USA Ultimate

"The U.S. Open is a celebration of our mission statement. We saw a lot of great competition this afternoon, some good learning sessions this morning, and one other element is community. So not only is that the community of players here, but also the community extending through our sport's past.  

We have this awesome opportunity to talk to Brian Murphy, Class of 2007 Hall of Fame, and while I'll give him a proper introduction in a bit, we are going to start out with a video. Over the past year in an effort to preserve our sport's past, we have digitized all our old championship videos. We haven't even had a chance to go through it all, but what I wanted to give you a chance to see is a look back at the 1980s.  

So here is footage from various championship events ranging from 1980 to 1989, and I hope you enjoy it."

Then & Now: A Look Back, 1980-1989

"I hope you all enjoyed that. I can't wait to hear Brian's comments on that, but before we do that I want to give Brian Murphy an appropriate introduction. 

I think it is safe to say that the sport and specifically the organization of the UPA, now USA Ultimate, wouldn't be a solid organization if it wasn't for the efforts of Brian in the 80s. Brian was the second director of the UPA after Tom Kennedy, who you briefly saw in that 1980 clip. Brian served as the UPA director from 1983 to 1985, was involved in things such as writing the 8th edition rules, he rewrote the bylaws for I guess both WFDF and the UPA, got 501 c(3) status for both organizations, and really put the UPA in firm financial standing so that it could continue on to be where it is today.

As a player, Brian started with the Bucknell Mudsharks in 1976, and later played on teams such as Flying Circus, and won two World Championships with Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. In his time, he established the College Division, and after his time as director he served from 1989 to 2001 as the legal council for the UPA. So, Brian's contributions to the sport are amazing, and his 2007 Class Hall of Fame makes a lot of sense.

So, Brian, the first thing I'd like to hear about...having seen that video, you started playing before that 1980 UPA championship.  I'd like to hear about what the sport was like before the UPA."

When I started playing in the mid 70s, there were really two types of players. There were the Frisbee guys, that we kind of derisively referred to as the freestylers, and they were mostly events players. They were Frisbee enthusiasts; they played freestyle, MTA, Double Disc Court, and when they wanted to run around a little bit they played Ultimate. The other group was the athletes who were the people that were coming into Ultimate from other more mainstream sports. All the teams at that time were really college teams, and a lot of these people were highly recruited Division 1 athletes: basketball, soccer, football, and on occasion track and field, who had for whatever reason became disillusioned with mainstream collegiate athletics but they still craved the competition. For them, Ultimate was just another game that you played and you could beat your fellow peers that happened to be played with a plastic flat ball instead of a round ball or an oblong ball.  

For a little while at least, the freestylers kind of dominated for a couple of different reasons. Number one, their throwing skills were vastly superior to the rest of us, and really showed us a lot about what you could do with a disc that was not possible with a ball. But also because, to the extent that there was a disc sports establishment at that time, they were it. Ultimate, along with the other disc sports were under the umbrella of the International Frisbee Association (the IFA) which was really just a promotional arm of the Wham-O Corporation. That organization had been formed by really for the benefit of the events players. Ultimate was kind of an add on, an afterthought later on.  

By the end of the decade, which is to say shortly before that last clip you just saw, there were a few things that happened which really pretty much directed how the sport was going to be played, and how the sport was going to be organized for the years to come. The first thing was that by the end of the decade it was clear that the athletes has prevailed. Throwing as we now now it is a learnable skill, so the window of opportunity for the freestylers who dominated the sport was rather narrow as it turned out and closed pretty rapidly. So, by the end of the decade, the sport was populated primarily with people who had come into Ultimate from other sports, who thought themselves as competitive athletes, who thought of Ultimate as a competitive sport capable of producing its own elite class of athletes who could become the equal of another other sport.  

That's more of a big deal than you might image at that time. The Frisbee itself as an object was associated with long hair, love beads, hippies and marijuana - not necessarily incorrectly so - but nonetheless, the thought that this could become a competitive sport with real athletes was pretty far fetched, and not at all a forgone conclusion.  

The other thing that happened by the end of the decade was that the sport became self-governed. By the end of that time, there were many many more times the number of Ultimate players that didn't play other disc sports than there were all the other events players combined. So we had far blown through what the IFA could provide to us, and had decided there was essentially an ownership moment in the late 70s when the players decided that they wanted to organize the sport. The wanted to control rule making, they wanted to control the organization of competition, they wanted to preserve what I think we all thought was a very unique culture and identity, and I think that is frankly the only reason why things like the Spirit of the Game, and observers as opposed to referees has endured. I really don't doubt that those things would have fallen away if it had not been for the fact that the players at the time decided that they were going to take control of the sport - that they were going to organize it their way - not withstanding the fact that none of us knew what we were doing.  I mean, none of us had run, all of us were in our mid twenties or younger, and had never run any organizations of any type, let alone national or international sports organizations.  

