Luke Judge

As I embark back into the world of full-time employment, combined with a dash of 3+ hours/day of commuting, I’ve had to reach back into the archives. I’ve looked through my old collection of video, and realized there are a number of sports that I’ve played and video taped, yet – for one reason or another – failed to report on. I am calling this the things I Tried This Year and Forgot about Till Today Series – or TITTY FATT for short.

First on our list is Ultimate, aka Ultimate Frisbee, an addictive game that seems to hook newcomers like myself.  in my case this has led to me joining three separate leagues to ensure that I am playing year round.

I first encountered Ultimate in highschool gym class. I had mixed feelings after catching a nasty backhand follow-through across the chin.

Fast forward a decade and I get this email from my old phys-ed teacher:

Heard you guys were so bad at hockey you couldn’t even win an old man tournament this weekend! just don’t tell the guys you play against that you all went to Austin, it would give us a bad name.

The real reason I am contacting you is to see if you play Ultimate. I figured a guy who runs like you and spent time out West would play for sure. I play on a team made up mostly of teachers and we have done very well in the past, but we lost 2 of our best players for this season. let me know if you are interested in playing.

And so the expectation was set that I could help replace two of the best players on a very good team, and the potential for disappointment was sky-high.

What this teacher was unaware of was that I in fact had not spent any time playing Ultimate, out west or out east. This was a shame, as it turns out I like the sport very much.

Our league is a co-ed, 7-on-7 set-up. The goal is to gain points by catching the disc in your opponent’s endzone. It’s a fast action, continuous game – you can’t run when you’re holding the disc, when you catch it you have ten-second to throw it, and if a pass isn’t completed it’s a turn-over and the other team picks up the disc and heads back up the field on offense.

Also of note is that calling it “Frisbee” instead of ultimate is akin to calling facial tissue “Kleenex” – you’re giving props to a specific brand rather than the proper name for the item. Some people frown upon this. I tend not to care because if I ask for a Kleenex and you start to argue with me you’re just going to get sneezed on.

It’s an amazing workout – quite akin to the cardio you’d pick up playing soccer. The outdoor games go an hour-and-a-half, so depending how many subs you have (ranging from none to about 8), you can get pretty sweaty.

There are two standout features that make ultimate different from any other sport I’ve played:

The Disc: an object based game that doesn’t use a ball. It’s actually incredibly novel. (After discussing this with family and friends it took me about two hours to realize hockey also fits the bill). Playing with a disc allows for so many unique throws and catches that could never be accomplished with a ball. You have to watch some of the game’s best to truly appreciate it, but throws that can hover, curve, rise or fall give the thrower (fittingly known as the handler) a huge array of options.

Similarly, it takes some time as a receiver to adapt to reading a flying disc and figuring out where it’s going. My track background has paid off numerous times when I’ve been on one side of the field and a throw has missed it’s target somewhere else, but hovered in the air long enough to allow me to get close enough to make a catch. A similar number of times my inexperience has made me look quite the fool as I sprint off in one direction and the disc curves off in the other.

The “Spirit of Game”: This summer I played in three leagues – Hockey, Slo-pitch, and Ultimate. These leagues were entirely populated with people who had full-time jobs outside of their recreational sports. Literally everyone I played against had to go to work the next morning, or at least look for jobs (promise I’ll be out of the basement soon mom).

The one big difference among the sports was that slo-pitch and hockey had referees while Ultimate had just the “Spirit of the Game” governing our actions. accordingly, every week in hockey and slo-pitch, some chump would go off and try and start a fight over a close call (or in many cases a clearly correct call). Obviously, not being able to stretch that single into a double in men’s league Tuesday night slo-pitch was going to ruin this guys week.

There was one particular situation in slo-pitch where an outfielder sort-of caught a ball as it hit the ground. He raised his glove in the air to signal a good catch, the ump agreed, and the out was called. after the game a teammate of mine, One-Eye’d Willy, asked this opposing player if he actually caught the ball, and he smiled and said “of course not.”

This brings me to the beauty of the “Spirit of the Game”. there were perhaps five disputed calls all summer in Ultimate, and the worst result was that the play was repeated from the last throw. I also never noticed anyone lying about a catch, and in fact saw many instances where someone could have claimed to have made a play, but opted instead for modesty. Observing this odd sportsmanship, it occurred to me that it had nothing to do with the sport itself. If I go and play hockey or baseball with a bunch of friends, or even non-friends, we’d almost never have a disputed call, and certainly no one would lose their cool over a close play.

My theory goes that putting a man in stripes out there for people to deceive, lie to, and yell at, encourages people to be deceitful, loud, liars when they’d otherwise just enjoy the spirit of competition and exercise. Or maybe all the guys in my baseball and hockey leagues are just jerks. either way, Ultimate – the sport that’s name literally translate into “incredible, the best, far out, and the craziest” – is great, and you should try it.

