'they Are My Life And My Wife'

The crowd in New Hampshire's Keene State College gymnasium is tugging off heavy winter coats in the overfilled stands; the room is heating up, wafting the indelicate aroma of old wrestling mats up to the damp flag hanging from the open beams. As even more spectators squeeze through the doors, a young man in a gold-and-silver dinner jacket is running around keeping 20 or so Melmac dinner plates spinning on long poles. He is not getting much encouragement, for most of the crowd is busy pretending he is not there, having come to see the Harlem Globetrotters, not The Ed Sullivan Show.

Eventually the plate balancer picks up his dinnerware to scattered applause, and the strains of post-modern jazz come through the faltering P.A. system, which has all the audio quality of Radio Hamburg circa 1942. The crowd is impatient enough to start whistling Sweet Georgia Brown. But during this 48th tour of the Globetrotters, there is one more brand-new act to precede Curly and Meadowlark Lemon and the rest. It is not the jugglers, nor another plate balancer nor the ever-popular Ping-Pong players, however. It is, well, it is... Frisbee . And here it comes.

Within a minute collective displeasure has turned into the standard reaction the Frisbee act has drawn from crowds: one great big oooh from 3,000 people. Out on the floor are two young men looking like college kids who have suited up for a basketball scrimmage only to find the gym is being used. In their scruffy intramural outfits of basketball socks, dirty sneakers, shorts obviously copped from another locker room and T shirts bearing the legend WORLD FRISBEE CHAMPIONSHIP—ROSE BOWL, PASADENA, 1974, they begin by simply tossing the Frisbee back and forth. World Championship Frisbee? All things are possible in the electronic age, but the crowd can hardly believe this. On the whole a well-kept, shoeshined, double-knitted assemblage, with a sprinkling of VFW overseas caps, they sit transfixed, watching one tall, blond ponytailed youth throw a 9�" plastic disk to another young man who has shoulder-length black hair and resembles a Godfather extra.

John Kirkland, 28, and Victor Malafronte, 28, are currently the world's best Frisbee players. Malafronte is world-class champion, having won that distinction in the Rose Bowl, as his T shirt proclaims, last August, where more than 100 contestants flipped and lofted Frisbees in four main events for the title. Frisbee meets include displays of accuracy, variety and throwing for distance. (Kirkland had won the distance event at Pasadena and in July had set a world record with a toss of 112 yards.)

Now as they cavort on the court they have conferred another first on the Frisbee. The game of backyards and picnics, of fraternity lawns and seashore boredom has turned pro. In Keene, N.H., an ail-American city, an all-American pastime is getting a paycheck. The Frisbee is doing impossible things. Malafronte throws it so that it floats over Kirkland's face. Kirkland blows on it, bounces it in the air with his fingers, leaps, does handsprings, catches it behind his back, whirls and throws it back—all in one fluid, almost Oriental motion. Frisbees walk on edge across the polished floor in elaborate question mark patterns, arriving exactly at the shoe tips of the other player, to be booted into the air and caught between the legs. Several Frisbees, thrown together like nested clay pigeons, go spraying out; huge arcing Frisbees whip over the seats, sail between the beams, dance by the huge exhaust fans in the ceiling.

Malafronte operates in a smiling, glazed trance and Kirkland looks as if he is pondering the summation of a Ph.D. thesis. As they twist and twirl, making spectacular throws and even more spectacular catches, one wonders what in the name of Abner Doubleday is happening in sport. And this is obviously a sport; athletic ability is involved; physical sophistication is at the heart of it. There is perhaps a deeper social import than at first appears likely in the tossing around of a Day-Glo orange disk. And sure enough, the history of Frisbee is as moonstruck as the sport itself.

Frisbee folklorists swear, although not under oath, that the saga begins in 1827, when a Yale undergraduate named Elihu Frisbee scaled a silver collection plate 200 feet in protest against compulsory chapel. Back in the 1870s drivers of The Frisbie Pie Co. in Bridgeport, Conn. whiled away the noontime by flinging tin pie plates back and forth. (A Frisbie Pie Co. was in existence in Bridgeport well after World War II.) In any case, Yale picked up the pastime, and Harvard—never far behind in crazes—soon was afflicted. Pie-plate throwing spread to Purdue and Notre Dame, and there is an unsupported rumor that when tin gave way to unsatisfactory cardboard as pie-plate material, collection plates were once again pressed into service.

Surely crews on Hollywood back lots tossed film can lids, and at least one Californian did well financially by inventing and hawking a plastic disk. "Fred Morrison became the world's richest building inspector in 1956," recalls Ed Headrick, who is executive vice-president of Wham-O Mfg. Co., the largest maker of flying disks, and holder of the copyright on the name Frisbee. "We bought out his patent on the disk and the injection-molding machine he made them on. It was a $1 million deal.

"Fred used to make them and sell them at the beach on weekends up at Pomona. He was so accurate that he pretended the Frisbees were attached to an 'invisible wire' held by his wife. He sold as many 'invisible wires' as platters," says Headrick. Later, when his bank balance was revealed, Morrison was brought into an L.A. court investigating corruption in public office. "We had to take in our books and bail him out," says Headrick.

Frisbee turned out to be one of those names that stick to a product, like Kleenex or Xerox. Although some 30 companies have manufactured plastic flying disks, none has rivaled the grand proportions of Wham-O's 60 million Frisbees in the past 18 years.