It was late February a couple of years back and we had just gotten hit with two feet of snow. I was driving up Barnes Road toward the airport when I noticed about a dozen cars parked off to the right where there was supposedly something called a Frisbee golf course. I had never actually been in there but had been meaning to check it out, and now my curiosity was really piqued. Who were these people who would trudge through snow in the middle of the winter to toss a Frisbee, when most folks were having a hard time just getting out of their driveway? And what kind of game was this, anyway?

Actually, I’ve always had a thing for offbeat sports; I once invented a game myself called crocce. It was half croquet and half bocce. Extreme croquet would be another way to look at it. The idea was that you had an object ball, just like in bocce, which you tossed someplace, and then you took turns using croquet mallets to hit croquet balls into the object ball; the first one to hit it won the hole. At first the game was rather civilized and we kept it confined to the lawn around our house, but as time went on we became more and more adventuresome. We’d throw the object ball into the bushes, into the woods, into a stream, into a culvert ­– at one point it ended up on the roof of our neighbor’s house. We even had our own terminology for crocce. The object ball was called the JoJo, and when you “sent” your opponent’s ball, like in croquet, it was called Shagging the Jo. We were quite passionate about crocce, but would we have gone out to play in two feet of snow in the dead of winter? I think not.

So I decided to do a little research on the subject. There are several legends about the invention of the Frisbee. A commonly accepted story has Yale students flinging pie tins from the Frisbie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, across the green, and Wham-O adapting the shape and changing the name a bit and applying it to a flying disc they had begun selling. More than 200 million Frisbees have been sold since 1957.

A man named “Steady” Ed Headrick is considered the father of the sport known today as disc golf. (One of Ed’s mottos was, “Take the rest of the day off,” and his love for the flight of the Frisbee was such that when he died in 2002, at the age of seventy-eight, his family and the Disc Golf Association honored his wishes by incorporating his ashes into the molds of commemorative discs.) Like most recreational players, Ed would throw the Frisbee around in the park with his friends. They’d toss it to each other or aim at trees, fire hydrants, or even the open windows of cars. Then one day in the late ’70s, Ed had an epiphany. He invented what’s known as the “elevated steel chain link basket target” – the equivalent of the hole in regular golf. Disc golf began to grow, but then in 1983, still another invention put it on the map.

The problem with traditional Frisbees was always that they weren’t all that stable, and they didn’t perform well in the wind. Then along came Dave Dunipace, Tim Selinske, and Harold and Charlie Duvall – The Four Diskateers – who designed a series of bevel-edged, wind-sheering discs that brought a whole new level of performance to the game, and its popularity took off.

Today there are thousands of disc golf courses all over the world. The West Coast and Hawaii are into the sport big time, and there are close to fifty courses right here in New England. And one of them is in the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest on Martha’s Vineyard.

Who knew.

So one night I’m talking to a friend of ours, Diane London of Oak Bluffs, at a fund-raiser for the hospital at the Farm Neck Golf Club. The conversation turned to golf, and I brought up the subject of disc golf and how I was really curious to try it out. “Well, then, you should give Steve a call,” she said. It turns out her husband Steve is a disc golf fanatic.

Who knew.

Steve picked up disc golf a few years ago when he was living in Maui. Until then, he was an avid golfer, but as an anesthesiologist, he found himself less and less able to spare the four or five hours it takes to get in eighteen holes, so he decided to give disc golf a try. You can complete a round of disc golf in about an hour and a half.

I called Steve and we arranged to meet at the course in the state forest, which I learned is actually called the Riverhead Field Disc Course, in honor of a river that ran through it as the glaciers retreated. Steve showed up wearing his “Flying Hawaiian Open” T-shirt and gave me a quick rundown on the game.
In theory, disc golf is just like regular golf – or “ball golf,” as disc golfers refer to it. The course has eighteen holes, and each hole is a par three. Just as in ball golf, you start from a tee, a marker from which you throw. There’s a set of white intermediate tees, a set of blue expert tees, and a set of family tees that are good for beginners.

Each player carries a bag of discs; the really good players use about a dozen, but you can get by with as few as two. There are flat driving discs designed to slice through the air. There are approach discs that generally have a more rounded edge. And there are putters, which have a very round edge, sometimes even cut at right angles to the plane of the disc, and a thick lip.

