Chapter 2 Excerpt

THE FIRST NATIONALS

In April 1975, the first organized Ultimate tournament was played at Yale University. Eight teams participated in the Intercollegiate Ultimate Frisbee Championships.

Rutgers and Hampshire were given the top two seeds, respectively. Rutgers showed up wearing soccer cleats and black and red vertically striped jerseys with numbers.

Later, when Rutgers visited Tufts on their annual spring road trip, the Tufts players would respond by wearing yellow T-shirts all emblazoned with the No. 3. They also wore the numbered shirts when they played in the 3rd annual Tufts-Hampshire Mother's Day Classic.

“We decided to all wear the same number in response to Rutgers’ wearing shirts with numbers,” recalled Jim Pistrang of Tufts. “I wanted No. 6, [co-captain] Ed [Summers] wanted No. 3, and we went with Ed's choice.”

But at the 1975 Ultimate Frisbee Championships, Rutgers beat Tufts and Cornell before meeting Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), a surprise winner over Hampshire, in the final. After trailing 22-21 with four minutes to play, the Scarlet Knights and their vaunted zone defense rallied to win their 29^th straight game, and their second national championship, 26-23. (Headlines sometimes referred to it as their third national title, although the 1973 championship title is disputed by some at Columbia High School.)

Both that tournament and the Mother’s Day event were mentioned a month later in a Time magazine article, which referred to Ultimate as a “spoof of big-time sports.”

“At the Tufts-Hampshire tiff, the first Frisbee was thrown out by the grandmother of one of the Tufts players, Mildred Cunningham, a little old Planned Parenthood lady who proceeded to give away LOVE CAREFULLY buttons and tell other spectators that she was ‘glad the boys are doing this—there’re so many worse things they could be doing,’ the article read.

“Most Ultimate Frisbee players agree—not necessarily for the same reason. There are, in fact, few other sports that Hampshire high-scorer Steve Hannock can play with his hair spilling down his back and an ever-ready can of beer handy on the sidelines. Or that Maggie Hirsch, a Hampshire junior, can play alongside her male classmates. While the younger brother of one player talks excitedly about pro franchises some day, most players would agree with Hampshire co-captain Dave Dinerman when he says, ‘Too much competition will make this the kind of game I wouldn’t want to play.’”