Ever seen disc golf?

I want to know how the USDGA makes the courses impossible during the US Disc Golf Open.

 

Can you play with just a frisbee?

 

There is nothing comparable to golf's U.S. Open there. They pick very challenging courses, and they might add nasty pin placements or new tee boxes. There is nothing analogous to incredibly nasty rough, and dry/wet conditions only affect the player's footing. They do play through rain short of thunderstorms though.

 

Uh.. well, you could. You could play baseball with a whiffleball bat, too. Seriously, it would just frustrate you.

A golf disc is purpose built to fly a long way. Any decent player could stand on the goal line of a football field and put one across, or at least near, the other goal line. You'd probably take three or four throws to do it with a regular old frisbee. If you had an Ultimate disc and you were good you might make it in one. Maybe, probably not. When you're good with one, you can make it fly predictably, reasonably close to where you want it to go, subject to the same frustrations as regular golf.

Go back to that video on page one. Look at that drone view of #1, a 477' par three that he birdies and tell me how many throws it would take you to get there with a frisbee. That guy is playing 500'+ holes and getting down in two, maybe three. He's insanely good, but give him a beach frisbee and watch what happens. You need proper tools. The good news is that they're cheap, you can get started for twenty, twenty five bucks. If you get hooked you'll accumulate more discs, but that's overkill for a beginner.

If there's a course somewhere near you, go hang out and watch a while, you'll see.

 

• They put several in parks where I live during the previous decade. They go largely unused, but they were inexpensive to install.
• The Frolf disc is harder to throw than a regular Frisbee until you get the hang of it.
• We played all the time in college on just made-up courses. You just assign something to be the target. Much pot smoking was involved.
• I played a handful of times around here about 10+ years ago. I got one funny anecdote out of it, so that makes it worth it in my book, but overall just didn't interest me.

 

There really needs to be a disc golf movie. The rumble in the bar with the snobby Ultimate team. The selfish guy that learns what being on a "team" means after suffering a finger injury. The gritty underdogs from a community college taking on the elite Ivy league school for the championship. The million to 1 shot that bangs the chains, wins the title and get the hero the girl.

 

No way in hell I could have played Ultimate. Those guys have to be incredibly fit, much like soccer players. Great game, though.

 

Wow. There's a course 5 minutes from my house in a park I drive past all the time. Never knew it was there. There are a ton of parks in my city so it is easy to overlook them.

 

Hmmmmm... That’s gold, Jerry. Gold!

 

Testing participants for THC?

 

I was never very good at Frisbee. And I'm old enough to remember when they first came around and were known as Pluto Platters.

 

That was in 1957. Damn. I thought *I* was old.