When Steve Rico's shot caromed off a maple on the par-3 14th hole, he walked up to the nearest tree trunk and started kicking it. He'd already sworn, stomped and had a testy exchange with the tournament gallery earlier in the round. Now he was just standing there, kicking a tree.
Golf was laying claim to yet another man's sanity.
True, this was disc golf, but its damaging effect on the psyche was no different from that of the traditional variety. Rico was one of 300 professional disc golfers who came to the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania in late July to compete in the 24th annual Pro Disc Golf World Championships. Conducted on four of the state's 31 disc golf courses, the tournament had drawn such disc golf greats as Dave Feldberg, Des Reading, Barry Schultz and Juliana Korver -- all household names, if you happen to live in a household where nicked discs hanging from your walls count as interior decorating.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Invented in the mid-1970s, disc golf is regular golf's poor cousin. The top prize in the most competitive men's division at the Worlds was US$5,000 (each golfer paid a US$180 entrance fee, out of which the prize money was rationed), and the spectator galleries rarely swelled to more than half a dozen until the last day of the six-day tournament.
The sport is based on traditional golf (or ball golf, as practitioners of the disc game call it), in that players negotiate a 9-, 18- or 27-hole courses by using the fewest number of throws and tallying up their score at the end. A disc golf "hole" is actually a metal basket sitting halfway up a pole; from the top of it hang metal chains that provide a target for the thrower. A disc hitting the chains the right way will drop into the basket with a distinctive ching.
In disc golf's infancy, lampposts, trees or other fixed objects were used as holes, but the invention of the basket by Ed Headrick "brought finality to each hole and professionalism to the sport," according to Jim Davis, known as Rocco, a Worlds tournament director. Headrick, the founder of formal disc golf and the designer of the "modern" Frisbee for Wham-O in 1964, is still a regular presence at disc golf courses -- his cremated remains were pressed into several thousand discs after his death three years ago.
Back at Nockamixon State Park, the most treacherous of the four Allentown-area courses being used for the Worlds this year, the 11-time world champion Ken Climo was peering down the fairway at a waving figure. "Is he giving us the all clear or is he going to the bathroom?" he asked. A few moments later, Climo gave a shrug and, with a hop-step off the rubber tee pad, launched his disc. "Cabbage!" he yelled as it veered off course and disappeared into the foliage. An errant shot into the woods is usually called "salad bar" by disc golfers, and is considered a good thing only when it becomes a "drive-through salad bar" by re-emerging safely and landing in the fairway, which Climo's shot decidedly did not.
Climo, a lanky, immensely broad-shouldered Floridian known simply as the Champ, has been a full-time disc golfer for 17 years, and with over US$260,000 in prize money, he is by far the career earnings leader. Sponsorships and bonus money paid by companies like the disc maker Innova double his yearly take. And yet being the greatest player ever to heave a golf disc is not unlike being the king of Tuvalu -- your subjects revere you, but the world at large is oblivious to your achievements.
"Sure I get frustrated at seeing all the off-the-wall sports that are televised, get the crowds and earn big money," Climo said. "Watching a bowling skills competition with a US$20,000 prize? Bass fishing? Come on."
Climo, who is among a small group of
players on the nine-month-long Pro Disc Golf Association tour, does what he can to promote the sport. In June, he and seven other golfers appeared at a Triple-A baseball game in Des Moines to hurl discs from home plate over the outfield fence.
"They first had a basket out in center field," Climo recalled, "and the announcer was saying, 'You think these people can throw it this far?' and everyone was yelling `No!' Then they backed it up to the warning track. `Do you think they can get it there now?' `No!' And we were just bombing them. A two-story building's down one line, and Dave Feldberg put one over the back fence and over that building. Out. Gone. The crowd was going wild."
Exactly how many people play disc golf recreationally is difficult to pin down. The Pro Disc Golf Association says it has 8,900 members and claims, perhaps optimistically, that 500,000 people play the sport regularly. According to the association's course directory (www.pdga.org), there are more than 1,600 courses in the US, with California's 93 leading the way.
Internationally, Sweden and Japan are vibrant outposts of disc golf, combining for more than a hundred courses. (Though he travels in anonymity Stateside, the pro player Dave Feldberg says that in Japan, "Mobs of people wait for us at the airport, yelling like we're rock stars.") The most remote is the nine-hole course at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, which, according to the official course description, features "ice, snow, drifts, heavy equipment and high winds." The most dangerous courses are probably the two that have just been set up on US military bases in Iraq.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby