With no posts on the blog in a while and an obvious absence from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, a lot of folks have asked me where I’ve been. In a nutshell, I needed to spend some time trimming the excess from my life. That included a lot of disc golf related stuff.
I’m guessing you’ve noticed that I haven’t put any new content up in a while. Not here, not on the Disc Golf Answer Man, not on the Zen Disc Golf Podcast, not on Instagram, not on Twitter, and not on Facebook. I’ve had a couple quality guest posts, but nothing directly from me in a while.
There is an environmentally safe way to go camping, one in which you leave behind what you find, dispose of waste properly, and generally go out of your way not to disturb the wilderness.
If the “leave no trace” ethos works for camping, shouldn’t it be true for other outdoor activities, like disc golf, as well? Take golf: it’s a beloved, centuries-old sport enjoyed around the world, but it’s also a sport that can have a negative impact on the environment.
If you’ve ever been to a professional sporting event, you’re familiar with the beginning of every game. It’s when the lights go out, the music goes up, and the teams are introduced to the crowd. Living near Chicago, a die hard sports town, I get the treat of some of the best produced sporting events in the country. My all time favorite and most memorable was, of course, seeing the Chicago Bulls in the early 90’s at the old Chicago stadium.
Everyone’s first throw is a bomb straight up into the air that very quickly begins to resemble a duck falling from the sky, reminiscent of the old school NES game Duck Hunt.
But then you step up for your next throw, and if you’re playing with “good” friends, they’ll give you a putter or midrange and tell you to release the disc flat and level to the ground. Then a thing of beauty happens, you’ll witness your disc glide 200+ ft directly towards the basket. It might even do an S curve. And from that moment on, you’re hooked. You’re literally addicted.
In a previous installment of Building the Perfect Bag, we addressed the topic of who does the work, you or the disc. We talked about the necessity of altering both your disc selection and your throw in order to cover all the possible flight lines you might need in a round.
That conclusion naturally leads to the dilemma of how many discs we actually need to carry. If some shots rely on a change in throw while others rely on a change of disc, how do we decide what to carry on any given round? Can you cover all needed flight lines with 3 discs? How about 10? Does it take 30? The real question is where is the balance and how do you find it? Not only that, where is the balance that is appropriate to our own individual game? That’s really where the secret sauce is.
A lot of you have been anxious for me to get to some actual disc recommendations as I slowly plod through the Building the Perfect Bag series. And since I’m probably not going to get there for a bit longer, I asked my good friends over at the Disc Golf Puttheads to serve up some putter recommendations for everyone.
A few days ago I played a round with a random person I met on the first tee at my home course. He hadn’t ever played there before, so I figured I’d show him around. My home course is pretty tough with a lot of woods and I like to give a hand to folks playing there for the first time. Normally, that’s not a problem, it’s something I enjoy. But I knew we were in for trouble when I saw him throw his first shot.
It wasn’t his throw that concerned me as much as it was the disc he used. As soon as I saw it emerge from his bag I prayed he didn’t have any more like it. Unfortunately there were a lot of them. Turns out this guy was a big fan of black discs with black stamps. At least half of his discs were this color. This was going to be an issue.
When I first started playing disc golf, my strategy for disc selection was pretty simple. If they sold it at the gas station down the street from my home course, it went in my bag. If the disc was tie dyed, that was even better. That kept me busy until they stopped restocking discs at that gas station. Then I discovered on line disc stores. That was fun, but bad. Very, very bad. Bad for my wallet. Bad for my game. I soon realized I needed a better strategy for what to put in my bag than “I’ll take one of each please!”
If we were to ask any disc golf related company what their company objectives are, we would get a variety of answers. Some examples would include…
The objectives would vary from company to company. Some would be focused on players. Some would be focused on technology. Some would be focused on being innovative and unique. The lists would be of varying lengths and content. As different as each list would be, they would also have one outstanding commonality.