[TFDA] Good Article about Ultimate's growth in Asia

Christian Schwoerke schwoerkec at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 28 09:01:17 EST 2007


This was the lead post on rsd this morning...

--xian


http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=100549

Agence France-Presse

HONG KONG - Yuan Yuan and four of her teammates took a hard sleeper
train 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) from the northern Chinese city of
Tianjin to Hong Kong to spend a weekend chasing after a piece of
plastic.

They joined more than 200 diplomats, bankers, students and accountants
from across the Asia-Pacific region to play in the annual Hong Kong
Pan-Asia Ultimate Tournament, a sport more commonly known as ultimate
Frisbee.

The game, invented around 40 years ago by a group of students in New
Jersey -- the founders were said to have named it as they did because
they believed it was the "ultimate" sport -- has spread rapidly across
Asia in the past decade.

Now it is showing signs of moving beyond the preserve of disc-chasing
expats to become a genuinely popular sport among local residents.

China recently held its first national championships. The Philippine
capital Manila runs a league with around 17 teams, including a squad
of fishermen from Boracay who fly in every weekend to play. And Japan
has what is believed to be the world's only semi-professional team.

"We have around 50 people playing in our team at university," Yuan
said at last month's tournament.

"We got interested in the game and learnt it from a DVD first of all
and then a Beijing player came to Tianjin and helped us some more.
This is our first time to Hong Kong and everybody has been incredibly
friendly."

The cost of the five players' journey from northern China to Hong Kong
was paid for by international business software provider BEA, one of a
growing number of sponsors who are taking an interest in the game.

Ultimate, which is often referred to simply as "disc" by aficionados,
is a seven-a-side game played on a field the size of a football
pitch.

Players are forbidden from running with the Frisbee and secure a point
by catching the disc in the opposition endzone, as in American
Football.

If the disc, which has a specific weight and dimensions, is grounded
or intercepted, the opposing team attacks the other endzone. The game
is played by men and women, often in mixed teams.

What really makes "ultimate" stand out from other sports is the
absence of a referee.

Even in international competition, fouls are called by players and any
disputes are decided by discussion, part of an abstract sense of fair
play called "the spirit".

This emphasis on playing fairly and respecting opponents is at the
center of the game, has transferred well across cultures and is part
of the attraction for local players.

"The sense of spirit -- and the partying -- definitely had an impact
on the game's development in Manila," said Erik Waldie, a Canadian MBA
student in Manila who moved to the Philippines to be with his
girlfriend, who he met at an ultimate tournament. Ultimate couples are
not unusual.

"Filipinos are a pretty jovial bunch and this fitted very well."

As well as Japan, the Philippines and Singapore have come closest to
emulating the organized leagues that are found in many north American
cities.

One of the Manila league's 17 teams comprises fishermen who picked up
the game from tourists heading to the beach paradise of Boracay, south
of the capital. Local hotels now sponsor them to travel to compete.

Tim Edwards, a Canadian diplomat based in Hong Kong and captain of the
territory's team, says the sport has exploded since he first lived in
the region 10 years ago, when only about four cities could be relied
upon to send expat dominated teams to tournaments.

Competitions now take place almost every month in cities from Shanghai
to Bangkok, and the Asian championships including teams from Australia
and Japan will take place next month in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

"It is still a long way behind the north American scene, where you
have enough players to differentiate between purely social players,
league players and people who compete in international competitions,"
he said.

"But now you have the quality growing from grassroots players to back
up the rotating expats who visit for the short term."

Edwards points to the success of the inaugural Chinese national
championships earlier this year as the kind of initiative that needs
to be encouraged for the game to take hold in China.

"Four of the eight teams were purely local, but every team had some
local players," he said. "Many of them are based around sports
universities, so they are great athletes, and if they learn the
strategy and skills they could compete with the best."

Japan, however, remains the model for spreading ultimate across Asia.

The game took off there in the early 1980s and now has the world's
only semi-professional team, the Buzz Bullets, whose players all work
for the same company, which pays for them to travel across the world
and compete, often successfully, against the best north American teams.





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