The other thing that happened by the end by the way was that all that second wave of players that came to the sport in the mid 70s graduated from college and they began to gravitate towards the major metropolitan areas that then became the hubs for Ultimate to really flower in the 1980s: Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. So, that last clip of the 1980 Championships was, in a way, an interesting kind of crossover year that was the first of the, what many people thought of as the all star club team versus the last of the big college teams. Within a relatively very short period of time there were no college teams that were competitive on a national level. Just within a matter of years, they were pretty much - you'd have one or two teams that might be relevant on a regional level, none of them ever made Nationals. It actually got to the point were the college teams were almost getting squeezed out of the sport, which we'll talk about a little bit if we get into the 80s.  

That was the year I think were you saw the change, and obviously field sports, we again, now know that you reach your prime in your late twenties stretching into your thirties. Within a few years you had 25, 26, 27 year olds playing 18 and 19 year olds. That is kind of what led the club scene there."

When I came in, and I replaced him in '82, I was living in the east coast, but I had played for the Flying Circus. I had experience on both coasts, so in a way I was somebody who was kind of acceptable to western players who kind of thought, oh those east coast guys are going to take over this thing and run it through our exclusion. So, in a way my choice was somebody who really was familiar with both sets of players.  

Now, of course, we were essentially out of money. I mean, Tom Kennedy ran this thing out of a shoebox in his spare bedroom in his bungalow in Santa Barbara and handed me the shoebox in 1982 and said here you go. And by the way we don't have any money, and don't really have any prospect of getting any. So, it was like a scene out of a James Clavell novel or something. One of the first things that I did was to require make membership in the UPA mandatory for any participating at the Sectional or Regional level. Seemingly unremarkable at this point, I mean every sport that is organized in such a way, but of course at that time you would have thought that I had mandated the each team bring a human sacrifice.  

The sport continued to grow and grow, as I said earlier, as the clubs matured and you had people now in their athletic primes, the college teams were just getting the snot pounded out of them. Even a mid level club team was really pretty well pasting even our best college teams, and it got to the point to where they didn't want to play each other any more. That, for some of us in leadership roles recognized that that was basically suicidal for the sport, so that really caused us to go back and create the College Division that hadn't been necessary before, but now needed to have a College Division that separated off on its own division of play, giving them a different season - they played in the spring, the open was in the fall - and gradually began to build a national roster requirements which was also very...like pulling teeth out of screaming children. That was kind of the big thing that I can take a certain amount of credit for the College Division because was something that happened during my tenure."

"That's right. I think I heard this line just the other day. Living vicariously through your children is a time honored thing going back to the beginning of time, really only very recently available to Ultimate players.

My oldest son, Gavin, plays for the Tufts University team that competed at college nationals in Boulder about a month or so ago. My youngest son, Aiden, was selected for a High School all star game that unfortunately got cancelled as part of this scramble to find new fields for this event. It is quite an interesting experience to watch both of my children embrace the game that meant so much to me for so long, and approach it and the way that they approach it with a seriousness and dedication, and yet the joy they get from it is really unbelievably gratifying to me. I mean, I love to talk about the old days, but I'm also very upbeat about the future.  

There's a lot of things that we heard yesterday morning when we talked, Tom Crawford talked about the the future of the sport. Some of the things that we were talking about there, Community, Character, and values...you could have had those conversations thirty years ago. Mike Payne was a little more articulate than we might have been, but it was the same concepts and those things have endured, which is very very gratifying to me.  

The other thing that happened as well with my kids getting involved was that I got involved in coaching. I helped to coach the local mixed team Swingline for a couple of years, and I'm now coaching a developmental mixed team here in Colorado Springs. Just getting back to the competition and being able to interact with these really, for me, young kids who are just starting their own careers in Ultimate is just such a wonderful experience and it really gives me a lot of hope for the future of the sport.  

I think thing somebody many many years ago asked me why do you do these things, these organizational things you spend so much time on? The line that I had was that I wanted to contribute to something that will outlive me. I don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon, but I do think that I've accomplished that. Ultimate will outlive me, and it wasn't something that was very obvious 35 years ago, or however many years ago that that was."

