Posted on 07/07/2003 3:45:48 AM PDT by The Other Harry
July 6, 2003
‘Frisbee Town, USA’
By JULIE JAG
Sentinel Staff Writer
SANTA CRUZ
Around here, the legend of the Frisbee usually begins with the late Ed Headrick. Headrick, a former La Selva Beach resident, is known as the father of the modern-day disc. He perfected the fledgling saucer in 1964 while working as an inventor for the toy company Wham-O and went on to help establish the quirky toy as a fixture in American life.
Today, Headrick’s influence can be seen across Santa Cruz County. His spirit glides with every Frisbee tossed on Main Beach. It sails with every toss at Ultimate games at the UC Santa Cruz fields, and it is snatched by many a flyin’ Frisbee dog at local parks.
The mark of Headrick also lines the shelves of the city’s new specialty disc store. And since Headrick invented the chain-link "hole," now a staple in disc golf, his mark is on the landscape of the county’s five disc courses from San Lorenzo Valley to the world-renowned course at DeLaveaga Park.
In Headrick’s wake, Santa Cruz has become, as one professional player puts it, "Frisbee Town, USA."
So strongly have disc sports taken hold here that this week the first World Disc Games will be landing in the city’s backyard.
The games feature eight disc-related events Monday through Sunday, July 13, at four primary locations, and expect to draw 450 competitors from 18 countries as far away as Russia and Taiwan.
One such competitor is 30-year-old Tomas Burvall. Burvall, who has been playing disc games for 18 years, will spend about $3,000 on flights and accommodations and 34 hours on airplanes to travel from his native Sweden to the games. The most he could walk away with is a gift bag worth $45.
So why did he bother?
"It was the honor (to have the opportunity to play in the World Games ) and to get over here was nice as well," Burvall said. "This trip is a big part about the championship, but we’re also going to have fun."
Fun is what Wham-O meant the Frisbee to be when it was brought into production nearly half a century ago. And Headrick saw the additional potential for the disc to be part of something competitive.
But Santa Cruz isn’t necessarily indebted to Headrick for the region’s ascent as a disc-sport Mecca. Like many others, Headrick came here after the hype, only to spend his last years on the Central Coast.
Much of the debt lies with a man named Tom Schot.
Schot brought the fun and game of the disc to Santa Cruz by organizing the area’s first tournaments. And he’s doing it again now.
Schot hopes the World Disc Games will become the marquee event for Frisbee. Think the Olympics of flying plastic, tying in many of the events supervised by the World Flying Disc Federation, including Ultimate, disc golf and double disc court, and the best international athletes.
"It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done," said Schot, who has organized about 30 disc-related events over the years. "I want this to be really something."
There are other competitions as big as the World Disc Games and other towns that rival Santa Cruz’s enthusiasm for the Frisbee, such as nearby Berkeley and San Diego. But the tradition in Santa Cruz is unique, and is one that stems from a proud, local history, of which the games could be the next big step.
The Frisbee’s birth
The roots of the disc -- which would only later grip Santa Cruz -- took hold nearly 100 years ago and 3,000 miles away at the Frisbie Baking Company in Bridgeport, Conn.
There, according to the sport’s unofficial history manual "The Complete Book of Frisbee," students at nearby Yale University would wolf down Frisbie pies, then play games with the tins, tossing them to one another around campus.
An idea was born.
In the late 1940s, Walter Frederick Morrison, a Los Angeles building inspector, caught sight of the flying tins. The quick-thinking entrepreneur crafted his own version out of light plastic and began selling the discs at fairs around the country, hoping to cash in on America’s growing fascination with UFOs.
The sales strategy came to the attention of Rick Knerr and A.K. Melin, owners of the Wham-O toy company. And by 1957, bright orange and featherweight Frisbees were rolling out of the Wham-O factory in San Gabriel.
The Frisbee took a back seat to Wham-O’s other hit at the time, the Hula-Hoop, however. That is, until it met with the innovative mind of Ed Headrick.
During the Frisbee’s inception, Headrick had been an American soldier fighting in Germany during World War II. As a teenager, he often engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and when he returned to the United States, he seemed to have little capacity for fun.
"It was such a contrast (between the Frisbee’s playfulness and Headrick’s sternness)," said Headrick’s youngest son, Gary. "He was a pretty hard-nosed guy. I think a lot of that comes from the military."
But "Steady Ed" Headrick also had a mind for inventions. He was always fiddling with ways to improve things; it could be water heaters or water skis.
The latter brought him to the doorstep of the Wham-O factory in San Gabriel.
Headrick had known owners Knerr and Melin from high school, and, while they had little use for his hydrofoil ski, they were in need of someone to head up their research and development department. Headrick agreed.
His first order of business was melting down warehouses of surplus Hula-Hoops.
With the plastic and a blueprint from the mold Wham-O had acquired from Morrison, Headrick eventually struck upon the a toy that would one day outgrow the hoops in popularity.
Headrick applied his own patented additions to the Frisbee -- including adding the "Lines of Headrick" around the perimeter to add balance.
The first professional Frisbee rolled off the line in 1967 (patent No. 3,359,678). It was white with a black flame ring and a gold foil label that revealed the disc’s puny weight -- 108 grams. Today’s Frisbees weigh between 140 and 175 grams.
In addition to improving the disc for Wham-O, Headrick took charge of marketing the new product.
