The Parking Lot Frisbee Game That Started in 1968 Is Still Going Strong

New York Times

15-02-2025

On hallowed ground in Maplewood, N.J., a small group of impassioned athletes braved the January cold to fling a disc. Some had gray hair beneath wool caps. Some were in street clothes. One wore shorts and a beard to rival Father Time's.
They can be found there most Thursday nights, even in the bleakest midwinter, their sneakers slapping out a staccato beat that echoes the invention of their sport, almost 60 years ago, on the same spot: the parking lot of Columbia High School.
As the players warmed up, a group of high school students wandered by. They noted the camera flash from a news photographer and, as they surveyed the curious scene, wondered what was up.
'Oh,' one of them said, with a teenager's almost audible eye roll. 'The stupid Frisbee rock.'
In a corner of that nondescript parking lot sits a stone the size of a backyard grill, with a small plaque commemorating the birthplace of Ultimate Frisbee in 1968, and the three students credited with inventing it.
The teenagers did not know it, but two of the guys in the game that night have a direct connection to the players mentioned on the plaque, the founders of Ultimate Frisbee as we know it. Joe Barbanel, 70, and his good friend Ed Summers, 71, both grandfathers, have been playing the sport in this parking lot for more than half a century.
But history is not what compels these Frisbee folks.
'Like Peter Pan, I don't have to grow up,' said Mr. Barbanel, who has matured enough to be a part owner of a chemical manufacturing company in Short Hills, N.J. 'I did it with my friends way back then, and I'm doing it with my friends now.'
Mr. Barbanel and Mr. Summers do not claim to have been present at the actual founding of Ultimate, which is essentially football with a Frisbee and no tackling. Credit for that generally goes to three older chaps in the Columbia High School class of 1970: Joel Silver, who later became a Hollywood film producer; Jonny Hines; and Bernard Hellring Jr., known as Buzzy, who died in a car crash in 1971.
But it's unlikely that anyone has played more Frisbee in this parking lot than Mr. Barbanel and Mr. Summers (class of '72). They were the younger disciples who helped spread the game far beyond its initial home turf of Maplewood, and they still play most weeks.
'We definitely had a religious fervor about it back then,' said Mr. Summers, a retired AT&T project manager and board member of the online Ultimate Hall of Fame. 'And still do,' he added. 'I love the arc of the disc. I love catching, throwing and making a quick cut to evade a defender.'
Flying disc toys are said to have been around since the 1930s, and campground games have been played up and down the East Coast since the 1940s, according to Tony Leonardo, the author of 'Ultimate: The Greatest Sport Ever Invented by Man.' Mr. Leonardo, who founded the Notre Dame team in 1991 (Ultimate is generally a club sport at colleges, though it is taken very seriously), is also making a documentary about the Maplewood parking lot, which he said is underrecognized, even by many of the estimated seven million Ultimate players around the world.
'The fact that our entire sport can be traced to this crummy rock with this small plaque at a parking lot is a little bit of an insult,' he said. 'It's insufficient.'
According to the legend, Mr. Silver went to a summer camp in Massachusetts in 1968 and learned a similar game from a counselor who played it at Amherst College. Mr. Silver brought it back to Columbia High School, tweaked it and, according to Mr. Leonardo, pushed it on the student council, almost as a gag or a fun form of cheeky performance art. The first game was played between the student council and the student newspaper staff.
'He did a lot of it as a shtick,' Mr. Leonardo said.
The parking lot became the early arena because of its lights, but otherwise, the sport is a field game. Winter pickup games in Maplewood are still played in the lot for the same reason as many decades ago — it is well lit.
One of the players in last month's game was Michael Brenner, a Maplewood native who went on to win consecutive national Ultimate championships for the University of Pittsburgh in 2012 and 2013. Later, he had offers to play in a professional league with referees. But he prefers the traditional game, where disputed calls are hashed out by players, overseen by 'observers.'
One of the key moments in the initial branding of Ultimate Frisbee was when the trio of founders recorded all the rules in a booklet, printed in 1970. In addition to establishing the run of play — a foul may be a physical action 'sufficient to arouse the ire' of an opponent — the first rule book also included a section on referees, with the key words 'honor system,' thereby codifying the essential spirit of sportsmanship and honesty.
Ultimate largely rejects commercialism, and though it embraces competition and athleticism, an encouraging word to an opponent is far more common than ill-tempered invective. But it's no hippie sport.
'We are engineers, intellectuals, with athletes mixed in,' Mr. Leonardo, the Ultimate historian, said. 'A little alternative, liberal, freethinking, very smart-alecky. Collegiate.'
So, instead of doing it for money, Mr. Brenner plays pickup in street clothes on winter nights in a parking lot in suburban New Jersey.
'There is something pure about it,' he said. 'It's the coolest thing in the world to still play here.'
If Ultimate was a shtick for the inventors, for Mr. Barbanel, Mr. Summers and their cohort it was sport, and maybe a way of life. They contacted other local high school students, told them about the game and handed out rule books. They even started a league — the New Jersey Frisbee Conference — and made a pact to start teams at their future colleges.
'It was always practice, practice, practice,' Mr. Summers said. 'And now, 50 years later, I'm still practicing.'
Sometimes in the winter it can be hard to find enough players, and once or twice Mr. Barbanel was left alone to run laps and do solo throwing drills in the cold. But during the pickup game last month, there were enough for a spirited three-on-three. The roster also included Mr. Summers; Andrew Warner, 40, another Columbia alumnus, who plays in shorts regardless of the temperature; Joe Crobak, who played at Lafayette College; and Mark Dowd, a marketing executive.
They played for about two hours, pausing several times to hunt for a stick long enough to retrieve the disc from the east branch of the frigid Rahway River after an errant throw. The players also stopped to wave in unison at the New Jersey Transit trains that passed by every quarter-hour or so. They have been doing that without fail since the first games in the parking lot decades ago.
'Sometimes the conductors blow the horn,' Mr. Warner said.
As the players tossed precision hammer throws, made deft cuts and always complimented an opponent on a good play, Steve Campione, an executive for an agricultural firm, walked his dog across the street. He said he had seen the game most Thursday nights lately, even the week before, when it was 20 degrees.
Asked if it seemed a bit crazy to brave freezing temperatures to play Frisbee at night, Mr. Campione, who has adult children, said no, assuming the players were students. He was then informed that they were all at least 30 and there were two grandfathers in the game.
'Oh, now, that's a little crazy,' he said with a laugh. Then he reconsidered. 'Once you fall in love with a sport, you want to keep playing. They're still out there having fun.'