We now see levels of athleticism that were just not present in the sport 30 years ago, which is not that surprising, but it is remarkable to see. And yet, a lot of the same tactics and you see the flow of the game, its really very similar to what it was 35 years ago.

There were an awful lot of Hall of Famers in those clips there."

"We're going to open it up to questions.  Raise your hand if you have a question for Brian."

[AUDIENCE] "I was interested, when did on field some of strategy and structure start incorporating itself into the game?"

The Glassboro was the team that instituted zone defense. Rutgers had done it a little bit, but Glassboro was really the team that really perfected. And that was a mind blower, I mean nobody knew what to do against a zone defense at the time, largely because all we did was run around. Once they put a zone on, you weren't able to do that. Now the zone, like so many things in different sports, defensive is the innovator and the offense adapts to it. And it is exactly what happened, they created knew set offenses to be able to attack the zone.  

Like I said with Rodger Shepard and the Stanford O was the creation of a vertical stack, so that, and that time this was before there were forces to everything was just a straight up mark, and the vertical stack was designed so that there would always be a cut for your forehand and always be a cut to your backhand, and then there would be a flow down the field.

So that is really when that started. That's about pretty much contemporaneously or shortly after those clips that you saw. Again, it was mostly because defenses got better and so offenses had to adapt to that."

One thing that was different was the stall count. It was sort of unsporting to call someone for a stalling, and so you didn't start counting anyone until they already had the disc in their hand for an ungodly length of time, and then it was to 15. So, people could hang onto the disc for what we would now consider to be an unbelievable length of time before they would have to throw it.

Now, of course, you start counting when you are about, well 3 meters away."

You know, there was a lot of pulling away from authority, and that sort of thing, and pulling away from structure and so this athlete wave that I talked about in the mid 70s were all top athletes who wanted to play and who wanted to perform and wanted to excel. They didn't want to have coaches and they didn't want to - it is ironic now if you watch the sport - they were coming to the sport as a difference from the mainstream collegiate athletics. The main thing was that we don't foul, fouls occur unintentionally. In fact, I distinctly remember there was a preface to the rules that said, there is an assumption that no one is going deliberately violate the rules, and so therefore there are no penalties, there are simply a reset to where play would have been had there been no foul. And when I say that the sport became self governed in the late 70s, that was a large part of it.  

We really didn't want to get sucked up into the sports machine, we considered out sport to be unique, and very special because it had this respect for each other, respect for the rules, didn't need referees because nobody was going to knowingly violate the rules. Not that we didn't have arguments, because we were competitive athletes in tense situations, but there was a real premium on being able to resolve those differences amicably and in truth we, and I suppose this is no different than it is today, we went out and partied with those guys after the game was over. But that was very much a part of, and we were very conscious of it at the time, it was something that was done deliberately because we wanted to be be not like those other sports. The concept of a good foul in basketball - well a good foul is one the referee doesn't see - but we can't do that in Ultimate, and that was really a foundational principle that we brought to the sport that we were determined to preserve."

Now you have kids coming up from High School and even pre High School, juniors programs through college with coaches and training and then they get to be in their mid to late twenties and thirties and they've been playing for over 10 years of competitive sports and competitive Ultimate and have been aware of it even longer than that. One of the things that different about my children's generation is that they didn't think there is anything odd about Ultimate, whereas in my day, truthfully you literally had to explain the rules to every human being. And a lot of us, I remember teammates back in the 70s who would say, I just tell them I play soccer. "Oh, you are going away for a tournament?" "Yeah, I play soccer."  It's not worth explaining.

So I think that's one thing that I'm very excited about, to see how good the athletes are becoming as time goes by, but I'm excited that unique culture has continued to prevail even through all these changes. And these are people who had nothing to do with forming the sport, or didn't know any of the people I know when I was coming up. But they still incorporated these ideas about Spirit of the Game, and as we heard yesterday morning, and that was one of the things I loved about that, the polling suggests that Spirit of the Game is widely embraced in the sport, and even more so in the younger generation than the older generation. It is hard not to be excited about that." 

Discraft - and I see you invited a disc golfer here involved with Discraft - meanwhile in the very early 80s, and really was designing their discs specifically for the sport. So, within a relatively short period of time, the Discraft disc became - and that was a little bit heavier at 175 grams with a more even weight distribution towards the rim which made it easier to stabilize in flight, and that really took over the sport.  

