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infinitebrownianmotion · 7 years ago

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Matters of the Heart or ‘Why I Stopped Playing Ultimate Frisbee’

Dear Nobody,

You might not have heard of Ultimate frisbee, but it’s one of the best things that has ever happened to me. It’s a team sport which I discovered in 2015. Until then, I hadn’t realized that I could play a sport. Soon, love quickly turned to manic addiction. Family and friends would groan at the mention of the F word, which in this case referred to the combination of football, basketball and rugby, with a frisbee thrown in the mix for fun. For a blissful two years, not much else existed for me. I would miss birthday parties, family dinners, and drinks with friends, just so I could chase after a 175g plastic disc. I don’t know what it is about a frisbee sailing through the air, its path determined by the presumably complicated physics of angular momentum, gravity and prevailing environmental conditions – but it’s always a moment of pure abandon, an exhilarating feeling as you bound after it, mind completely blank.

You know what made Ultimate frisbee so special though? It was the people I got to play it with. For the longest time after I returned home from a masters abroad, I found it hard to make new friends or connect with the ones I already had. This was because my masters coursemates had set the bar too high for most other people. But in discovering Ultimate, starting a team in Bangalore and interacting with the larger community, I felt like a polar bear who’d found an intact sheet of sea-ice in the Arctic (i.e., thrilled, what with climate change and its impact on our planet). My point is that I finally felt at home for the first time in two years, part of a cult (as my friends still adamantly maintain) and amongst a diverse set of like-minded people. My team, which we fatefully christened after a spinal cord injury that I would suffer from a few months later, meant the world to me. If I wasn’t at team practice on weekday evenings or on weekends, then I was at some team dinner or Ultimate tournament or post-tournament party or the other. I had found my paradise.

My dearest Nobody, when I started writing this letter to you in December 2017, I knew it was going to be a sad, melancholy one. We’re now in April of the following year, but it seems like this letter will still be sad and melancholy, however, with a faint glimmer of hope. Maybe. Let’s see.

As I was saying, I had found my paradise, but not for long. In mid-2016, I landed what I thought was my dream job with a dream organization. It required me to spend nine months with a few short breaks at a field site in a remote part of the country surrounded by forests and wildlife (I have written about this here). I arrived at the stipulated location with my bag and a burning love for Ultimate. Is that how evangelists feel? I had brought a few frisbees with me and it wasn’t long before I started terrorizing the village kids. Yikes, is that also how evangelists feel? Through my proselytizing, I met a young girl (now a good friend), who was a brilliant football player. She took to the sport like a bear to honey. Pretty soon, when I began to teach Ultimate at local schools, she was my assistant coach. Outside of Ultimate, she was my coach, always motivating me to go running with her at unearthly hours on cold, dark winter mornings, ensuring that I stretched afterwards. Despite all my mock protests, I was glad to be whipped into shape, because I knew that I had to go back for tournaments and I couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, let my team down (out of touch maybe, but certainly not out of shape, I’d say to myself sometimes). It was difficult getting out of my field site and all the way across the country to national tournaments (not to mention expensive AF), but there was never a question about not making it. That first field season, despite the endless challenges it posed with regard to working with local communities for wildlife conservation, was glorious. I loved village life on the forest fringe, watching hornbills at their nests during the breeding season, having new experiences practically every day – it was all very exciting. I even ploughed through the few crazy months that I had to spend alone in the field, always keeping sight of the silver lining. And then after the field season ended, I went back to Bangalore, which happens to be home and also where our office is located and where my Ultimate team is based. Three months later, I was back in the field but this time around something had changed.

