A growing sport soars on the Front Range
JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. — Every Saturday, early in the morning, I take my dog for a walk at Harriman Lake Park in Littleton. Across Quincy Avenue is Fehringer Ranch Park, where I often see Frisbees flying through the air.
I moved to Colorado from Miami in 2011. I always associated Frisbee as a sunny, sandy East Coast beach hobby.
Upon further inspection, I realized these weren’t the same Frisbees I was used to seeing in South Beach. In fact, people don’t call these “Frisbees” at all — they’re discs, used for disc golf.
At Fehringer Ranch Park, I met Randy Baldwin, who was visiting from Illinois.
"I prefer more wooded land, with different elevations," he said about the disc golf course, which is largely flat and open. Randy said he has played disc golf since the 70s. When I met him, he was playing with his son, James, an astrophysics student at a nearby university.
"I always invite my friends to come to play but since it's 5 in the morning nobody wants to come," he added with a laugh.
"It's one more excuse to go out and meet people,” Randy said. “If you lose your [disc], any stranger helps you find it and that's when you interact with people."
Right on cue, a group of other disc golfers waved at the Baldwins to “play through.”
“See?,” James said, “The beauty of this game is that we have to respect each other.”
Walter Fredrick Morrison, who passed away in 2010 at 90 years old, is credited with inventing the Frisbee when he created the first plastic flying disc in the late 1940s.
In the late 60s, Ed Headrick — who was then Wham-O’s head of research and development — made alterations to Morrison’s invention, which resulted in the modern-day Frisbee. Headrick is also credited with standardizing disc golf. In 1975, around the time Randy started playing, Headrick patented the first disc golf targets, which many people call baskets.
But even though Headrick is called the “Father of Disc Golf,” some people dispute the history of the sport.
“There are many historical accounts of people playing golf with a flying disc, some of which pre-date the advent of the plastic flying discs by many years,” said Jim Palmeri, a hall of fame disc golfer.
Even if the history of the sport is fuzzy, the present is clear about one thing: disc golf is really popular in Colorado. From the Eastern Plains to the Western Slope, and the mountains in between, Colorado is home to nearly 300 disc golf courses. UDisc, an app dedicated to the sport, ranks Colorado as the 12th best state to play disc golf.
"Playing disc golf with my dad is the most wonderful thing in the world," said James, "We don't see each other that often and when he comes here to visit we're in the mountains or the prairies … spending time together and showing him places in Colorado that not many people get to see. I think it's wonderful."
Julio Sandoval is the senior photojournalist at Rocky Mountain PBS. You can reach him at juliosandoval@rmpbs.org.