First, people, please: it’s disc golf, not Frisbee golf. That is, if you’ve heard of it at all, which is probably unlikely, unless 1) you watch a lot of ESPN2 late at night between the Magic the Gathering tournaments and one of many screens of useless poker, 2) you smoke a lot of pot, 3) you play Ultimate Frisbee, which often has a strong correlation with #2, or 4) you go to college. Frisbee is a brand of flying disc made by Wham-O, usually 135 grams (which is light, as opposed to a 165 gram Ultimate Frisbee or a 175 gram golf disc), whereas disc golf is played with golf discs (Wham-O does make a few golf discs, among them the #86 Softie, a classic putter now just recently brought back into circulation, but they are generally unimpressive). A Frisbee can leave a bruise. A golf disc can probably—though I didn’t take enough physics in school to prove it—kill you when thrown properly.

I have spent thousands of hours playing the game on over a hundred courses from San Diego to Tuscaloosa, AL to Canton, OH, where the Pro Football Hall of Fame resides just outside of Cleveland. Mostly this is done in Summer, which is the height of my obsession with the glorious game, between work refinishing floors of my hundred-year-old house and occasional teaching and catching up on reading in the long breath between semesters. The real test of the devotee, though, is when the Summer gives way to cold and Fall and leaves descending. My rule is that I will play year round if it is above zero, and occasionally I play when it’s below. Snow is no real obstacle, though it requires heavy boots and bundling up. Sometimes parks close (disc golf is primarily played in public parks on courses devoted to the game but onto which wander occasional kids and dogs and drunks) and I have to circumvent the gates. I’ve played with guys who tie streamers to the backs of their discs to aid in locating them when they get inevitably buried in snow banks, beneath the powder. I have been known to play in rain, in massive windstorm (this is less than fun), in sleet and hail and drunkenness, in squall and in tornado weather outside Ames, Iowa, when the sky turns green; when there are sirens and everything is suddenly still, I figure I can still get one more hole in before calling it a day and running to a shelter. I figure that, if a disc were thrown in a tornado, potentially it could travel for miles (far surpassing the flat land distance record for a golf disc, currently 250 meters, by Swedish golfer Christian Sandstrom—this is an impressive number; most average players can throw about 100 meters, and—though distance is one thing I do very well, which probably contributes to my obsession with the game, which is to say I can crush the thing—I can throw it about 150 meters on a good day).

I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that it’s not ridiculous, including you. So how can I convince you? It’s not as if it’s more ridiculous than “ball golf” (as we disc people call it): throwing a disc is far more natural than hitting a tiny dimpled technologically-enhanced ball with a graphite-shafted Big Bertha stick. I mean, discs are in the fucking Olympics (well, discus, anyhow). That means it’s like old and such. It takes much less time—I get in 18 holes in about an hour if I’m playing by myself, or an hour and a half if I am having more fun with friends. Compare that to the 4+ hours of your life you’ll blow on the ball course. It’s way better for the environment (the royal ball golf course in the country of Dubai uses one-third of the country’s yearly water supply for upkeep, as an extreme example). It’s cheaper (free most places, or occasionally you have to pay the public park fee or—very occasionally—greens fees of $10 or less). And the equipment—in spite of being at least doubly as cool as ball golf, more on this in a bit—is much cheaper. One disc ($7) is all you need to play. Compare, again, to perimeter-weighted, titanium-headed, graphite-shafted asshole sticks and the gas or electric carts that Southerners use exclusively to move them around the course (this is true—I played ball golf a couple years back with a Southerner who had never walked a round of golf in his life; he sputtered out and went back home after walking about nine holes with me). And I even like ball golf in all of its bizarreness and history; I own a set of clubs. I play a couple times a year with friends or when my in-laws visit. I even like watching it on TV and playing Tiger Woods Golf 2004 on Xbox with my friend Neil.

Disc golf is a stand-in for many of my most geekish tendencies: hoarding (or, if you prefer, collecting), a sometimes ferocious competitive streak, a serious interest in the bizarre (or simply dumb) or esoteric, my desire for control over and to exert force upon the world.

I have suffered the mockery of my wife and friends with my Mazda Protégé’s trunk filled with discs, and disc golf bags, and disc markers, disc golf magazines, the international course directory, and gloves (I wear a throwing glove to protect my hand and to improve my grip). I own hundreds of discs, most of them by the two major disc manufacturers, Innova (based in the awesomely-named Rancho Cucamonga, CA, and maker of discs mostly named after animals: Shark, Jaguar, Puma, Viper, Eagle, Cobra, in addition to the less realistic Archangel, Banshee, Dragon, Orc, and Roc, and the more abstract Beast and Monster­—Innova makes most of the discs that I like the best), and Discraft (Walled Lake, Michigan, which means I should be loyal to my home state, though in this one case I am not; they make more-technologically-named discs like the XL and the MRX, or the more meterorological and menacing—since menace is a necessary element to naming in any sort of sport—Cyclone, Storm, Typhoon). Discs come in a variety of weights (from 140 up to 200 grams each) and colors, different kinds of plastics, and different molds. Some are made for distance, some are designed for the equivalent of chip or midrange shots, for stability in wind, or to turn either left or right when thrown correctly, and others are for putting only. And variety is the key, as they all perform differently, so this ensures I’ll add more booty monthly to my plastic hoard.

