See, It's Like Football, Only With A Frisbee, And No Tackling Or Helmets

Once upon a time, I was a regular cheerleader for the sport of Ultimate. Ultimate is a great sport - it's fun, and unique, and generally not populated by a bunch of testosterone-laden assclowns who value winning and belittling their opponents above all other things (although some might argue that I was the exception that proved that particular rule. Whatever.)

I've been involved in Ultimate at just about every level imaginable: player, coach, tournament director, administrator, the board of director of Grass Roots Ultimate, UPA Sectional Coordinator, Regional Coordinator, and chair of the College Eligibility Committee. I even once made up a position for myself, Media Coordinator at Nationals, and managed to pull it off for 2 years straight before someone found out that I wasn't, technically, qualified to do it.

When you tell people you play Ultimate, you get a wide variety of responses, ranging all the way from 'What?' to 'Huh?'. In all seriousness, of course, you do occasionally meet someone who knows what Ultimate is. Most people have never heard of it. The best responses, as always, come from people who know just enough to be dangerous without knowing quite enough to be actually knowledgable.

The response which frustrates most Ultimate players to no end always has to do with dogs somehow. Whether they think that Ultimate is actually a sport somehow involving dogs, or they hear it and say 'oh, I love playing frisbee in the park with my dog!' Making it worse is the fact that the one major media appearance of Ultimate I know of, the game between the Hippies and the Womynists 1994 movie PCU, actually includes the use of a dog as a receiver by the Hippies at one point during the game.

Anyhow, this is by way of introduction to say that my very good friend Tony Leonardo has written a new book entitled Ultimate: The Greatest Sport Ever Invented By Man. Tony is an absolutely wonderful writer, I used to troll rec.sport.disc all summer hoping for some insanely highbrow missive by him from some ridiculously podunk tournament the previous weekend. He also happens to be a really nice guy, although not really much of an Ultimate player, per se. But hey, neither was I, so who am I to judge?

You can order signed copies from the website linked above. They make great presents for those tall, handsome, retired-from-Ultimate bloggers in your life for whom you were searching for the perfect Christmas gift. Especially if you had them monographed 'To O.D., the greatest ever to watch the game.'

As I say, Tony's a really wonderful writer. I viewed a few of the pages that they took screenshots of, and I laughed my ass off. If you are a player or fan of Ultimate, and if you are reading this there's about a 50% chance that you are, you won't regret picking up a copy for yourself.