Can't believe this is my first post here. Heh. Love the site. Use the course reviews all the time. Was here that I learned about Flyboy outside of Atl which is now on my bucket list of courses to play.
Anyway, I lurk a lot though I could have sworn I posted here looking for help about a year and a half ago when I started building my own basket for a friend as a birthday present.
Anyway, wanted to share this. This is starting to blow up some, certainly around here. I've always been proud of the fact that we have some of the best courses around where I live and we're even luckier to have Ken Climo in the area pumping things up. I shop at his store a lot - in fact while I have less than 2 dozen discs all but I think 3 of them came from his store.
This was posted yesterday to youtube - a video of one of his company vans really coming way too close to a bicycle rider. The guy riding the bike seemed pretty cool about it when he caught up to the van and just tried to remind him to give bike riders a bit more room on the road when the guy started being kind of a jerk about it. The driver was telling him to get off the road, etc. Even the vans passenger was trying to tell the driver to ease up a bit.
Even that wasn't all that bad. This morning when I saw the video I tossed a small post on the companies Facebook page making sure they knew about it and that maybe they should educate the guy driving the van, etc.
They responded to that saying the guy on the bike deliberately swerved into the path of the van just to antagonize the driver! I couldn't believe they would put that kind of public face on arguably one of the largest Disc Golf sponsors in the area, if not the whole region. I mean, Ken Climo is damn near the face of the sport! Certainly was the first name I came to recognize as I started playing more.
Even worse they then started deleting every single persons post on their page. The overwhelming majority of them were pretty calm and level headed, just asking for an apology and that the van driver learn to take it easy.
As this spreads around the internet, I hate seeing that this is the introduction to Disc Golf that a lot of people are going to be getting. It's just not cool. Generally speaking we are often one of the loudest voices for keeping areas open and green - it's those areas that make the perfect course. I just think we can do better.
What do you think?
Here is the video:
http://youtu.be/LoHO_e40Ick
Here is their response on FB which they have since deleted when they removed everyone elses comments:
Clearwater Disc Golf Store wrote: "It seems around here we have a lot of aggressive bicyclists with helmet cams that go out and try to antagonize drivers. We talked to the police about it and it seems its an ongoing issue. Too bad they want to take it out on a struggling mom-n-pop local business.
If you have an issue take it to the local police. Don`t slander hard working people on a public forum. I promise I won`t try to move my bike in front of your car and film it and blame it on you.
I have a teenager who rides his bike around here too, all the time. 3 feet is the rule and everyone I know tries there best to abide by it.
Now if you want to hate on us there isn`t much we can do about it.
To be perfectly clear - I'm not on a witch hunt. I'm not running around with a torch yelling for them to get shut down or anything. I just think it's bizarre how it's being handled and I think it makes the whole sport look bad and I wish they'd just apologize, move on and none of this would have happened.