It is sometime shortly before noon, and the Wisconsin Hodags — Madison's Ultimate Frisbee team — is visibly drunk, but not without some reason.

For Madison, the sectionals are a chance to have a good time before the regional meets set in and ruin some of the fun. This explains — in part — the heavy drinking.

Imagine if you will the natural evolution of sport. Imagine the sports that have evolved to the highest conceivable level of refinement, sports that have been around for years, sports that are the end of a centuries-long process of evolution. These sports are soccer, basketball, baseball and polo.

Walter Frederick Morrison patented the Frisbee in 1955. The rules of Ultimate Frisbee were invented in New Jersey in the 1960s, but the game in its popular form wasn't around until the early 1970s. Rutgers and Princeton held the first intercollegiate game in 1972. The Ultimate Players Association was founded in 1979. This puts Ultimate Frisbee somewhere on the leading edge of the primordial ooze of sport.

Just as European noblemen once derided soccer as the sport of the drunken masses, so too does Ultimate invoke an unrefined label from some sports purists. The players in the Lake Superior sectional don't seem to care, even the ones wearing funny costumes. The one that sticks out the most on the men's side — costuming is more of a tradition on the women's teams, one player tells me — is the fellow from Madison decked out in a skin-tight hodag costume, complete with horns, face paint and tail.

According to a few Marquette MU-Tang players — some easily distinguished by the creative hairdos handed out in a frenzied showing of esprit de corps the previous night — Madison has a much larger talent pool to select from, whereas Marquette in particular has to patch together a team from people who show up to club meetings.

It is conceivable that the Lake Superior Ultimate sectional will one day be much bigger than the unused football fields behind Wisconsin-Whitewater. To get there, Ultimate will need a striking innovation, something like what the forward pass did to football and what the one-timer did to my own beloved hockey. Something that is nothing more than an exhibition of all the masterful yet muffled grace and speed that go into every small play involved in the sport of Ultimate.

Until that day, apart from the rigorous warm-up routine, Ultimate will resemble a bunch of college kids throwing a Frisbee around.

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on April 19 2005.,”Brian O'Connor”

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