While Wham-O intended the Frisbee as a child’s toy, Headrick quickly realized that it also brought amusement to adults. To grab the older crowd’s attention, in 1967 he began the first group dedicated to the disc -- the International Frisbee Association, which had 1,200 members at one time.
Soon afterward, Headrick turned to his next fad invention: the Superball.
But in the meantime, the public release of the Frisbee was prompting a variety of disc games to sprout up across the country. In 1969 in Maplewood, N.J., for example, high school students were fashioning a rough version of Ultimate Frisbee, a game much like rugby but with a disc.
Santa Cruz wakes to the disc
Aside from a few recreational players, Santa Cruz was mostly dormant to the Frisbee and its fringe games, like Ultimate, during the disc’s early years.
The sleepy beach town didn’t really catch on until after Headrick "invented" disc golf in 1976.
Though people were playing a loose version of the game with coffee can lids as early as 1922, Headrick is said to have made the sport legitimate by devising a "hole" -- a metal basket with disc-snagging chains -- so that "golfers" were no longer hurling their Frisbees at random objects like street signs, buildings and bystanders.
Meanwhile, Santa Cruz native Schot, then 32, was picking up his first Frisbee at a park in San Jose.
A couple of years after he started playing, Schot organized his first disc tournament: the Santa Cruz Flying Disc Classic at Cabrillo College.
Schot dreamt of making buckets of cash on the event, which would became the World Disc Championships in 1978 and last until 1986. Instead, Schot lost money -- most times not even making enough to pay out prizes.
But Schot says he considers his legacy his fortune, and in that case, he’s well off. He helped put Santa Cruz on the Frisbee globe.
"When these tournaments started, they brought in a lot of good players," Schot said. "Other people moved here, and they formed other Ultimate teams. Santa Cruz became a Mecca. People moved to be where there’s a Frisbee culture."
Kevin Givens, who won nine titles in the freestyle competition, a stunt-based event, was one of them. He had learned to play in high school in Modesto, but called Santa Cruz home shortly after entering his first tournament here.
"Santa Cruz has always been on the map, so to speak," said Givens, now the director of intramural sports at UC Santa Cruz.
"In my mind you could call it Frisbee Town, USA. There’s nothing that really rivals it."
Setting the course
Indeed, the city was ahead of its time with makeshift disc golf courses going in at Cabrillo and UC Santa Cruz in the late ’70s. The first Ultimate team also sprung up about that time.
In 1984, Santa Cruz took another step toward cementing its place in disc history when the City Council gave permission for a disc golf course near the DeLaveaga Golf Course, now considered by some to be one of the world’s best courses.
Bigger and bigger things only followed.
The 12th Annual Freestyle Players Championship invaded UCSC’s East Fields in 1990. In 1991, the World Flying Disc Championships arrived at campus.
In 1999, Santa Cruz jumped into the forefront when Fury, a regional women’s Ultimate team, won the club national championship in Sarasota, Fla.
The growing number of events and activities demonstrated how many different ways people had turned Frisbee-flinging into a competition since Headrick first turned the sport loose.
With the advent of so many styles of play, people became decidedly more specialized. Discs, too, became mind-boggingly diverse. They included colors from fluorescent orange to sky blue to plain white. Sizes ranged from cookie-sized mini- discs used as ball-markers to salad plate-sized golf discs and platter-sized freestyle Frisbees.
"Back in the old days you had basically one Frisbee," Givens said. "You’d hardly recognize (the sport) from where it was to where it’s come to now."
Cashing in
An estimated 15 million people play Frisbee in the United States every year, according to "The Complete Book of Frisbee." And with the sport’s popularity having grown, so has the demand for Frisbees.
Until last year, though, Santa Cruz residents hoping to test out DeLaveaga’s renowned holes or take a few throws in at the beach would have to settle with the generic disc stocked by the local sporting goods store.
That’s when Elaine Harding talked her husband, Rob, into opening the city’s first disc specialty store. It is named, simply, Santa Cruz Disc.
Elaine said they didn’t do any research into how a disc business would fare in Santa Cruz, they just plunged in.
"It was a chance for us to venture out, do something on the lighter side," said Harding, whose son Miles won the Junior Amateur World Championship in disc golf last year. "It’s Santa Cruz. Anything goes. The crazier, the wackier, the better."
But considering how well the business, located at 1051 Water St., is doing, the idea no longer seems bizarre. Harding said the Santa Cruz shop has grossed about $100,000 for the year.
Santa Cruz Disc is not the only disc business seeing profits.
Josh Orzech, with the Disc Golf Association, says an increasing number of sponsors are throwing money at Frisbee-related products and events.
That makes sense since the Pro Disc Golfers Association estimates that 500,000 people worldwide are regular disc golfers. California has more than any other state, according to the association.
That kind of enthusiasm is just what Schot is hoping to cash in on with the World Disc Games this week.
And for Santa Cruz, it will be another mark in the history of the Frisbee.
Athletes are coming to Santa Cruz to test themselves against the world’s best competition. They’re coming to Santa Cruz to celebrate how far the disc has come and to celebrate Headrick, who died at his La Selva Beach home last year and would have celebrated his 79th birthday June 28. They’re coming to Santa Cruz to have fun.
But mostly, they’re coming for the same reason that Frisbee flingers like Headrick and Givens and Burvall ended up here: It’s a good place to play.
"It’s a magical town in so many ways," Givens said. "And being a Frisbee player, I would not want to live anywhere else."
Contact Julie Jag at jjag@santa-cruz.com.
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