A Piece Of The Wrist Action By Simon de Burton
Published In The Financial Times, UK Weekend Supplement Magazine
August 5 2000

Until recently, the best place to spot something Gucci flying through the air was probably at a Mayfair cocktail party -milliseconds before the handbag of a bright young thing connected with the chiselled jaw of an over-amorous admirer. But now G-force has taken on a whole new meaning with the introduction of the Gucci flying disc, an eight-inch diameter round of semi-flaccid rubber that smells like Play-Doh. This piece of flying fun has literally taken off, leaving Gucci's Bond Street store with a waiting list that grows longer by the day.
The popularity of the Gucci disc bears testament to the fact that the fun-filled summers of the 1970s, when Frisbees in the park were as common as ice cream cornets and bowling shoes, are enjoying something of a revival. The difference now is that flying discs are no longer the exclusive domain of bearded college students wearing faded jeans and skinny-rib T-shirts:
Frisbee throwing has developed into a range of serious sports, from a team game called Ultimate to the unlikely-sounding disc golf, with distance, accuracy, discathon and freestyle Frisbee falling in between. And in spite of the relative cheapness of the sport (top-flight equipment rarely reaches into the realms of double figures), it is high-earning lawyers, stockbrokers, bankers and IT professionals who make up the core of serious players.

Charlie Mead, a child psychologist and former Keele University rugby player, has been addicted to disc sports for more than 20 years. He is chair of the World Flying Disc Federation and established the first Ultimate world championships in 1986 when just six teams took part; this year there were more than 100, with competitors from as far afield as the US, Japan and the MiddleEast. "It has become a sport played predominantly by professional people who dabbled in it while at university," says Mead. "After graduating, they have invariably progressed up the career ladder into influential, powerful jobs before returning to disc sports much more seriously in their free time. The sport very much reflects the lifestyles of the people who play it. It is all about taking part at the highest level - competitiveness and camaraderie are of the utmost importance."

The team game of Ultimate is currently enjoyed by around 700 "serious" players in the UK - a number predicted to grow to 5,000 within the next five years. It is played on a pitch measuring 120 yards by 40 yards. Teams are made up of seven players, and the aim of the game is to score goals, American-football style, by passing the disc to a player standing or running inside the opposition's "end zone", one of the 25-yard areas at either end of the pitch. Once in possession of the disc, a player is not allowed to run with it; it has to be worked up the pitch towards the end zone through a series of tactical passes. If it touches the ground or is intercepted, possession passes to the opposition. A key Ultimate phrase is "spirit of the game", which refers to the sport's basic code of conduct. Even at world championship level, referees or linesmen are not needed - the responsibility for fair play rests on the shoulders of the competitors. A whole new language has evolved among the game's aficionados, with words such as "force", "hammer", "poach" and "stall" being used to describe the various moves, throws and tactics which Ultimate demands.

For Derek Robins, a finance officer, disc golf is his disc sport of choice. For 10 years he harboured an ambition to own his own 18-hole course - and now, after spending £26,000 on 15 acres of land,£10,000 landscaping it and £2,000 installing equipment, his dream has come true. Robins, chairman of the British Disc Golf Association, charges just £3 for a round at his picturesque course beside the River Avon near Leamington Spa. The rules are similar to ordinary golf, the obvious difference being the use of flying discs instead of balls and clubs. Players walk the course with a range of five or more special discs which have bevelled edges and are made of denser material than an Ultimate disc, thus allowing them to fly further. When a player reaches the spot where his or her last throw has landed, a disc is chosen which is the most appropriate one for the next throw - in much the same way that a golfer might use a driver from the tee and a pitching wedge near the green - with the aim of "holing out" the disc into a chain basket in the minimum number of throws. As yet, there are only about a dozen courses in Britain, but disc golf is becoming big business in North America, where professional players are walking away with serious prize money and a whole industry is developing around the sport. This year's world disc golf championships are currently taking place in Ann Arbour, Michigan and the game has been accredited as an official event of the World Games in Akita, Japan, next year.

It's all a far cry from the early days of the Frisbee in the 1870s, when William Russell Frisbie set up the Frisbie Pie Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Legend has it that Frisbie pies and cookies were bought in tins by Yale college students who took to tossing the containers around the campus, shouting out the warning word "Frisbie" to the intended recipient. However, it was not until after the second world war that inventor Walter Frederick Morrison decided to perfect the flying qualities of a pie tin and turn it into a marketable product, just in time to coincide with a surge in flying saucer sightings. Morrison experimented with plastic as the medium for his invention and by 1951 produced his first fully airworthy model. The rights to the Morrison "Pluto Platter", as it was known, were subsequently bought by Rich Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin, whose Wham-O company put them into production as "fling saucers" in 1957.Initially the discs sold slowly, but during a marketing trip to the campuses of the Ivy League, Knerr heard about the early days of" Frisbie-ing". Knerr adopted the name, erroneously spelling it phonetically as "Frisbee", now a registered trademark of the Mattel toy company. An estimated 100m flying discs have now been sold throughout the world, and today, as the Frisbee revival continues, the sport counts among its disciplines distance throwing events, strictly choreographed Frisbee contests, music-based freestyle, and the four-competitor, cross-country discathon. But if all this sounds a little too energetic and you are more than happy to simply chuck a Frisbee in the park for your faithful mutt, a visit to Gucci could well be in order. Ask for the Gucci Dog – it has a rubber bone attached to the top - but at £35 each, it might be wise to have your hound's teeth removed first.