The most basic Socratic Question of all is when we ask ourselves Is that true?, so in that spirit, I would only suggest to you to ask yourself that question when any part of these articles challenges your underlying belief system. Ask yourself, Is that true? to your belief that it’s best to run through a reception a full speed? You’ll be surprised to discover the answer.
Over the coming weeks, months and years, the Ultimate community is going to begin collectively realize that virtually everything they’ve been led to believe about how the game has to be played is fundamentally just a set of misguided beliefs that simply are not true, and never were true.
The Galileo of Ultimate Frisbee®
In the middle of a point of an Ultimate Frisbee® game I was playing on September 4th, 1993, at approximately 2:36 in the afternoon, I had the epiphany that with my new offensive system that I was developing, I could do what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted and there was nothing the opponent could do to stop me.
I was playing against west coast powerhouse and perennial UPA National Championship contender SF Tsunami when I had the realization that in that moment, I had broken Ultimate.
With my revolutionary offensive system, I hadn’t just exposed a loophole in the rules, I had exposed the entire framework of Ultimate to be one massive loophole.
And here I am over 30 years later, still beating my head against the wall trying to explain to the the Ultimate community that the world isn’t flat, so to speak. You might call me the Galileo of Ultimate, having been relegated to house arrest ever since.
I’ve been playing Frisbee® since the 1960s (this is me in my backyard in South Bend, Indiana around 1970) and I played my first Frisbee® football game in that same spot in 1972. I have six brothers and we spent the 70s throwing a ton of disc and although we never had the change to get all seven of us on the line to play Ultimate, when I began playing Ultimate at Purdue in the late 70s I was already extremely proficient in throwing.
Since then, I’ve most likely played more Ultimate than any other player, I’ve invented an astonishing eleven new, unique and ‘game ready’ throws (I’ll be releasing a video of all eleven throws in April on my twitter account). Statistically I’ve been one of the most dominant defensive forces in the game throughout the past 45 years and of course, in my offensive system that I call Shredding, I’m obviously the best at because no one else understands what Shredding is besides me or how Shredding breaks the game.
To bookend that GIF from 1970, here’s a short clip from the 2022 Shredfest I event in Lexington, KY of me dunking on AUDL DPOY AJ Merriman with a left handed, high release, no look, backhand lift for a 25 yard score. AJ’s closest hand to block this throw is 6 to 7 feet from my release point.
I hadn’t played Ultimate in 5 years, I hadn’t even warmed up, I was out of shape and I was 62 years old at the time and I walked on to the field, strolled up to AJ and said “Daddy’s Home” and put up this dime.
True story.
There’s no one in the game who’s got this throw. There’s never been anyone else in the game who’s got this throw, not to mention being able to hit my receiver going away against the former Defensive Player of The Year from the semi-pro league.
In a sane world, I would have been, and should have been a unanimous, first ballot hall of fame inductee. But in the upside down Ultimate Frisbee® world, I’m pretty much hated by everybody.
This is my story
This Dogs and Baskets Substack, gets its name from a phenomenon that most Ultimate players are all to familiar with, which is being asked one of two questions when we tell strangers what our favorite pastime is; “Ultimate, is that the thing with the dogs?” or “Ultimate isn’t that the thing I see the kids play down in the park with the baskets?”.
It’s probably the one thing I have in common with every other Ultimate player. It’s what binds us together. We all hate that the game isn’t respected but the question is why hasn’t the game earned the respect that we all feel it deserves? Maybe it’s because the game needs a complete and thorough overhaul.
Dogs and Baskets focuses on ideologies and the Dogs and Baskets phenomenon in ultimate is a result of the game’s ideology.
There are a series of articles, documentary films, and podcast episodes at the Dogs and Baskets website that you might find interesting.
I’m personally kind of partial to this conversation I recently had with Dr. Robert Malone, who is credited with having invented the methodology (he has several USPTO patents granted) that went into the mRNA gene therapy technology.
Ideologies
As it so happens, Ultimate makes for an exemplary case study for the harms of ideologies and so that is what this article is mostly about.
I got my PhD in Ideologies from the University of Ultimate Frisbee and for my regular subscribers, I need to warn you in advance that this article is predominately about the love hate relationship I’ve had for 45 years with the game of Ultimate and the people who play it. I love the game. The community hates me.
My tenure with the game just recently culminated with an episode so shocking that it still leaves me stunned. For a game whose ideology based on the honor system, what just occurred is arguably the most dishonorable thing that’s every happened in Ultimate.
I’ve spent my entire life devoted to becoming the best player I could be, bringing as many innovations and improvements to the game as I possibly could. However, it always seemed to me that the more advanced of a player I became, the more I found it more challenging to fit in.
