The Sport Of Free Spirits

LATE-AFTERNOON BREEZE on Green Lake's grassy eastern shore, perfect weather for Freestyle. Mary Lowry squeezes Krazy Glue on three of her fingernails and attaches fake tips specially made from retainer resin by a dental hygienist. She sprays a lime-green flying disc with silicone to reduce friction and drag. She tosses grass clippings into the air to test the wind. Then, she lets the disc fly.

It floats, spins counterclockwise, maximum torque. In the hands (and feet and elbows and wrists) of Lowry and her world-class Freestyling friends, 160 grams of molded plastic come alive. "It's not a ball," Lowry says. "It's not subjected to gravity's ups and downs."

Instead, it curves and dances around a circle of players as they spin, squat, kneel, somersault, kick, airbrush, nail-delay, chest roll, back roll and cajole the disc in an improvised "jam" session. Funny, funky contortions with even weirder names: "Spinning Flamingitis," where you stand on one leg like a flamingo, pirouette a couple times, then wrap your arm under and around a raised leg to catch the disc. "Bad Attitude," a backward standing split, foot lifted above shoulder, hand reaching behind ankle to snag rotating plastic. "Scarecrow," a blind catch, arm angled backward, head looking in the opposite direction

This is Freestyle, the jazz of disc sports, and the Green Lake crowd distinguishes itself in quality and quantity of players as well as style.

"The Seattle community plays differently from the rest of the world," says world champion Freestyler Cindy Kruger. "We like to share the disc. I'll do one move and pass it to you. Other communities will do long combinations and monopolize the disc. We think sharing is more fun."

This weekend, Seattle will host the 2005 Freestyle Frisbee World Championship and Alternative Sports Festival, drawing about six dozen players from Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, New York and California as well as the Northwest.

Seattle is home to three of the world's top five women Freestylers and at least as many world-class Freestyling men. That's statistically significant. Because Freestyle is a young sport that takes years to master, there aren't many players on the planet who are really, really good. To produce stars, you need a pool of dedicated disc enthusiasts to practice with each other, to attract other top players, to keep energy high. The Freestyle scene has evolved in Seattle over 25 years.

Plus, the region is thick in Ultimate talent. Using a flying disc instead of a ball, Ultimate mixes elements of touch football, soccer and basketball in a self-refereed team sport. Seattle's club teams, the men's Sockeye and women's Riot, are reigning national Ultimate champs. About half the Sockeye team got started in a local middle-school league founded by Lowry. Serious players choose to live in Seattle because of its hot Frisbee scene. Computational geneticist Alex Nord telecommutes to San Francisco but resides in Seattle just so he can play with the Sockeye. The 25-year-old, who learned Ultimate as a middle-schooler in the Seattle Public Schools, competed at Carleton College where he was awarded the Callahan, Ultimate's Heisman Trophy. Last year, Nord returned to his former middle school as a coach.

Here in Seattle, the flying disc has achieved critical mass.

WHEN MARY LOWRY isn't playing Freestyle, coaching Ultimate or organizing youth leagues and tournaments, she teaches social studies (full time for 22 years!) to middle-school students at Seattle Country Day School. Her classroom is decorated with National Geographics, the Declaration of Independence and tournament discs.

So how would a social scientist explain the Seattle flying-disc phenomenon?

"Anytime you're teaching kids, you want them to think not just that something happened, but why it happened. You need to look at demographics and what kind of people become interested in disc sports," she says. "Hippies, but really more than that. Disc people are innovative, creative, they have freedom of thought. So what is it about the place that generates feeedom of thought? . . . Why is Microsoft here? Boeing? Starbucks? What are you saying about Seattle? And what has this done to help our society grow to be a better place? There are reasons why innovative people have lived in this town. I don't know if that transfers into Frisbee."

Amazingly, when discussing factors that helped fill Seattle's skies with flying discs (temperate climate, baby boomers, discretionary time, regional fascination with flight), Lowry neglects to mention herself.

On one weekend in 1997, the disc diva won world titles in both Freestyle and Ultimate. In Freestyle, she is a three-time women's world champion (partnered with Lisa Hunrichs Silvey, also of Seattle). Lowry also helped start Seattle's first women's Ultimate team, Women on the Verge. But the teacher's lasting impact on the sport is the youth league she helped found.

