A Few Disc Golf Photos

This was last Friday. The weather was cool and cloudy. Sometimes it rained. The creek pictured here is the channel of a swamp that swells and recedes in these woods. The water was down this day. This was my first visit to the Easley course, but I’m told that the swamp swallows discs easily.

Bryan is a veteran Frisbee guy, but this was his first try at disc golf. Here he is warming up around the parking lot.

He really did well. Here I am worrying that he might beat me. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll keep slamming the discs into trees or lose them in the swamp. Oh wait…he’s using MY equipment. Okay, I’ll worry about that, instead.

I was standing behind a tree for this shot, so it’s not quite as dangerous as it looks. The sound of the Pro Destroyer whooshing by my head was a little frightening, though.

New Plastic

While in town yesterday, I stopped by my favorite place for disc golf equipment and diversified my throwables. The Leopard and the Destroyer are made of Pro plastic — a polymer I’ve never owned. The Wraith is in Star plastic, only my second of that newest material that Innova produces. I hope to find chance to use them before long.

I learned some things in the process of buying these discs, most notably that Destroyers have a different profile depending on whether they are made of Pro or Star (I didn’t think to compare with DX or Champion plastics). The Pro Destroyer is quite domed compared with a Star Destroyer, which is very flat. The store clerk called Innova on my behalf to ask them why, and the answer is that the higher dome of the Pro gives it more glide. I wonder if that will also slow down its rifle-like tee pad speed.

The other item I learned is that the Leopard now has a larger diameter and flatter profile than a Leopard I bought a few years ago. It seems to me that if the manufacturer of a disc changes the dimensions of that disc, they should also change its name. Innova also changed the shape and size of their Panther recently, a disc that was the most useful to me of all that they made.

Two Courses in Rock Hill

cellphone photo by Victor Patterson

Victor and I played two rounds of disc golf in Rock Hill last week. We started at Winthrop University’s lakeside course around 10:15 in the morning. Several others who were to meet us had plan changes and were unable to arrive, so it was just the two of us. We had each played this course once, previously. That was over two years ago, but I was still intimidated by the memory of that previous round. When we played in 2005, on a single hole (# 9) I lost two discs, and on the next hole Victor lost one (a Scorpion and Cyclone for me, and a Leopard for him, all of them sinking in the lake). This time, we both played conservatively. My overcompensation and inability to make easy putts hurt my score. When the eighteen were finished, Victor came out three strokes better than me, the first time he has ever beaten me, according to him. Congratulations!

After lunch at McHale’s Irish Pub and a visit to Old Town Outfitters to look at discs, we drove to Boyd Hill Park for an afternoon round. I won this one, but it was still a lot of ugly throwing for both of us. This course has trees like the ones on The Wizard of Oz that reach out and grab your discs or jump into the flight path after you’ve released the throw. Holes 7-11 are particularly thick and oppressive. It’s hard to concentrate on your game when you’re slinking through the gloom, looking over your shoulder for flying monkeys.

We had fun, and I hope we get to throw together again soon.

Disc Golf

I love throwing stuff. Always have. Baseballs, rocks, overripe garden vegetables…. There are many episodes I could tell about throwing and the small dramas that followed. I’m sure it goes back to having a dad who helped us kids enjoy the clean fun of sports. On my fifth birthday, I got a blue Regular Frisbee (by Wham-O), and that was an important stage in it, too.

Now, thirty-nine-and-a-half years later, disc golf — a direct outgrowth of the Frisbee movement of the 1960s — is one of my passions. It is a great sport for a middle-aged guy to use to exert himself, especially when the water is too cold for kayaking. It’s so much better than ball golf, more natural physically and more egalitarian financially. Friday is my day off, each week, barring emergencies, and for two weeks, I’ve joined friends at a local course and had a great time. We laughed our way through the woods and tightened each others’ games with useful sharing of perspectives. On the par 65 course at Boyd Hill Park, I shot a 64 the first week, and then a 63 and a 54 the second week. I’m interested to go with this group to the course at Winthrop University, which occasionally hosts national and world championship tournaments. I played there once a few years ago with my brother, Victor; that is a much more challenging course, and bigger numbers can be expected.

Had I not been so busy throwing, maybe I would have taken some pictures to share. Next time, perhaps.