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Published 03:41 p.m., June 4, 2010

Frisbee golf, commonly known as frolf, is making a comeback on the M State – Fergus Falls campus.

While the college has been home to frolf courses in the past, this year the facilities management team is doing what it can to keep the course in top-notch condition. And people in the community seem to be responding.

The course is not limited to students. In fact, Joe Kotschevar, facilities services supervisor, said the course is designed with the community in mind.

“We wanted to revive it and give more of an option for everyone in town,” Joe Kotschevar said.

To make it user-friendly, the college has installed a box near the start of the course which includes score cards, maps and rules to follow. The course is set up with 12 basket courses, with each location marked with a starting point and corresponding basket.

The course does not, however, have the frisbee golf equipment on hand. Kotschevar said equipment can be found at any local store that sells outdoor sporting equipment.

The game is played with rules similar to golf. Teams begin in clearly marked starting points and choose an appropriate frisbee, based on distance of shot, to make it as close to the goal post as possible.

The ultimate goal is to throw the frisbee into the post, which has a bucket that surrounds the post. Points are determined by how many tries it takes for players to land the frisbee in the bucket.

Kotschevar said the area is intended to provide a sport for people in the community, including those families looking for a location to host birthday parties and youth groups in search of some outdoor fun.

“All we ask is that you respect it and enjoy yourself,” he said.

The course isn’t only intended for those interested in the sport. It’s also a place where people are able to hike through rolling hills on the M State campus.

“It’s a very good nature walk,” Kotschevar said.

Those interested in running the quick, challenging course are also welcome to use the trail.

The trails are mowed regularly, Kotshcevar said. Trails are expected to be kept up until the snow flies.

The course is open seven days a week.

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It’s been about a month since the city’s parks and recreation department filled its director position, and the days have gotten busy. Even a random hour with new director Bill Bizzell proves busy.

It’s about 3:30 on Friday, and the crew of 51 full time, part time and seasonal employees is out taking care of the city’s numerous parks and recreation properties — including the local parks, the Hillcrest Park Zoo, and the Clovis Municipal Golf Course.

The staff just finished hammering out final details on the next two months at another facility — the Clovis Aquatic Center, the site of swimming lessons. So far, Bizzell says, 147 students have signed up for one of the four, two-week blocks. The first block is full, and registration fees ($70 per student) have raised $10,290.

“That will pay the bills,” Bizzell said, noting six instructors were hired for the two months. “The second, third and fourth blocks will be adjusted as needed. The first block, all hands are on deck.”

The parks and recreation department building, located at 500 Sycamore, isn’t too far from much of the city’s prime recreation real estate. In fact, many properties are just a brisk walk away.

However, it’s 100 degrees outside, so the transportation of choice is the car issued to the director — a slightly used car with 28,455 miles on the odometer and … Washington Redskins floor mats?

That’s not from Bizzell, who said the décor was courtesy of former director Rob Carter — who left in February to take a job in Virginia closer to family. Bizzell was a big Dallas Cowboys fan before Tom Landry was fired. But now he just gets excited when they play divisional rivals and it doesn’t break his heart if the season’s going poorly. He doesn’t plan on changing the mats (”I’m too cheap to put money in somebody else’s car.”).

The former Clovis High School assistant principal and superintendent of Bovina Schools was brought aboard in May to focus on youth activities.

The first stop on his short drive is his golden ring, the project he’d do if money weren’t an object. It’s the unused building on Seventh and Sycamore streets marked, “YRB.”

It was called the Youth Recreation Building, Bizzell said, and he’d like to return it to the facility it used to be.

Decades ago, he said, the building offered board games and art classes on the inside and athletic events like kickball in the adjacent field. Youth groups could also rent the facility cheaply for dances or fundraisers, and both the city and the organizer could make money.

“It’s our desire to establish some funding — nothing happens without a price tag — to either demolish the building (and replace it) or refurbish it,” said Bizzell, who noted a tour Thursday with city officials revealed needs for roofing and air conditioning repairs at the very least.

Between rings of the cell phone, his next stop is the aquatic center, where construction is still going on. There are three phases to the center’s upgrade, with the first phase a multipurpose building that will take on many functions — office space, aerobics rooms, locker rooms — while other phases are implemented. The office space will replace the current office, a trailer in the parking lot.

“That’s got to go,” Bizzell said. “It looks pretty cheesy to me, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to survive while construction’s going on.”

The trip just got longer — both calls are for an emergency at Guy Leeder Softball Complex.

“A typical day is dealing with problems,” Bizzell said. “The pump is out on our softball field, and we’ve got a big tournament this weekend.”

He arrives to find Neil Lambert and Kyle Snider looking over the controls. Snider has the equipment to fix it, which is a relief because the heat amplifies the need for working irrigation.