When my second field season/exile to the field began, I sensed something amiss but struggled to put a finger on it. I was more acutely aware of the sacrifices I was making to be here, far, far away from my family, friends and team, knowing fully well that their lives would go on without me, as it had before, and that I would miss watching my niece and nephew grow up, that I wouldn’t be able to improve my game at team practice sessions, that I would miss almost everything that added meaning to my life. Before I landed this job, I had missed many social gatherings and family visits for Ultimate, so this shouldn’t have been a revelation to me, yet not having a choice in the matter seemed to make all the difference. I felt like my life was on pause when I was in the field, resuming only when I went home. The only problem was that only my life had been on hold, and I was constantly trying to catch up with those around me who’d moved on. I stopped going for morning runs with my local friend. I had already missed one tournament in Chennai when I left for the field and I wasn’t going to be able to make it for the one in Surat later in December, so I surmised that there wasn’t any point in working on my fitness (my only motivation to stay fit has always been so that I can play Ultimate). I missed my team terribly. I couldn’t bring myself to do throws with either my friend or the other village kids. I completely stopped teaching Ultimate in schools in my free time (much to the disappointment of some of the kids, unfortunately). I was suffering from intense nostalgia (the Portuguese word ‘saudade’ comes to mind) and also what is referred to in the digital age as FOMO or ‘fear of missing out’.

After three months of not throwing or working out, I went home for Christmas. It was a relief, to say the least, and I tried to play as much Ultimate as I could manage. The next national tournament was scheduled to happen in Ahmedabad at the end of January, but there was no way I could have stayed on that long. With a renewed sense of determination, I decided to play that tournament no matter what. I knew that it would be a long journey, travelling the entire breadth of the country from the easternmost state to the westernmost one. Even the staggering costs of air travel (from the nearest airport, which is in the neighbouring state, and with multiple connecting flights thereafter) couldn’t deter me. And so I played Ahmedabad Ultimate Open with my team, who had travelled together from Bangalore. Perhaps because of expectations I had from previous tournaments we’d played together for two years, I was a little disenchanted. Ours being a university team, there’s a huge turnover of players and the team composition inevitably changes as players come and go. I wasn’t used to playing with many of the newer players (to put it technically, we didn’t have ‘chemistry’ which is built over time as you practice together) and I was extremely rusty. It was a frustrating three days for me. My body wasn’t coping well with the physical abuse that comes with tournaments, my game was shit, and I missed some of the older players who I was used to playing with. But while my fantasy on the tournament field was shattered, off the field, I had a great time getting to know the new players and reconnecting with the few old ones, exploring Ahmedabad’s crazy street food scene and playing ridiculous games until late each night with the team. It was almost like old times. I was sad to leave because I didn’t know when I would get to play another tournament again, even as I realized that there was probably no point playing unless I had been able to practice with the team – I wasn’t going to be able to contribute much on the field otherwise and might even get in the way, especially if new strategies that I was unaware of were being executed.

With the tournament behind me, I did have one thing to look forward to though. Two of my friends/teammates were accompanying me back to my field site and would spend a few days there. It turned out to be a really great trip and on the eve of their departure, we played an impromptu Ultimate match with my friend and a bunch of village kids who were playing football when we invaded their ground. This rekindled my love for Ultimate and after they left, I resumed my fitness routine in part, if not fully. I was starting to feel good again and things only got better when I got selected to attend a workshop in Bangalore, after which I spent a few days working from the office and going for team practice sessions on alternate evenings. When I left for the field once more, it was with a conviction that things would be different this time around and that I would struggle to stay positive and motivated.

As I finish writing this letter to you, my friend, it’s with a stinging realization that tomorrow, my teammates will leave for Kodaikanal, where a special tournament of great sentimental value is happening for the first time in over six years. I won’t be joining them because I have to be an adult who can’t shirk work responsibilities, especially at a crucial time when we are in the process of shifting base camps and bang in the middle of the hornbill breeding season. Life seems bleak once more. I know that my heart will sink a little when I see team photos and there will be a tight knot of sadness in the pit of my stomach when I read about games and exciting plays on our Whatsapp group. Thanks to advances in modern communication, I can at least live these experiences vicariously, but it’s times like these that make me wonder at opportunity costs and whether any of this is worth it. I guess that glimmer of hope was just that – an illusion.

Love, D

New beginnings: Our first Ultimate frisbee tournament, Bangalore Ultimate Open, June 2015. We were all glad to get a new jersey designed immediately after, but this yellow-green one still holds immense sentimental value to the squad who played that first tournament.

Standard practice: Team huddle before every match.

The amazing Indian Ultimate frisbee community. Photo courtesy: Ultimate Players Association of India

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