I'll start as early as I can remember...
When I was a young lad around..92? (age 8...this may be BS but we'll act like it's fact) My dad brought home 2 Firsbee's marked with his company logo: The Gleason Works, he was a machinist at the time. Anyway, these discs were very similar to today's Ultimate discs. I loved those stupid things and would throw them all over. I eventually bought a bright green disc that was rather different in shape (maybe like a groove or a Banger GT but flatter) and flew a lot faster but didn't hang in the air as much.
I would spend hours just throwing them at things, trying to hit the box on the backboard of my basketball hoop. Try to hit trees from far away, throw for distance (shots marked off with little orange sports cones and all!) I had a lot of other sports and things going on (lots of bike riding) but I always enjoyed discs.
Years later I got a bulldog and discs were sort of a touchy subject. Bulldogs are the exact opposite of what would make a good disc dog...Labs I think have a very soft bite, they won't but holes in a disc and can be trained well. Bulldogs know ONE game this thing in my mouth is mine, good F***ing luck getting it back. So we'd play with discs around here and keep her slow butt running. If she got the disc your best chance was to do something else and hope she followed. She was a good dog
I moved to the "city" (AKA in town, not out in the sticks..) and played Lacrosse and didn't do much with discs of any sort. Over the next several years disc toys fell into more specific categories, nobody made random discs anymore. There were Ultimate discs, really light Frisbees (used to Double Disc court eventually) and weird flying toys by Aerobie. I bought a couple Ultimate discs.
I work overnights and we used to have 2 servers on all night. This was a pretty sweet deal because we never had a problem being too busy, and as soon as things slowed down the two of us could clean up really fast and had a lot of extra time to goof off and do stuff. During that first winter we played a lot of card games.
As spring rolled around we started getting anxious to get outside, but it was still too cold yet, we introduced a new product (our restaurant being a test store for the company) and it was TERRIBLE. They were supposed to be like pancakes meet crepes. I called them floppy frisbees. To prove my point we spent an entire shift tossing one of the damn things across the store. We got pretty good at avoiding lights and curving around corners and such. I decided I'd bring in a disc the next day.
For the next year roughly we spent HOURS a night just tossing an Ultimate disc around. We also dabbled in Aerobie rings and even one of those like 3' diameter hula hoop like discs. We had a lot of fun and played just about every game you can think of. Eventually we tried to hit light poles from a specific cement pad on the sidewalk.
Somewhere around 5 years before the aforementioned disc tossing summer (summer of 08 btw) I helped a buddy of mine move, and I found all these discs in his trunk. They were mostly Millennium discs but he told me they were for disc golf and he'd played with friends in Texas and we should totally play sometime. I did a tiny amount of research on the subject and got distracted by girls, computers, cars, music and whatever else at the time. He never did get back to the subject of disc golf until I brought the idea up to him about 2 months ago..
6 months before present day: I missed playing with discs at work. I had dabbled in a few other areas of interest without as much fun or opportunity to play (I've got more boardgames than you'd know what to do with...) so I on a whim looked up disc golf. I ended up on a Discraft site reading about good discs for beginners. They said, get a Buzzz. I looked at Amazon for it and found the Discraft Starter Kit. I added it to my wishlist and didn't buy it.
2-3 months later I find this newspaper article while bored an hour before leaving work:
I took a picture on my phone so I wouldn't lose it and decided to buy the disc set when I had the money.
I ordered the set on a Thursday and over the weekend we hung out with my buddy that had played disc golf in other states before. I asked him if he'd heard about the Naples course, and if he's like to play sometime, as I'd just ordered some discs.
He laughed out loud. A buddy of his at work had just gotten in to disc golf and was trying to get the guys at the office to play and they'd decided to play THIS UPCOMING WEEK! He asked if I'd like to join and I was excited to go!
Come the day of the game I still didn't have my discs and I wanted to throw something of my own in case I lost it, but also because I didn't want to have to learn a new disc when I got mine. So I stopped at a local Dick's to buy 1 (ONE!) disc...I walked out with an Innova starter set...oops.
I played that day and LOVED the game. Just LOVED it. The next day I got my Discraft set and I talked my dad into going to play the new Naples course the day after. I bought a weird disc (Quest AT T-bone) for myself and my dad like a Lightning disc they had and he used that to play for the day.
Since then I've got like...50 discs. A portable basket (the InStep one) 2 starter bags 1 FADE tourney bag, quad shocks birdie bag blah blah blah.
I'm the @$$hole with more gear than he has skill, I'll admit it. But I do use my stuff and I am learning, and I use my extra stuff to teach people how to play and to sucker friends and family into the game.
I think a large part of it is that I'm excited to have more than one choice in discs again. Ultimate disc selection is do I want the blue hotstamp or the red? I love the freedom of choice...so I choose a lot of stuff
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