“This is typical,” said Lambert, the parks superintendent. “Yesterday, we had a 4-inch line blow up. Today, we had a 1-inch pipe blow up.”

There are plenty of ongoing or planned projects — replacing netting at the golf course driving range to prevent badly-sliced shots from landing along the walking paths of the city zoo; rebuilding the Pee-Wee football league after the west Texas contingent broke off to establish its own league; and work on creating a walking trail at Goodwin Lake.

Throughout his time in the office, he promotes the city’s facilities. He says he’s heard great things about the Frisbee golf course at Ned Houk Park, and he considers the golf course to be one of the area’s finer public courses.

But he doesn’t have a favorite place.

“I want every park in every part of the town,” Bizzell said, “to be as much of a good environment as it can be.”

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I was out in the park earlier with Sparky, Kota and their new KONG frisbee. I bought it last week to replace the hard plastic one that Sparky didn’t like catching and I was no good at throwing.

We like the KONG frisbee. It’s soft enough for Spaky to catch and carry and light enough for me to throw and flexible enough that I can fold it up and put it into m bag when we’re not playing.

Anyhow, we were playing frisbee. And Sparky got a little hot and so, as he ofte does, he ran off into the river to have a drink.

And, as he often does, he came back out again toy-less.

And so I sent him back down the muddy slope into the river with a “go fetch your frisbee!” Sparky ran off all excited and came back up 2 minutes later. Still toy-less. And so I sent him back down again. “Go get your frisbee Sparks! Bring it here!”

Sparky went charging into the river all excitedly and came back out again. Frisbee-less.

And so I clambered through the fence that seperates the park from the river. And slipped down the muddy, weedy slope to the edge of the river. And, hanging pecariously over the edge, proceeded to look for the frisbee. After a few minutes I spotted it.

At the bottom of the deepest part of the river.

Sparky obviously knew it was there, he kept walking over to it and then back to me and looking at me pleadingly. He coud see his frisbee and he wanted it. He just wasn’t going to put his head under the water to get it!

And so what could I do? That’s right, I took off my bag and my coat and my shoes and my socks and placed them on the wet, muddy, slippery bank. I rolled up my trousers (I really need to shave my legs…) and stepped through the soo into the freezing cold water. I rolled up my sleeve and plunged my arm elbow deep into said freezing cold water.

All to retrieve my dogs’ frisbee.

A message to KONG: Next time, make frisbees that float!

frisbees dogs, fence

I was supposed to write about something else today, but HS couldn’t stop pestering me about his jump shot (last pic in this post), so I’ve decided to pacify him with some pics of our Trinity Methodist Church Youth Ministry day out in Tavistock Park @ Serangoon Gardens. We took a ton of pics (you should see most of them in FB), but I’ve chosen my favourite few to include in this short blog post.

The crazy faced Christabel and the IPhone addicts (can’t help but think I look super fat there).

The sisters who can’t stand still – Jill and Terri!

Hern Shung (HS) always ready to steal the limelight from Gillian, Dionne and Christabel.

Practising my product shots…

Playing Monkey Frisbee.

Mingqhee, Jill and Clara

And lastly the JUMP SHOT where Christabel and Dennis barely left the ground! hehe.

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On another note, despite having Monday Blues since last night, I was happy to complete my 10th batch of Personalized Name Accessories

frisbees gillian, hern, iphone

Gabrielle Zevin’s timely new novel is full of holes, beginning with its title, “The Hole We’re In.” The holes start small — in stockings, a nightgown, the backyard — but as they keep appearing, they grow deeper and harder to ignore. So does the metaphor. During the bubble years, encouraged by cheap credit and instant gratification, we got used to living beyond our means, ignoring the consequences. “The Hole We’re In” criticizes our rabid consumer culture, as well as the people who’ve bought into it without examining the actual or hidden costs.

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283 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14

Roger Pomeroy is one such person. At the start of the novel, in the early 1990s, the 43-year-old father of three leaves his position as assistant principal of a Christian high school to get a Ph.D. in education. This fundamentalist family guy is not your typical grad student (well, aside from his dueling egocentrism and insecurity). Latching on to his adviser’s remark that “there just might be a book in” his dissertation on religious schooling, he fantasizes about his future best seller and has no qualms about cashing in his retirement or maxing out on student loans and credit cards. Confident that his Ph.D. will one day increase his earnings and allow his wife, George, to stay home, he asks her to work longer hours in the meantime to cover their expenses, which dwarf their earnings.

