What’s a P-Funk?
Elysée Barakett
February 10, 2023
Sometime during the first days of classes in 2021, I met a girl named Nora who could make entire facial expressions with just her eyes. She was good enough at Introductory Level Chemistry to help me when I was stuck, but not too good to avoid Thursday Night Optional Problem Solving Sessions—we went together every week. She always layered her shirts: a tank top over a white tee shirt or a gray graphic tee shirt over a black turtleneck. Sometime during the second set of exams, I stopped seeing Nora as much. She tried out for Ultimate Frisbee and made the team she wanted. She stopped coming to Thursday Night Optional Problem Solving Sessions and started wearing her brown hair in pigtails. Whenever I saw her later in the semester, she’d be wearing a polyester long sleeve and white sports glasses with ear grips and reflective lenses. The world of Ultimate Frisbee had slowly consumed her, and I had lost a friend in the process. How could someone completely disappear—into the World of Frisbee? Was Nora even on campus still? Maybe she was somewhere else—floating through space on a massive purple frisbee and talking only to frisbee-shaped aliens. I decided to explore what draws people so far into Ultimate Frisbee that they are never seen again. To do this, I had to ask the people on the other side. I thought of the frisbee players I knew and reached out to all four of them: Henry ’25, Daniel ’24, Aaron ’25, and Bella ’25, who have all been a part of the frisbee program since their first year at Brown. I spoke to Henry inside the lobby of the Nelson Fitness Center before his Sunday afternoon practice. Henry wore a flat black cap with a logo of a distorted frisbee and a purple athletic shirt with a cartoon of a frisbee slicing through a mushroom. Henry explained that wearing merchandise from past tournaments or old teams gives you clout. He explained that someone who amassed a lot of merch over the years was called a “FCG,” which stands for “Frisbee Cool Guy.” A FCG is basically a “frisbee sweat.” From his appearance and description of a FCG, I believe that Henry is your textbook Frisbee Cool Guy.Henry was first drawn to frisbee at the Club Fair. The frisbee team placed a frisbee on top of a high pole and challenged kids to leap up and grab it. It was a fun challenge to test people’s jumping abilities and draw them in—if they could retrieve the frisbee off a pole, maybe they would be exceptional at Ultimate. Henry, who is from Nebraska where the sport is more or less “nonexistent,” accepted the challenge. Standing at 6’4”, he easily retrieved the frisbee with a graceful leap. He has been hooked on Ultimate ever since.I met up with Daniel and Aaron at Jo’s. Although Jo’s is known for its cheeseburgers and spicy chicken sandwiches, Daniel and Aaron are vegans. Both opted for salads with every topping available, and a hot cup of classic minestrone soup on the side. Daniel likes to wear athletic shorts to practice, and he brings both a light and dark shirt to change into for team scrimmages. He also always sports his navy Brooks brand visor when he plays. The Brooks logo, once white and reflective, is a bit yellowed and peeling off. From Middletown Springs, Vermont, Daniel played frisbee frequently before coming to Brown—he played pickup with friends and his school included Ultimate as a part of gym class. He entered the world of Ultimate Frisbee on campus during the 2nd semester of his first year. Aaron said that he wears standard athletic shorts and a shirt to practice, but that on Halloween the players dress up into costumes, such as furry animal onesies. He started playing when he was 10 years old at summer camp, and he joined his first Ultimate team when he was 14. He says that he spends most of his time with the team, as they are his closest friends. Bella, who is from Brooklyn, also started playing Ultimate in high school. At practices, she likes to wear a pinny and whatever you would wear to soccer, while also usually sporting skinny tortoise shell glasses. She said that people can wear whatever they want because the sport is so inclusive. The funky fits people wear are called “Flair,” which is less of an adjective and more of a noun. Bella noted that she has seen people play barefoot and in “Cow Hats,” which she logically described as “hats that look like cows.”Ultimate Frisbee is a noncontact sport—you can box people out, but you can’t push them. The game starts with a “Pull” which is basically a kickoff, but it’s actually just a throw because kicking a frisbee would probably be impossible unless you had super-high toe dexterity. There are two end zones, like in football, and seven players on each team, like in touch football. Of the seven players on the field, two are “Handlers” and the other five are the “Stack,” explained Daniel. The Handlers are the passers—like the point guard in basketball. The Stack lines up down the field from the person with the frisbee. They cut back and forth to get open and catch the frisbee when it’s thrown to them before passing it to someone else, eventually, moving the frisbee down the field in this way (you cannot run with the frisbee.) There is a Vertical Stack Formation to move up and down the field and a Horizontal Stack Formation to move across the field. Teams can choose to use Person-to-Person Defense or Zone Defense, also like in basketball. On defense, Aaron likes to do a “Layout D” which is similar to a slide tackle in soccer, with the defender diving toward the frisbee. When the frisbee touches the ground, possession changes—it is now time for the team that was on defense to get a chance at offense. Sometimes when the frisbee touches the ground it rolls about for a bit