https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqSUoi71NtQ&t
Hey again everybody, I found that footage of me throwing in 1992, so here it is!
Not Michigan, but actually at Ball State University in Muncie, IN. When I was there from '91-'95, there were no courses closer than Indianapolis and I didn't have a car, so I could only take the few Discs I owned (including a Wham-O 165) and throw practice shots around campus. Come to think of it, I also had a Whippet and a Viper, but I left those at home because I couldn't throw them for snot yet. Not sure why the F-15 Eagle wasn't in this little video. Maybe I had lost it by this point.
At BSU I saw a group of other guys throwing Golf Discs in the quad just one time in four total years. If you include me, that's five people in total who I ever saw with real Discs when I was there.
The only two courses I had ever played at this point were Oxbow and George Wilson up in Northern Indiana where I'm originally from.
I couldn't throw any Golf Disc with a backhand at all at this early point in my "career", not even an Aviar. I was a HS baseball player just a year and a half before this video, so forehands were the only way I could generate enough power to make them do anything. I had never seen anybody play other than PDGA #315, who sold me my first Disc and was an old guy even then, and maybe about 15 or 20 others in total who were as clueless as I was about these fancy new sleek Golf Discs (that I always capitalize due to their holy significance if you didn't know). No YouTube for another 13 years and the internet was barely there at all, basically text only in a university computer lab. I wouldn't encounter printed material on Disc Golf for awhile yet either.
Thus, I had no real idea how to throw these and wouldn't for years to come.
In order of flight here we have a Roc, an Aviar Putter, and a Stingray (you'll notice I called it my driver!). Then I included my Wham-O 165 so I could compare the flights of the Golf Discs versus a regular Frisbee. Don't think I could crack 200' yet. That Roc would eventually be impaled by a thorn at Oxbow and I'd lose it over the park boundary fence at George Wilson on a hole that hasn't existed in over 25 years. The Stingray was lost to the pond at Grand Woods in 1996 when I yanked it errantly just like in this video on hole #9 and it sailed hard left into an area of the pond that probably didn't see a lot of Discs. I imagine it's buried ten feet deep under the muck still to this day there. I even remember where I lost the Frisbee. It was at a park in Goshen where I was a playground leader for neighborhood children. It sailed farther than I meant it to fly into a river that defined the park boundary and floated away forever.
Anyway, enjoy this snapshot of what Disc Golf was like for a lot of us in the very early days when you had to know somebody who knew what they were doing or else you had no chance to throw well.