Although there were a lot of people that were difficult to convince at first, but it really did come on and become the dominant disc, to the point that frankly Wham-O got out of the market. They did care enough to try to compete for the sport disc niche after I want to saw the mid 80s or so when finally Discraft was able to get enough of a critical mass of people that were supporting their disc that it became the official disc of Ultimate. And, that was kind of a wake up call for Wham-O and they choose not to answer it well, and really they decided that they would prefer to get out of that market and just with the recreational one.  

Yeah, the disc has evolved somewhat, but honestly it isn't that different in the greater scheme of things than it is now."

There was the initial World Ultimate Guts championship in Sweden, I want to say in '83, and that was really similar to the U.S. Open concept because it had people coming from all over the world, and you know, the Ultimate captain's meeting where we talked about things like direction of the sport, it was really very much the prototype for that sort of thing. And that was a great time, I did probably travel around Europe quite a bit those first few years and made quite a lot of contacts with people over there.

It was differently organized, they were very much on the IFA model where all disc sports were governed by one umbrella organization per country, and I think to a certain extent that may still be the case overseas, where you may have like a British Frisbee Association and there were Ultimate, Guts, and all the other disc sports.  

They were somewhat resistant to the idea of some American carpet bagger coming in telling them that we were going represent all of the Ultimate players everywhere, so I sort of read that handwriting on the wall and backed off of that early on. But we did establish really good relationships with players around the world and I think that was something that we were able to continue. Those World Championships games have continued ever since then."

There were no coaches. Nobody who had anything to do with the game that wasn't actually playing in it. Certainly nobody considered themselves to be knowledgeable enough to experience enough to be able to tell other people what to do. Now, of course, human beings being what they are, that changed and not too long down the line. You obviously had leadership in teams, more experienced players and as those players began to retire from the game and not really being physically capable of playing the game any more they would get into coaching, which is where all good coaches are originally. Now we have a whole new generation of people who have not only played but been coached and played, and now are retired or getting into coaching. We went from a sport that was really almost specifically anti coaching to a sport where coaching is widely embraced, certainly at the college level. At college nationals virtually no teams were without a coach, and I think it is more and more embraced because as we get older we realize that coaches do have something to add especially if they have experience in the game."

I think probably my favorite was when went Masters - the Masters Division started in the early 90s.  This was really well timed for me. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove has been a club team based out of New Jersey in the 80s and actually we actually toyed with the idea of calling ourselves N+1, N being the given number of team from a given region to qualify for Nationals in that year because we always lost the game to go to Nationals. We had a great team, but we always came up just short. Masters came around, and I guess I was doing some work for the UPA at the time, so I had some advance warning that Masters was going to come in and knew that the UPA has now idea how they were going to deal with it.  Sensing an opportunity, I put together my old team and Seven Sages, which as turns out was just a great group of people and a great group of friends. Worst case scenario we get together and hang out with each other for a week, but we ended up winning and end up defending that title for three championships, so we actually reigned as world Masters champions for 1991-1997 which was a period of great peace and prosperity in the world, and I don't know if there is any coincidence there or not."

I mean, I moved here to Colorado Springs in the late 80s, and there was not much going on. There was a big club team in Boulder, the Boulder Stain, that was a magnet for people who were Ultimate players from all over the state, but there wasn't much else. There wasn't much of any college, and I sort of got together with some CC players mostly because I wanted someone to play with. And, helped them organize, and virtually by default because I wanted them to be able to play somebody I became Sectional Coordinator for the college division just so I could get some other teams going. I think that that is the late 80 early 90s kind of answer to your question, where we really  started to achieve that critical mass where it wasn't just in the big cities, and it wasn't just...you'd have one team who would be any good and it would draw all the good players from all over the region so there was no chance any other team would form. So that really started to fade away in the period of the late 80s early 90s where more and more teams were created and there was much more of a critical mass of players all over the U.S."

From my own experience, Colorado Springs really became a kind of a mixed Ultimate community even before there was a Mixed Division in the mid 90s or so, and maybe that was simply a reflection that we didn't really have enough women in town to have a separate women's team. But, we really played a mixed game here, and I suspect that was true in other places as well. The Mixed Division was formed in '97 I want to say, and the timing was perfect because we were already ready to go and the local Colorado Springs team Pira Haku made it to Nationals and went to the final game. That was really a very unusual, obviously a very long time after the women's division had been formed. Pretty new stuff, it was, I don't remember seeing it happen anywhere else much before that."