and players from each team chase after it wildly.Players can choose from a bunch of different throws. There are forehands and backhands, like in tennis. The backhand is the more common throw with the back of the hand facing outward. It is similar to the shooing motion. The forehand is where the palm faces out. It is similar to slapping motion. There are more spicy throws as well. Henry likes to use a “Scoober” which he described as a “floaty throw.” This toss gets the frisbee over the defenders, with the disc staying in the air longer. To do it, you grip the frisbee as if you were throwing a forehand, flip the disc upside down, and throw the frisbee as if you were throwing a backhand, but with your arm twisted a bit. Depending on how far you want to Scoober the disc, you should try tossing at different angles. Daniel likes to use the “Hammer” where you wind up over your head and throw the disc as if you are playing the High Striker game at a carnival. Aaron added that the Hammer “can lead to a magic trick” where you act like you are going to throw the disc but you don’t actually do it. He compared this move to when you play fetch with a dog and pretend to throw the ball. He quickly added that he doesn’t know if he wants to “make that image” because most people already connect frisbees and dogs. Frisbee teams typically have quirky names as a way to counter typical sport culture. Brown’s teams have been around since the 1970s. Henry’s team is called “Brownian Motion,” better known by its nickname: “B-Mo.” Brownian motion is a physical phenomenon in liquids and gasses in which the particles randomly and spread out evenly. The phenomenon was named after Robert Brown, a Scottish botanist, who was the first to study it in depth after he noticed microscopic pollen grain particles spreading out while researching the fertilization of clarkia pulchella, a purple flower whose four petals look like reindeer antlers. Aaron and Daniel play for “Polyester Funkadelic,” better known by its nickname: “P-Funk.” There was a funk band in the 1970s called Parliament Funkadelic, that was abbreviated to P-Funk. The American band has released multiple albums with names such as “Maggot Brain” (1971) and “One Nation Under a Groove” (1978). The team’s name is a nod to the band, Aaron explained, and he guesses that adding “Polyester” to the name is a reference to polyester being a common material in athletic clothing. Bella plays for “Cosmic Rays,” better known by its nickname: “Co-Rays.” Galactic cosmic rays are high energy atom fragments that come from space. They can be created in supernovas (a star exploding), when particles within the explosion crash into each other.B-Mo’s logo is a Hellfish curled up to look like a frisbee. The Hellfish is actually not a real fish. It is the name of a World War II military unit in the television show The Simpsons that had members including Abraham Jebediah “Abe” Simpson II (the grandpa in the show) as well as Charles Montgomery Plantagenet Schicklgruber Burns (also known as Mr Burns, the evil guy who runs the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant). The frisbee slicing through a mushroom on Henry’s shirt is the logo for P-funk, the team he was on last year. The mushroom, probably a psilocybin (magic) mushroom, is a reference to the psychedelic themes of the band the team is named after. The logo for Cosmic Rays is a sting ray with constellations covering its back. The ray is curled up, presumably in the shape of a disc. I asked Aaron why it is called Ultimate Frisbee, and he said that he had a story that he felt was “pretty true.” He explained that “Frisbie” was the name of a pie tin brand. People started calling the game Frisbee, but the name was patented, so they switched to just calling it “Ultimate,” without frisbee in the name at all. But, he added, “they” didn’t want to seem like they were trying to be too cool, so they went back to calling it Ultimate Frisbee. Henry thinks that the frisbee disc was invented before the game, and that random high-schoolers from New Jersey were the ones that invented the sport. Upon creating the game, they called it “Ultimate” because it was the best way one can play frisbee, Henry said. To me, Ultimate also means final. I’d like to think that perhaps this form of using a frisbee is the final stage in the game’s evolution. Other records suggest that Ultimate Frisbee was created in 1968 by eventual American film producer Joel Silver after a one-year stint at a prep school in Massachusetts. He learned of a game kids were playing in Amherst, the site of the Frisbie Pie Company, called “Frisbee Football,” in which they threw around the metal pie tins. Silver then moved to Columbia High School in New Jersey, where he successfully advocated for the game to be added to the school’s curriculum. Kids played in the school’s parking lot, and Silver, along with his two friends Bernard “Buzzy” Hellring and Jonathan “Jonny” Hines, developed rules for the game. Ultimate Frisbee became a hit, and students at neighboring schools started to play.Over 100 people tryout for Brown’s five teams. There are three open division teams and two women’s and gender expansive teams. B-Mo is the top open division team. Last year, it was the second best team in the country. Some of the people on the team play professionally or play on club teams during the summers. P-Funk is considered the open division B-team. It is still competitive like B-Mo, but “more chill,” according to Daniel. The open division C team is called Mo Ship. Shiver is Brown’s women’s and gender expansive A-team and Cosmic Rays is the B-team. Both Mo Ship and Cosmic Rays do not require tryouts and accept all players regardless of their skill level. On these