Okay, Now You're Just Being Selfish

Back in my first job at Pizza Hut, folding up the pizza boxes was an art form. In total, there were eleven individual folds to make for the flat piece of perforated cardboard to become a rigid box, and one of my managers was amazingly skilled at folding. In the time it took me (and I was in no way slower than the average- if anything I was slightly above it) to do one stack of boxes, he could have filled the entire store. Watching him fold boxes was almost magical - he was so good at it, yet at the same time I questioned the ultimate purpose of being so very, very good at something so very, very trivial.

There is a special facial expression that accompanies this mixed emotion of awe/pity, and it's the same expression I see on people's faces when I tell them that I am going to represent Australia in frisbee.

So, where we are at the moment, in Oz: ultimate is a competitive amateur sport. I'm a paragon of unathleticism, and yet I manage to make it to events like Nationals to play alongside or against people are truly world-standard.

And recently a sense of selfish irony has hit me: despite all the efforts I make trying to get people to get into frisbee (at uni or for league) I really don't want the overall standard of play to rise much higher. I don't want ultimate to be an Olympic sport, or be recognised as legitimate by all the normal folks out there.

It's not just a fear of how chumped I will get by actual legitimate athletes who play the game, it's more a fear of how the game itself will change to accommodate its growing professionalisation: it's so fundamentally reassuring to turn up to day one of Nationals and see hundreds of people in the carpark who are there because they want to be there, because they love the game. The moment people start playing for the paycheck, I'm going to play dischoops.