Each hole consists of a tee area, a fairway, and an elevated target, or basket. As you progress down the fairway, you throw each consecutive shot from the exact place where the previous shot landed, until you finally get it in the basket.

What makes the game particularly interesting is the enormous variety of shots you can use. Depending on the wind, the given approach, or just your personal preference, you can throw sidearm, overhand, backhand, underhand – whatever works, dude. And every shot has a name: The overhand is a tomahawk or a hammer, there’s the UD (upside down), the thumber, the roller, the turbo-putt . . . it’s endless. Then there’s the whole business about aerodynamics.

If you’ve ever thrown a Frisbee, you know that it has a natural tendency to tail off in one direction or another. For instance, a right-hander’s backhand toss will naturally fade to the left, in the direction opposite its rotation. A left-hander’s backhand will fall to the right. When you intentionally force the disc to do this – to fly in the direction opposite to its rotation – it’s called a hyzer. When you force the disc to actually fall in the same direction of its spin, it’s called an anhyzer. (And if you can actually pull off an Anhyzer, I’ll buy you an Anheuser-Busch, because let me tell you, it ain’t easy.)

On that first day, mostly I tried to throw the conventional backhand (or odd job throw), but I was having trouble controlling the hyzer, so out of desperation I went to the overhand or two-fingered Tomahawk throw. To my astonishment, it actually worked. I launched that sucker and watched it do a couple of barrel rolls and ultimately fly straight up by the basket, a couple of hundred feet away. The more I worked on my tomahawk, the more proficient I became, and I must admit, I was starting to feel pretty good about myself. It wasn’t until later that Steve London told me that they often call the overhand the “old man’s throw” because it’s a lot easier on the shoulder. Evidently throwing that backhand across your body all day is a good way to mess up your rotator cuff. And for what it’s worth, I did notice that Dr. Rocco Monto, the orthopedic surgeon on the Island, has sponsored one of the baskets.

As we were finishing up, Steve said, “Come here, I want you to meet Seamus Scanlon: he’s the guy who started this whole course.” Seamus is an athletic-looking guy in his thirties with an easygoing manner who had a bounce in his step as he went about checking out a thousand and one details on the course.
Seamus is originally from Worcester, but when he was living in Breckenridge, Colorado, he was introduced to disc golf. Seamus moved to the Vineyard in 1994 and took over Harry’s Deli in Edgartown, where he now lives. In the summertime he barely had time to catch his breath, but he was looking for something to do to break up the monotony of the winter, so he and two friends, Erik Brown and John Tate, both of Edgartown, decided to take a shot at putting together a disc golf course.

They approached John Varkonda, superintendent of the state forest, a 5,100-acre woodland of pine, spruce, oak, and scrub spreading across the middle of the Island. Varkonda allowed them to set up the course off Barnes Road. That was in 1997, and Seamus and a lot of other volunteers have been working diligently to improve it ever since. The only real capital outlay has been for the purchase of baskets; they cost around $300 apiece. Some have been donated by Vineyard businesses, and the others have been paid for through fund-raisers. Today there are about thirty to forty regular players on the Vineyard, and there are leagues that play on Tuesday evenings and Sunday mornings. But the highlight of the year is the annual tournament, something called the Vineyard Social, drawing players from all over the country. “If you want to see some good disc golf,” advised Seamus, “you really want to check out the Social.”

This year the Social took place on a warm day in July. Traditionally it was always held much earlier in the year, and as Seamus pointed out in his welcoming remarks, this was the first year that there wasn’t snow on the ground.

I wasn’t actually going to play in the tournament – I was having hyzer problems – but I wanted to get out and watch some of the players do their stuff. I met Seamus at the registration desk and he said, “You’re going to have a lot of fun; you’re going out with a great foursome.”

The group was composed of two Kaeka brothers from West Tisbury, Daryl and Dwight, a.k.a. “Dewey”; Jen Foxlee of Vineyard Haven, one of only two women who competed in the tournament; and the legendary Jake Hankamer, who had come all the way from California.

Let’s start with the Kaekas. Daryl, Dewey, and their brother Danny are not only passionate disc players, they pretty much carved out the course by hand. Dewey runs a construction company, so he has access to landscaping equipment, and in their spare time the brothers can often be found clearing underbrush, mowing fairways, and creating holes. But aside from that, these are guys you just want to hang with.

