FRIZZY FRISBEE FELLAS
“It was the era of—I mean, let’s be candid—you smoked pot on the way to the game and people were just having great fun.” That’s how Ron Kaufman ’78 remembers what it was like to play on the shaggy-haired Brown Ultimate Frisbee team in its earliest years in the late seventies. The photo here is of the team in October 1979, taken at a game at Harvard. And yes, it’s all guys—the Brown team, briefly coed at its start, somehow became all-male, with the women’s team, Disco Inferno, not starting for several more years. Kaufman says he was recruited for the fledgling Brown team as an Olney House freshman, at a time when the game, which had been invented at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, in the late sixties, was only just gaining traction at colleges like UConn, Tufts, and Yale that the Maplewood kids had gone on to. (The second high school to take it up, claims Kaufman, was his own, in Westport, Connecticut.) “It’s like soccer, but you can’t run with the Frisbee—you have to throw it,” he says of the game. Kaufman isn’t in this photo—he had already graduated. But faces in it are still familiar to him. “It makes me remember the wildness of being out on the road as a team,” he says. “We felt like we were launching history.”—TIM MURPHY ’91
Click here to read about Brown Ultimate’s 50-year anniversary bash last fall.
PHOTO: COLLECTION OF ROB SEIDENBERG ’82/BROWN UNIVERSITY FRISBEE TEAM