It started small. At Country Day, which is academically advanced and has few team sports, Lowry taught her students basic throws and how to play Ultimate. The sport appealed to them because flight is rooted in physics and also, Ultimate held a certain "alternative" cachet. Besides, it was just plain fun. After a while, though, the kids got tired of playing only with each other.

One afternoon, Lowry looked out her classroom window and saw a gaggle of students walking up the street, Frisbees in hand. It was Joe Bisignano's class from New Option Middle School, returning from a Queen Anne park.

Hey, you wanna play?

Soon, Lowry sent information packets to all the city's middle schools encouraging teachers to get kids involved; she arranged field time with the parks department; she leaned on friends to volunteer. "She would beg other players to come out and coach," says Cat Pittack, a former Women on the Verge teammate turned volunteer coach. "We wanted to foster Ultimate in the young kids. Sportsmanship."

Ultimate filled a void. Middle schools typically offer few after-school activities. Ultimate didn't require expensive equipment, allowed boys and girls to play together, and channeled adolescent energy on afternoons that would otherwise be dangerously empty.

"It attracts serious athletes, but also a lot of kids who might have been turned off by the whole sports scene," Bisignano says. "A lot of them like the freewheeling nature. It's a little looser than what they were finding in select soccer."

At 48, with her sun-bleached ponytail and petite, muscular build, Lowry could be mistaken from afar for the students she coaches. On the field, she doesn't scold, doesn't patronize. During the last game of the season, the kids are tired, down a couple points to a much taller team, and the bench has started eating bagels. In the huddle, she asks for ideas rather than giving orders. "OK, good D! Strong defense!" she yells when they're back on the field.

The other team scores. "Nice play!" Lowry's student tells an opponent. This is Spirit of the Game, as fundamental to Ultimate as forehand and backhand throws. Ultimate is a self-refereed sport that calls on athletes to play fair and to honor the game and other players. At the end of every tournament, peers vote on which team and which athlete best embodied Spirit of the Game. Winning Spirit of the Game is as big a deal as winning the game itself. These core values are key for middle-school students in their formative years, Lowry says, another reason she started the youth program.

The league now has hundreds of kids from both public and private schools, 34 teams that welcome players of all levels, and doubleheaders every Saturday.

"Mary has been the torchbearer for all of this," says Jeff Jorgenson, an international Freestyle star who was married to Lowry for 14 years. "Even though our marriage has stopped, one of the proudest things we did was start a junior Frisbee program, one of the biggest in the country. Mary has definitely made an impact on people's lives."

For this, the Lowry-Coddington award was named in her honor, a modest cash prize given every year to someone who "spreads the jam," showing good sportsmanship and teaching others how to play.

Nora Johnson, now a college sophomore, remembers when she couldn't figure out how to throw a forehand in sixth grade and Lowry finally suggested she stand on one leg and throw under the other, a position that forced Johnson's errant elbow into the correct position. "A lot of coaches would have given up, but she figured out a way," Johnson says. "Mary wasn't the traditional coaching style, yelling, running sprints, tough love. If we didn't want to practice, she didn't force us. I guess she was hoping we'd figure out we'd have to work hard to play well. It worked."

FLYING DISCS have been around for hundreds of years in various incarnations. Greeks competed in discus throwing during the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C., according to the "Complete Book of Frisbee," a feat later immortalized by the poet Homer as well as the sculptor Myron in his famous statue, Discobolus. Disc throwing also surfaced in ancient India, France, Japan and among native Americans, mostly for fun, occasionally for making war.

Modern Frisbee might have started in the early 1900s when factory workers tossed pie tins during breaks at the Frisbie Pie company in Bridgeport, Conn. The first trademarked plastic Frisbee was produced in the mid-1950s, when a former World War II pilot teamed up with Wham-O manufacturing company.

"PLAY CATCH — INVENT GAMES," the early discs instructed in raised letters on the Frisbee's underside. Who knew the toy would eventually become sport?

After supper, under the street lights in Texas and Louisiana where she grew up, Mary Lowry tossed the disc with her brothers and friends, playing catch, inventing games. "It seems like I've always had a Frisbee," she says. "I almost can't remember a time when I didn't play."