It was hot and muggy the day of the tournament, and Daryl took off his shirt. He had an interesting assortment of tattoos and I asked him about the shark on his back. The Kaekas are half Hawaiian and half native Vineyarder; their mother was a Vincent. The shark tattoo actually traces its roots back to their Hawaiian ancestry; according to family mythology their great-grandfather was a shark god. Their amakua, or family motto, is mano, the Hawaiian word for shark, and the brothers wear the symbol proudly. In addition to the shark on Daryl’s back, both Daryl and Dewey have stylized tribal shark bands running up the side of one of their legs. As Dewey explained, “It keeps you from getting bitten when you’re surfing.”

Jen Foxlee was raised in Michigan and began playing disc golf on local courses when she was around seven years old. Jen is a hell of a player. While a lot of the guys she competes against are more flamboyant, Jen quietly gets the job done. She’s not flashy, but she’s good and she’s steady and she has great technique. Jen’s also got a slightly twisted side to her that I found endearing. I asked her if they had any trouble with geese on the course. Geese can be a nuisance on a golf course; they flock to the water holes and litter the fairways. “No,” replied Jen, “there aren’t any geese on the course, but we do have the occasional Vine Rat.”  I thought I’d heard of everything. “What are Vine Rats?” I asked. “Well,” she explained, “no one has ever seen one but you can occasionally hear them around the course, and judging by their screech, they sound like they’re half chicken and half rodent.

Who knew.

Jacob Hankamer has one leg and he can kick your ass at Hacky Sack. That’s what kind of an athlete he is; I saw it with my own eyes. We were out on the fourteenth hole and I happened to mention to Jake that I heard he was a good Hacky Sack player. He immediately reached into his disc bag, brought out a sack, and went to work: over-the-shoulder, under-the-crutch, behind-the-back – he was a whirling dervish. I couldn’t have come close to what he was doing if I had six legs.

Jake’s disc golf game was on the same level. I still have this vision of him driving a disc off the tee. Somehow he would get his body all torqued up, lunge forward, and use his crutch as a pivot to launch the disc into the next zip code. Jake can regularly drive a disc between 300 and 350 feet, which is sort of the way John Daly draws golf balls. Just a footnote: the world’s record for driving a disc is 820 feet, but that was done on a desert with a strong tailwind.
Throughout the round, each of the players amazed me with various highlight-reel shots: long laser drives that threaded their way through groves of trees where I could barely see an opening, thirty-foot putts shot from a prone position, great sweeping anhyzers that seemed to defy the laws of physics – but if there was one hole that defined the day for me, it was hole number three.

Like all the holes on the course, there were formidable obstacles between the tee and the basket. In this case it was a tight fairway framed with dense underbrush on either side and an enormous oak tree situated right in the middle, blocking the path to the basket.

Dewey was first up and launched a tomahawk that soared directly over the top of the tree, did a couple of loop-de-loops, and dropped into the middle of the fairway.

Jake, who’s left-handed, got up next and drove a backhand hyzer that arced way around to the left of the tree and landed far down the fairway in the right-hand rough.

Daryl took the opposite route and drove around the tree to the right, letting it fade out to the left-hand side of the fairway.

Finally, Jen stepped into her drive and fired it straight down the middle with surgical precision, going just under the branches of the oak and nearly kissing the trunk to a chorus of “Hoo-ah . . . Nice rip, girl!”

From there, Dewey, Daryl, and Jen all made good approach shots and went on to par the hole, but it was Jake who got my vote for shot of the day. Tucked over in the rough with no real clear path to the basket, Jake elected to go with the roller. He slammed it down on the ground, and damned if that disc didn’t motor all the way up the fairway, hang a left at the dogleg, and sit down about six feet from the hole.

Technically, at the end of the day, the tournament was won by Pete Johnson of Millis, Massachusetts, who turned in a pretty remarkable score of two over par for thirty-six holes. But if I were handing out the trophies I know that one would have to go to Jacob Hankamer. Steve London told me on the first day out, “You’ve got to meet Jake. He’s got the roller down pat.” What he didn’t tell me was that Jake had the ability to take an inert piece of plastic, infuse it with a brain, and command it to march overland in the face of daunting adversity.

Who knew.