it driving in a car, seen it while on foot, even seen in while riding a bike… you name it, I’ve done it.”
John and I are not fazed by the total lack of interest. If you didn’t play the game, you likely don’t give a hoot about where it originated, which is in a parking lot somewhere in New Jersey. When those students first started playing, I would have been nine or ten, in fifth grade, living in Pelham not all that far from here. If we warped time, you’d find me and John out on the street with our friends, inventing games because there were no phones, no electronics, and ultimately no dopamine hits to be had without the creativity of invention.
“Who wants to play?” We’d have asked back then, alternating between stick ball, basketball, touch football, kick the can, capture the flag, or whatever concoction we came up with. All of this decades before League of Legends and TikTok robbed generations of the desire to be outside. We often had to make something up or find ourselves alone and bored. Wham-O encouraged us with Play catch. Invent games inscribed on their plastic discs.
Just as John and I are about to pull away from his house in Montclair, Cheryl comes out to the car to ask if we’d take OsKar.
“Sure.” We say in unison. “Bring it on!”
Oskar’s nine. How great is that? Exactly the age we were in 1967 when it all started.
“Where are we going?” Oskar asks getting in to the car with his father Karl.
“The Mecca,” John and I say. “Where the game Steve and I played was invented.”
“How far?” Oscar asks. Of course he does, because he’s nine and because he’s now in a car with a bunch of boring adults. “When will we be back?”
“Not far.”
While on our way, John gives us the lay of the land. Montclair, Orange, South Orange. He talks about which towns are doing well, and which are struggling. His work with NJSpotlight, the digital arm of New Jersey’s Public TV, makes him the perfect person for a guided tour.
“What sports do you play?” I ask Oskar.
“I don’t play sports,” he says, as if he’s been sent by some magical spirit to demonstrate just what our game can mean to people like him. Kids who haven’t yet found a sport.
“Do you like art… or math… how about science?” I ask, finally realizing just how ridiculous my line of questioning sounds. The kid’s in fifth grade. Give him a break, which I do.
“I think it’s up here on the right,” John says as we pull into a retail district. I’m not sure why, but I’d expected tree lined streets and green space. Instead, we find ourselves in a more urban suburban town, not at all what I pictured for the birthplace of a game that’s now played on huge expanses of plush green fields.
I pull out my phone and type in ‘ultimate’, Google Maps autofills the rest— Ultimate Frisbee Monument.
“You take a right at the intersection,” I say to John, who says the same thing just as we approach the traffic light.
“There it is,” John announces pointing off to an empty unlined parking lot on the left. I’m looking off in the opposite direction, fooled by a similar lot situated next to some construction. We all kind half cheer and half chuckle at the scene, not exactly sure of what we’d expected. I’d seen pictures. Read stories. But as with everything, being here feels different.
“Here we go!” I say bounding out of the car with disc and phone in hand. “Come on over here,” I ask of Oskar and John, thinking we’re going to need photographic documentation of the event. Truth is, I need photo documentation of every event, so why would this be any different?
In ’67 and ‘68, I’d have been on a similar asphalt surface for recess at Colonial School in Pelham. Kick ball, dodge ball, and tag all the coin of the realm, most of us still too young to worry about Vietnam, and still too naive to be swept up in the pop culture of The Doors Light My Fire, or Jimi Hendrix Are You Experienced. We might have cared about The Red Sox magical season, and maybe even been aware of the first Super Bowl between the Packers and the Chiefs. The following year would bring championships to New York on the shoulders of Tom Seaver and Joe Namath. Yet sadly, the most lasting memories for me are of violence. As much as anything else, the assassinations of both MLK and RFK in the same year mark the end of our childhoods. When you look back at the end of the sixties, you understand how something like ultimate could pop out of the turmoil of the time. Kids just want to have fun.
“Nice throw,” John and I both say to Oskar as learns the release of a back hand.
“But I can’t catch,” he says, lamenting his various failed attempts.
“You need to pancake it,” John says. “Watch when I through this to my brother.”
Oskar’s a quick study, and masters the catch with ease, even rips a few forehands. John and I jog around a bit, both of us careful not to turn an ankle in one of the many potholes strewn around the lot. I can picture a pick-up game happening here after school as we’re not far from the high school up at the corner with the traffic light. We’re whooping it up when John stops to talk to a young couple making their way along to a wooded path running alongside a stream. He asks them if they know the significance of the place, and they say no. When he tells them it’s the birthplace of ultimate, the young mother says, “yes, I guess I have heard there was something around here, but just never saw it.”
“We’re on the map,” I think to myself, and now we’ve introduced Oskar to a new sport. How great is that, and I thank him and his father for making the trip with us.
“We never new,” Oskar’s dad Karl says, though more and more people do in fact know, of the sport, and the place where it all began.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this lot gets developed into condos,” John says. “Right now it’s parking for school faculty.”
“Let’s hope not,” I say with little confidence.
When we’re all back in the car and heading back up past the school, I take a closer look and say to myself I’d like to come back. The school’s bigger, and grander than I’d pictured it. Cheryl later describes a ‘progressive’ period in which schools were built with soaring architectural elements to inspire the students who attended.
“We have seen, and our plastic has soared,” I think to myself. Thank you Columbia High School juniors and seniors for your energy and spirit. On this day after Thanksgiving, we tip our hats in gratitude for the game we’ve come to love and enjoy the better part of our lives.
(note: After our visit, John and I learn of the annual Thanksgiving reunion game between Columbia High School students and alums. Missed it by a day.)