It more or less makes sense to me now why this is, but the answer isn’t any more settling. Hopefully this article explains the phenomenon effectively enough to shed light on this situation.
For example, in December of 2022, Ultiworld (the preeminent source for all things Ultimate related) tweeted this post bout me:
This is an oddly written tweet. It doesn’t actually accuse me of hate speech, it only infers it through rumor and inuendo. Not quite enough to sue them for defamation or libel, but enough to associate the name Frank Huguenard with the act of committing a hate crime for the over 100,000 plus members of the Ultimate community who read it.
What the hell is going on here?
I’ve never engaged in hate speech, I live on what you can basically think of as a Buddhist Monastery and and I make films about meditation and spirituality. Why am I being accused of hate speech? Hate crimes are extremely serious accusations. Have they brought in the FBI to investigate my heinous act? What have I done to warrant such a social media death sentence?
UltiWorld didn’t even bother to provide any evidence or at a minimum, they didn’t they offer me the courtesy of responding with my own commentary or the opportunity to defend my good name.
I have been labeled as antisemitic by many people in the Ultimate community, which I find interesting as my mother’s heritage from Poland is 100% Ashkenazi Jew and in fact, I literally had family members put to death at Auschwitz.
I think it’s interesting that UltiWorld not only defamed me, but that they then turned around and donated the money that I had committed to pay him to publish my press release, to the Anti Defamation League (ADL).
*Founded in 1913, the ADL’s timeless mission is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.”
Wowser. You can’t make this shit up.
I’ve been accused of being sexist and misogynistic, so I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to ask that you to at least cite a single example of me saying anything remotely sexist or misogynistic.
You won’t, because you can’t, because none exist.
Just because you hate my speech doesn’t make it hate speech, no matter how hard you work to take the things I’ve said out of context or try to twist their meaning.
I’ve also been accused of being xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist and there’s simply not a shred of evidence to back up any of these assertions. Blah blah blah, we all know what this is.
When ideologues, on either side of the political aisle, are unable to debate you on the substance and merits of your arguments, they resort to social cannibalism where they use social media to ‘other’ you while they simultaneously turning around and calling you a bigot.
Without justification or foundation, I’ve been labelled a Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist and people on /r/ultimate have posted that they wanted me dead.
How did we get from a game that is based on honor, mutual respect and good spiritedness to the point where cancel culture is routinely used to silence dissenting opinions and the entire community has been overrun with extreme progressive liberals?
What the hell is this?
The Apostle Irv
A large portion of these assaults on my character can be traced back to an article I wrote around 2008 showing how Ultimate had many ideological parallels and commonalities with Christianity.
To understand the ideology of Ultimate, you really need to understand the three main progenitors of the sport.
The earliest roots of the game can be traced back to its original inventor and Amherst College Student Counselor Jarred Kass, who made up the game and taught it to Joel Silver and others at Mount Hermon Summer School’s (MHSS) camp in 1968. Jared wanted to create a fun activity to give the high schoolers boarding at MHSS for the summer a sense of belongingness and to ease them out of their loneliness.
Even in its embryonic stage, Jared remembers a lax, penalty free, kind of approach to game, being very soft on violations and mistakes. You can trace the Ultimate’s lack of penalties all the way back to the earliest days when Kass made up the game at MHSS.
If you just look at who Joel is, he’s an American film producer known for his action films, including Die Hard (1988), Lethal Weapon (1987), The Matrix (1999), and V for Vendetta (2005). Silver has also produced Xanadu (1980), 48 Hrs. (1982), Brewster's Millions (1985), Weird Science (1985), Commando (1985), Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), and Road House (1989).
When you look back at this, Joel went from being involved in the creation of Ultimate to producing Xanadu in less than 12 short years. That’s really quite astonishing.
Seriously.
It’s a remarkable testament to his exceptional penchant for shameless self promotion.
Joel, if nothing else, was a promoter extraordinaire, the ultimate showman and when he was able to successfully lobby for and be awarded with having Ultimate become a varsity sport, it was all meant in good fun. It was a big joke, meant to poke fun at jocks, letter sweaters and conventional varsity sports.
When Joel popularized Ultimate back at Columbia High School, it was actually much more like a Saturday Night Live skit than a real sport. Joel even called Ultimate “the Anti-Sport”. Just look back in the origin story of Ultimate and you had Joel making the school janitor the General Manager (or something to that effect) and basically the entire launch of the game was undeniably a big, fat spoof.