teams, anyone can join at any point during the season. They allow for a wide variety of commitment and skill. Teams compete in various tournaments in different regions depending on their conference. Henry went to Maine a few weekends ago and woke up at 4 am this past Friday to fly to Georgia for a competition. This past weekend, P-Funk went to New York for a tournament and stayed at their captain’s grandma’s house. By winning tournaments, the team gets trophies, medals, merchandise, and “cool frisbees,” Henry said.To recruit new members, the teams advertise themselves at the Club Fair, host pick up games through their Falltimate (Fall Ultimate) League, or do a Dorm Storm (print out flyers and distribute them in every first-year dorm). Daniel added that most kids on the higher level teams came to Brown knowing they wanted to play because they had done it previously. Off the field, the teams come together for program-wide functions. These include casual scrimmages and parties, which mix with other teams in the program, allowing players to meet each other in a different way that is not focused on actual frisbeeing. Bella said that Frisbee People tend to live together, and that although there is no official “Frisbee House,” there are different groups of frisbee players all living on Pitman Street. As Daniel put it, frisbee draws in people who “tend to be cool.”Each Halloween, there is a program-wide party called the “Big Bang,” where all players from all teams can come party in their costumes. Another all-program party tradition is the “Yule Ball.” The concept of the Yule Ball comes from the Harry Potter movie series. In the movies, it is a formal Christmas party for students from three different wizarding schools. Prior to the frisbee event, players self-select into one of the four Hogwarts Houses and attend a pregame with their respective house. Bella was a Gryffindor. She noted that there is “lots of interteam dating,” and that during a party with alumni present, she heard from many of her frisbee peers that there was a lot of tension in the room between past lovers. Bella explained that some teams have their own traditions such as Chicken Finger Fridays where a whole team goes to the Ratty and eats chicken fingers on Fridays. “Everyone who does [frisbee] loves it, which makes it such a great community,” Henry said. Aaron explained that nicknames are a big part of college frisbee culture. Every person is given a nickname by the rest of the team. “People pride themselves on people not knowing their real name because people only know their frisbee name,” Aaron said. Daniel’s last name is Graves. His older brother John is on the team and received the nickname “Bones,” so kids on the team gave Daniel the nickname “Stapes,” which is the smallest bone in the body, located in the middle ear. Aaron is called “16.” That was his number on his high school’s team and he wore his old jerseys to practices. People started calling him “16,” and one day someone joked that calling him “16” was funny because “he looks like he’s 16,” and the nickname stuck. This year, Aaron asked to get a new nickname because he wanted to move away from being compared to a 16 year old, but “someone was like ok, what about 17?” so now he has two nicknames: 16 and 17. Aaron said that he doesn’t think about where the name came from or what it means. “It’s the same way I’m Aaron,” he said. There are a bunch of cheers and chants that teams do in between points. Daniel said that these are never taught; players instead learn them on the fly. “They are nonsensical and amp you up,” he said. I asked him to give me an example of a cheer, and Aaron and Daniel began rhythmically chanting. Daniel made a fist and started hitting the table to make a beat. I am unsure of how to spell any of the words from the chant or explain what they meant. I can say with confidence, however, that the cheer did hype me up. Aaron said that there’s no varsity level of the sport, no official recruitment, and no referees. The lack of referees puts the responsibility on players to make the right call. The game relies on people trusting one another’s judgment, which is very different from other competitive sports. Aaron said that the lack of institutional hierarchy makes the sport anti-authority and therefore more inclusive. This somewhat countercultural aspect of the sport is one of the reasons why he loves it so much. It also lacks many of the skill barriers that other sports have. It is physically less taxing than other sports and Henry said that in order to play Ultimate, all you really need to know how to do is throw a forehand or backhand. Henry added that he only knew how to throw a backhand for the first several months when he began playing on P-Funk, and now he is competing on the second best Ultimate team in the country. To Daniel, frisbee is an activity, a community, and an escape. Aaron explained that the sport adds a break in his day, which has been good for his mental health. The practices are a great opportunity to workout while hanging out with your friends, he said. Today, it’s mid-November and I’m watching a practice on the Berylson Family Fields where the football team practices. Some of the players are wearing knit hats and gloves to keep warm. In between plays, one player pats another on the back. They look at each other and smile between rosy cheeks, then turn back to the game. I’m not sure if I’ll ever enter the black hole of Ultimate Frisbee, but after talking to Henry, Aaron, Daniel, and Bella, I can see why Nora never returned. Perhaps she is learning new throws, enjoying chicken fingers on Fridays, or signing the lease on a new Frisbee House.
Sole Magazine
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