https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/nyregion/ultimate-frisbee-new-jersey-parking-lot.html
The Parking Lot Frisbee Game That Started in 1968 Is Still Going Strong
In the New Jersey parking lot where high school students invented Ultimate Frisbee nearly 60 years ago, some of the original players are still throwing the disc every week.
Feb. 15, 2025
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Oh,” one of them said, with a teenager’s almost audible eye roll. “The stupid Frisbee rock.”
In a corner of that nondescript parking lot sits a stone the size of a backyard grill, with a small plaque commemorating the birthplace of Ultimate Frisbee in 1968, and the three students credited with inventing it.
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“That stupid Frisbee rock” that commemorates the birthplace of Ultimate.Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times
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Mr. Barbanel and Mr. Summers do not claim to have been present at the actual founding of Ultimate, which is essentially football with a Frisbee and no tackling. Credit for that generally goes to three older chaps in the Columbia High School class of 1970: Joel Silver, who later became a Hollywood film producer; Jonny Hines; and Bernard Hellring Jr., known as Buzzy, who died in a car crash in 1971. …
Flying disc toys are said to have been around since the 1930s, and campground games have been played up and down the East Coast since the 1940s, according to Tony Leonardo, the author of “Ultimate: The Greatest Sport Ever Invented by Man.” Mr. Leonardo, who founded the Notre Dame team in 1991 (Ultimate is generally a club sport at colleges, though it is taken very seriously), is also making a documentary about the Maplewood parking lot, which he said is underrecognized, even by many of the estimated seven million Ultimate players around the world.
“The fact that our entire sport can be traced to this crummy rock with this small plaque at a parking lot is a little bit of an insult,” he said. “It’s insufficient.”
According to the legend, Mr. Silver went to a summer camp in Massachusetts in 1968 and learned a similar game from a counselor who played it at Amherst College. Mr. Silver brought it back to Columbia High School, tweaked it and, according to Mr. Leonardo, pushed it on the student council, almost as a gag or a fun form of cheeky performance art. The first game was played between the student council and the student newspaper staff.
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One of the key moments in the initial branding of Ultimate Frisbee was when the trio of founders recorded all the rules in a booklet, printed in 1970. In addition to establishing the run of play — a foul may be a physical action “sufficient to arouse the ire” of an opponent — the first rule book also included a section on referees, with the key words “honor system,” thereby codifying the essential spirit of sportsmanship and honesty.
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