And while Buzzy Hellring and Johnny Hines both were involved in tweaking the rules that Jared Kass had initially developed, it was due to Silver’s showmanship that Ultimate ever got off the ground in the first place. What’s important to understand here is that Joel initially called the game Frisbee Football until it was renamed to Ultimate; more on why this is relevant later.
The third main progenitor of Ultimate was Irv Kalb who, more than anyone, was responsible for the proliferation of Ultimate throughout New Jersey initially, and then ultimately throughout colleges and universities across the country and beyond. Irv was literally a boy scout who was, as Silver put it, the Johnny Appleseed of the game.
All of this history can be referenced in any number of other articles, books, interviews and podcasts, but the most relevant part of this early history of the game is that in virtually every book, article or interview that Kalb has taken part in, he has discussed his early evangelical days of the game’s explosive spread in the context of early Christianity. This is a stone cold fact.
When he’s discussed this, he has consistently said that he compared his activities in promoting the early game terms of what the activities of spreading early Christianity would have been like and he has said many, many times that he got the sense that he was starting a new religion. In other words, by all accounts, one of the three primary progenitors of the game (Irv Kalb) in virtually every interview he’s ever given about the formative years of the game, contextualized the sport within the framework of religions and specifically Christianity.
Said another way, Irv (who now has changed his tune and argues that religion has no place in the discussion of the game’s origin story), is the person who literally set the precedent for discussing religion in the context of Ultimate’s origin; in every single book, interview and article every produced about the game’s history. You can not make this shit up.
If you do read the article I wrote, that has drawn the ire of so many people in the Ultimate community and labeled as antisemitic, all I’m doing is extending Irv’s comparison between Ultimate and Christianity and pointing out their ideological similarities as well. Controversial? Perhaps, but accusing me of hate speech for saying that Ultimate was invented by people of Jewish heritage? When my mother’s heritage is also Jewish? That is rich. I suppose the Jewish periodical Haaretz is antiemetic too, yes?
To say that I’m guilty of hate speech towards religions is patently absurd, overtly malicious and completely uncalled for. I would argue that accusing me of hate speech for documenting the ideological similarities between Ultimate and Christianity, in and of itself, constitutes hateful speech.
Haters gonna hate. That’s what they do, but don’t accuse me of a hate crime unless you can bring the receipts.
Hate Speech on Gender
The other implicit accusation in Ultiworld’s libelous assault on character, is that I am somehow hateful of gender.
For the record, I have issued a statement in the past that Dischoops does not support Gender Equity (dischoops is a sport that I invented back in 2005).
Here’s my quote:
There’s neither anything hateful about that comment, nor is that comment relating to gender in anyway. In fact, most women who play Dischoops excel at it. Gender Equity is an ideology, and as I will explain throughout this article, ideologies are always harmful and they imprison people into a narrow and bigoted way of thinking. All ideologies do this.
This is a bit of a rabbit hole but it’s important so please humor me and give me the benefit of the doubt here and take a moment hear an alternative viewpoint regarding Gender Equity.
Here’s what an internet search provided me with as a description of Gender Equity and let me try to point out how this is ideological
First of all, I notice a few interesting things the way that this is written. If I’m reading this correctly, what it seems to be implying here is that there are no differences between men and women and if weren’t for the social and historical disadvantages that women inherit upon birth, we’d have women playing in the NBA today.
That might be a bit of an exaggeration on my part, but I did it specifically to make a point.
Why would a definition for a fairness doctrine regarding disadvantages that women are inherently born with, leave out the most obvious disadvantage of all, physical differences between men and women?
This omission of fact, being replaced by the insertion of an opinion or an assumption, is a telltale sign of an ideology. There’s always an underlying belief with a corresponding agenda behind all ideologies and this one really stands out.
Furthermore, over the past three thousand years, 99.999% of humanity has been historically and socially oppressed, this phenomenon isn’t limited to the 50% that this definition for fairness would have you believe.
The second thing that I notice here is that whomever wrote this, used the word compensate, which seems to be indicative of sort of monetary, social, academic, political or professional reparations doled out to females. Implied here is the idea that women are automatically entitled to various benefits that men otherwise have to work hard to get, just because they are female.
A good example of this is the concept of respect. In general, amongst each other, males understand that respect is something that is not given, it’s earned. If you’re not being given respect, it’s because you haven’t earned it yet and therefore, you don’t take it personally.
But some women who’ve bought into the Gender Equity ideology don’t appreciate this unwritten law so when these women don’t get the respect from men that they believe they’re entitled to, they automatically presume that it’s because the man is sexist or misogynistic (rather than understand that they simply haven’t earned it yet).
Ironically, it’s this very sense of entitlement that makes getting respect that much harder to begin with.