This was before the era of structured select athletics, before kids had every minute programmed into adult-supervised, developmentally appropriate enrichment activities.

Senior year, when her dad's job took him to North Africa, Lowry studied at a boarding school in Switzerland. She fell in love with the Alps and with the idea of playing Frisbee in cool places, say, a square in downtown Copenhagen, London's Hyde Park, the Pont du Garde in France. "We gotta play Frisbee everywhere we go!" she told her friends, and they hopped Europe's trains, Frisbees in hand.

Since then, Lowry has played all over Australia, on the Costa Rican beach where the Christopher Columbus movie "1492 Conquest of Paradise" was filmed; in front of Aztec ruins. "Even though Frisbee has been around since the late '60s, it still feels like it's in an infantile stage of development," Lowry says. "We need to make it exposed. Spread the jam so people can see it."

After a couple years at University of South Florida, where she learned Ultimate as a club sport, Lowry transferred to the University of Washington to study political science, drawn by the Northwest's alpine mountains. One day, she noticed a flier for Ultimate plastered to a garbage can. She called the number, took a bus to Green Lake and started playing with the mostly male Windjammers team.

"If there was a major spirit on our team, it was Mary," says Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who played on the Olympic Windjammers with Lowry in the early '80s and recalls she had a great throwing arm, terrific field sense, brilliant humor and a subscription to Foreign Affairs, a political policy magazine. "The culture was counter-culture. Lot of granola, lot of yogurt, lot of Birkenstocks. Most people didn't have a lot of money and didn't much worry about it. They played Ultimate. Some people played flying discs seven days a week. Mary was one of those people."

Some Saturdays, Lowry would play Ultimate from 9 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, then practice Freestyle from 2 until 6.

"She's a legend in Ultimate," says Stephanie Boyd, who played with Lowry in the early days. "She was the first standout woman out here. . . . My favorite times in Ultimate were when Mary had the Frisbee and I would cut hard for the end zone and entice her to 'huck' the disc most of the length of the field. She had about the longest women's throw around, very accurate and great fun to run down."

In Freestyle, Lowry became known for an Awesome Demo Move (ADM) called disco-gitis, an across-the-body under-the-leg catch plus a double leg-over behind-the-back pull, a few spins and some disco moves thrown in for good measure. (Preferably performed to '70s disco hit "Brick House.")

"People sort of get known for being technical or super creative, and I would say that Mary would be more like she's a workhorse," says Freestyle partner Hunrichs Silvey. "She's just solid. She goes out there and does the best she can. If it doesn't go well, she lets it go and moves onto the next thing. She's very positive, always a good attitude. She knows it's just a competition, not life and death."

LOWRY HAS SAVED a flying disc from almost every tournament she's played; the hundreds of plastic plates in her basement collection trace a lifetime building a sport.

Her first Frisbee, a white All-American with red and blue stripes, traveled with her around Europe in the mid-'70s. She has a blue WHAM-O sailing satellite that looks like a space saucer; an early 165-gram WHAM-O with raised lettering underneath (she neatly shaved off the letters with a razor so it would spin cleanly atop her fingernails while playing Freestyle); boxes filled with a rainbow of tournament discs from all over the world.

These days, her favorite plastic platters are from tournaments and teams she's organized or coached. That red and black disc with the eagle is from an international tournament in Germany, where she coached the first U.S. high school women's team. The white disc decorated tribal-art style is from a tournament where her team was given the Spirit of the Game award. It means as much to Lowry as if they'd won the actual game.

The teacher believes there's a direct connection between flying discs and conscientious citizens because Ultimate requires students to referee themselves, to play fairly under competitive pressure, to enjoy playing as much as winning.

"The attitude they learn in disc sports carries over," Lowry says. "Competition without the negativity. They learn to help people and do good things."

Also, how to have fun. At Freestyle tournaments, such as the upcoming Worlds, there's a tradition of wild late nights, skinny dipping, more games. "Winning the party is as important as winning the tournament," Lowry confides. "No matter how tired you are after you play, you go out to the beach and play your brains out again."

Paula Bock is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Her email is pbock@seattletimes.com. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.