'Crazy' Frank and the New Games Report

Simmo's most excellent blog (ballaratultimate DOT blogspot DOT com) has inspired me, somewhat, to write a little bit about the New Games Report of Frank Huguenard and what I think about it.

To summarise the situation for those not familiar: Frank is pretty much the maverick genius of Ultimate. Frank is ambidextrous. Frank once owned a fusion Italian/Indian restaurant that made Indian pizza. Frank doesn't like the UPA. Not many people in the wider Ultimate community like Frank. Frank is combative when it comes to his thoughts on the game. Why?

It's not just the UPA's rigid conservatism that irks Frank the most. His research - this New Games report - basically states that Ultimate is a 'New Game', or in other words, that it was created and developed, along with a bunch of other counterculture games in a social movement in the 1970's, with an almost aggressively anti-competitive, egalitarian mindset.

It's quite a read, pretty much all of it in Crazy Frank's Crazy Rhetoric - a language rather like English, but more fanatical - but there was one part of it that I want to share, straight from the horse's mouth:

You can't have it both ways. Either you have a game that is fun and fair for all or you have a sport that is designed for excellence at the highest levels.

I think it most accurately sums up Frank's position on Ultimate, and why it will never take the world by storm. But it makes a false assumption: while few Ultimate players (and a surprising amount of casual pick up players who have mucked around with it once or twice, or even people who've seen it played like my grandmother) will dispute that the game is fun, it is, at the end of the day, a sport based on athletic ability which, by the simple convention of having a system of points scored, means that there will inevitably be a loser, and there will inevitably be a winner.

But is Ultimate a sport, or is it a New Game? Nobody is denying the strong roots of Ultimate in counterculture, and the perception by the greater majority that Ultimate is two bearded men in Tree of Life jumpers throwing around frisbees with their dogs in a park does little to help. Frank's says his report proves beyond a reasonable doubt that 'cross-pollination occurred' between New Games and Ultimate. And I'm not going to argue with him: similarities do abound between the founding philosophies of the New Games and the concept of Spirit of the Game.

But his report takes this rather tenuous link between the base axioms of one movement (the New Games' freedom from competition/egalitarian ways) and the adjudication apparatus of another (Ultimate's Spirit) and stretches it too far. They share superficial similarities but they are not one and the same, which renders the rest of his 'proofs' as baseless assumptions.

More on this later, as I'm rather tired. Sorry for going all tangential, this post doesn't express how much I admire Frank for continually trying to express his views in a way that, for someone with the nickname 'Crazy', is moderate at best.

T.