The third thing I notice here is the complete list of other demographics that have all kinds of other inherent social and historic disadvantages where we can also attempt to level the playing field:
attractiveness
background
upbringing
emotional IQ
athleticism
ingenuity
resourcefulness
mindfulness
height
race
ethnicity
enterprisingness
entrepreneurship
social IQ
mental health
spiritual health
critical thinking
creativity
fitness
agreeableness
leadership
leadability (the ability to be led)
There are arguably dozens and dozens of other categories and subcategories. Does equity entail leveling the playing field for every single one of these spectra? How would we even begin to accomplish this?
Virtually none of these qualities are black or white, so to speak, so let’s grade each individual on a scale from 1 to 100 each each of the top two hundred qualities that we want to implement equity on, so that we can make life fair.
Do you see where I’m going with any of this? In truth, it’s impossible to artificially level the playing field on an single one of these spectra, not to mention all of them and trying to achieve equity will only compound the problems we already have and make them that much more worse.
Socrates developed critical thinking as an aid to help people free themselves from ideologigies and the most basic Socratic Question of all is, Is that true?
Is it true that we can artificially level the playing field? Or that it’s even a good idea to attempt?
Life ain’t fair, and nothing you do ideologically to make it fair can possibly accomplish this and in fact, any attempt to do so will result in an equal and opposite reaction. Ideologies don’t empower, they disempower. Once you go down the diversity rabbit hole to it’s deepest, finest granularity, you’re left with one inescapable conclusion.
Every single on of us is a diversity unto ourselves.
We’re all distinct human beings and uniquely disadvantaged in many, many different ways while also being uniquely advantaged in various other ways. Most of us are severely disadvantaged to be honest. Being human is an extremely difficult but rewarding challenge.
Embrace this challenge and become empowered
Blame someone else and become disempowered
The choice is yours, and yours alone
Ideologies can never help with this process. Ever. They only make things worse.
I’m not suggesting that there are not historical and social disadvantages to being born with XX chromosomes, there are. Obviously.
What I am saying is that any attempt to ‘artificially level the playing field’ will always fail because in order to accomplish this, you have to do two things:
You have to give people below the ‘leveling line’ false positives* to lift them up to average, and
You have to give people above the ‘leveling line’ false negatives to drop them down to average.
*the entire game of ultimate frisbee is laced with false positives.
When you combine false negatives with false positives as a way of leveling the playing field, you’re always going end up with systemic mediocrity. Every single time.
Gender Equity and Mental Health
I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that telling girls and young ladies that “historical and social disadvantages are holding them back in life” is, in reality, setting them up for failure.
This happens when females don’t achieve the successes in life that they were promised by the Gender Equity ideology, so they conclude it’s their fault. Their self-blame can turn to self-loathing and they become anxious, depressed and suffer from low self esteem (all of which are known to be able to spiral out of control making any kind of success that much more challenging).
In other words, the Gender Equity ideology becomes a disadvantage in and of itself when its original intention was to alleviate disadvantages.
This graph is frankly horrific and it correlates heavily with the onslaught of the artificial leveling of the playing field that the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) ideology has infiltrated virtually all parts of our society with over the past ten years or so.
While we know that correlation is not indicative of causation, this correlation was predicted by many psychologists and sociologists twenty and thirty years ago when the trend of artificially providing false positives in our schools, businesses and institutions initially began.
Ironically, the most important form of diversity has always been diversity of thought, but ideologies do not tolerate different (heretical) thinking. Just look at DEI and how just having a conversation about alternative viewpoints is verboten. The DEI ideology is, itself, not properly diversified.
Now whether or not you agree or disagree with the points I’m trying to make here is one thing, but to accuse me of Hate Speech on Gender for expressing an opposing viewpoint is completely inappropriate.
In fact, accusing me of hate speech for questioning the legitimacy of Gender Equity specifically is a false negative used to punish me for being a white, hetero, male.
There can be no other explanation as I’ve done nothing that can legitimately be constituted as hate speech. If I sound ticked off, I am. This shouldn’t have ever happened.
I think that it’s only reasonable to ask UltiWorld to issue an apology, a retraction and that they should also publish a link to this article and tweet it out on X. It’s the fair thing to do.
Either that or publish proof of a single thing that I’ve that is convincing evidence of hate speech towards gender or religion (or any other subgroup for that matter). What ever happened to presumed innocent until proven guilty in this country?
If you agree, please make your voice heard and send Charlie a note at charlie@ultiworld.com
NEXT
Shredding and How it Breaks Ultimate
PREVIOUS
Dogs and Baskets
Reprinting portions or all of this article is unallowed and impermissible without expressed, written consent from the author.