The Pomeroys have a bad case of consumeritis. They confuse wants with needs, putting things they can’t afford on credit — like furniture for a new house too big to fill — and stuffing the bills in a drawer. Their eldest daughter, Helen, is worse. On her first day of college, she signed up for a credit card because it came with “a free glow-in-the-dark Frisbee.” Now in her mid-20s, she’s already $19,000 in debt, a citizen of the mall. Like an addict, she gets no pleasure from her habit, and like her mother, she keeps her debt secret. In this novel, the children are doomed to mimic their parents’ mistakes, no matter how hard they try to be different.

While the subject is grim, Zevin’s writing is often surprisingly, if darkly, funny, thanks to her wry and astute cultural observations. George temps for an insurance company but can’t afford insurance. “She harbored particular envy for rich people who could afford mental hospitals — how relaxing that sounded!” Her sole mindless task is to rubber-stamp “extraordinary” claims (like that of an elderly woman requesting home health care visits) with the word “no.” Paradoxically, this is the one word she can’t say to Helen, as her daughter’s backyard wedding turns increasingly baroque. A conventional bride (and brat), Helen expects her parents to pay for everything, from the engraved vellum invitations to a swan pond, ordering her mother to “hire a couple of Mexicans to dig a hole.” Helen is so odious that the fun is in hating her.

Zevin is a concept-driven writer. In her previous novel, the whimsical “Margarettown,” a man falls for a woman who has splintered into versions of herself at different ages, showing how hard it is to sustain love when identities are constantly changing. The idea behind “The Hole We’re In” is that an absence of thought is what leads people to behave so stupidly, so zombielike. Roger, George and Helen Pomeroy consume to the point of numbness. Their bad decisions hardly qualify as decisions, since they don’t make them consciously. When George receives a credit card application in the mail, in her son’s name, she unthinkingly fills it out for him and doesn’t intend to use the card — until her own is denied. Her lack of reflection enables her to defraud her son without remorse. The problem is, it’s hard to care about zombies. Eventually, you just want them brought down.

But in this novel, as in life, bad deeds often go unpunished. It’s Patsy, the youngest Pomeroy, who pays the most for her parents’ mistakes. We meet her as she topples from her high school cheer­leading pyramid into the arms of Harland, an African-­American football player who will become her boyfriend, to her racist father’s distaste. This sets up her subsequent fall. After Patsy’s mother scapegoats her for an indiscretion that turns up on a credit card statement, her father ships her off to live with her cruel religious grandmother. Patsy applies to college, only to learn that her credit is ruined — again, not her fault — so she’s ineligible for loans. In her quest to break from her family, she makes a familiar choice. She enlists in the Reserves, seduced by the Army’s pitch: “You’ll get in awesome shape, one weekend a month and maybe a couple of weeks a year unless there’s a war, and darlin’, we’re living in a period of unprecedented peace, don’t you know?” In this world, nothing good is free.

Cut to Part 2, which opens in 2006. The bubble has burst, and Patsy is coming home from Iraq: minus a toe, but with a pregnancy she’s going to have to terminate or explain to Magnum, her lummox of a civilian husband. Patsy is flawed like the rest of her family, but she also has complex thoughts and tries to live without hypocrisy. She might have been able to persuade her husband that the child was his, but she can’t bring herself to deceive him. Her experiences in Iraq have left her scarred and jittery, but she has too much bravado to wallow in self-pity. Zevin breathes real life into this tough-girl vet, a heroine for our times, recognizable from life but new to fiction. When Patsy visits an old war buddy in the hospital and discloses the paternity of her child, she accidentally does so to the friend’s roommate; the two men are so disfigured that she can’t tell them apart. Realizing her error, Patty comforts herself with the fact that the stranger in whom she confided is “mute and, thus, unlikely to tell tales.” Against the odds, Zevin finds humor in the horror.

Patsy is tiny and foul-mouthed, brave and bighearted, by far the most vivid character in the novel. In fact, the sharper she comes into focus, the more villainous the others seem. It’s disconcerting to sympathize with one character to the exclusion of all others. As Patsy is victimized (and her parents get away with it), what was earlier a biting social satire becomes more like a morality play, with too clear a line between good and evil. I would have liked to see more scenes between Patsy and her parents in which they had to recognize one another as simply human.

It’s frustratingly believable that Roger and George Pomeroy never really atone for their misdeeds. They just grow old and fat, eventually lowered into the hole that claims us all. They don’t change or develop or have to reckon with their children. The characters evade dramatic confrontations. When George finally confesses to her husband that she never shared his faith, she does so while he’s snoring. Not that it matters, since he clearly doesn’t love her deeply or care who she is at core. In a flash forward at the end, we see a stark contrast between Patsy’s lack of connection to her parents and the real closeness she shares with her own daughter, who is able to confide in her even when she gets into serious trouble. Patsy is not a perfect mother, but she’s a lot better than the sad sack who raised her. She may have had to spend her life clawing out of that hole, but apparently it built her character.

Malena Watrouss first novel, If You Follow Me, has just been published.

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