"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.
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