I have a hundred and fifty discs (give or take a few—and the water and the trees both give and take constantly), only about half of which are really in rotation. I carry 15-20 in my bag (yes, I do have an official disc golf bag after years of carrying around modified purses gleaned from runs to Salvation Army) at any given time. Duplicates are necessary in case of loss during friendly play or tournaments. Of course some of them have been retired from play due to hitting trees (they become less reliable after this abuse), and I’ve kept several discs that have split in half due to hitting trees during sub-zero play (my policy is to keep the broken ones that have some sentimental value, such as those I’ve used to hit holes-in-one). And some of them are for show only, like my limited edition Starfire (how badass does that sound?), my old Super Roc, and my 2004 Championship Roc (both of which are hard to find, sold only promotionally, and can fetch well upwards of $150 on eBay, repository of all we secretly need and hoard but fear to own up to in public). When my wife cajoles me to make room for our groceries in the trunk, I resist. I can leave the jumper cables, the spare tire or the jack at home. How often do you need those, anyhow? I got AAA. It is important to be able to outfit up to ten friends who could conceivably join me for any given round at any moment with six discs each. It is important to open up my trunk among non-disc-golf friends and see their baffled stares.

I don’t get excited about the first stink of NASCAR exhaust, or the smell of the grass and beer and leather on baseball’s opening day. For me, it’s the feeling of new plastic, especially the Champion Line plastic (Innova’s name for it, whereas Discraft calls it Z-plastic) which is sometimes translucent, fluorescent, candy-colored, and just a little bit sticky—it fucking feels space age, like zero-gravity candy. It is made for the air, made to be accelerated by my arm out into a fairway as it stretches down a hill into the open. I am a massive sucker for it, and if I go into a disc store, I am guaranteed to come out with at least one new item for the arsenal. I suppose this is how car buffs feel about some sweet new ride. Or how my high school friends felt about a new titanium shaft oversized driver and perimeter weighted irons. This is the lure of technology, of having the newest, coolest thing. Not all disc golfers fall for it as often as I do, but such is the province and the genius of the nerd.

So if my right arm is far stronger than my left from repeated use, who cares? Just because I have my students work on proposals for how to get a disc golf course on campus doesn’t mean I care less about their futures. When I was still in school, I would ditch nearly any class to get in a round if it was suggested. I did fine, after all: summa cum laude is for chumps and suckers. So I subscribe to the glossy (and generally impressive) Disc Golf World News and keep copies in my bathroom, refusing to do so much as hide them under Harper’s or The New York Review of Books; where’s the shame in that?

One stereotype is true: a lot of people smoke a lot of pot while playing. I rarely get through a round at one of my four regular courses without being offered a joint. This is real generosity. At the same time, the same course will also contain 200 people hanging out in the parking lot on summer league nights, Def Leppard or Cinderella streaming from the windows of their Trans Ams, beers in hands nearly all around. All in all it is a classy scene. Some come to party, whereas I come to play (though I never turn down a proffered beer: that’s just rude). The Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA—add .com at the end of it to find their website and much evangelism about the game) touts disc golf as being open to anyone from any economic class, and that’s true (not as much true for ball golf, obviously). Hence the Trans Ams. Hence the Cinderella (“That gypsy road won’t take me home…I drove all night just to see the light”). Yes. At my weekly league, several guys call me The Professor since there aren’t so many college profs who play the game—and this is kind of shameful, considering how many courses are built on college campuses. A friend of mine in grad school had his composition class meet on the course one spring, where he lectured briefly in between holes. Something to admire, to aspire to. You do see smart folks out there, though: I used to play in Ames with a guy finishing up his Ph.D. in soil sciences who was a world-class (if overly given to self-promotion) player, who was also excellent at chess. He was single, in pursuit of his obsession. Aren’t we all.

I never have a hard time understanding people’s geekdoms—whether it’s playing the first Bard’s Tale game on their retrofitted 1985 PC with 16-color EGA graphics, or memorizing baseball statistics, or writing fan fiction with Mulder and Scully finally getting it on in a drunken and implausible threesome with Krycek, or digging through trash in hopes of treasure. I can see that there are pleasures in nearly everything if taken seriously enough.

That being the case, it frustrates me to even have to explain the root of my obsession. And I’m not sure that we can—while immersed—ever really see ourselves from enough distance to see it rightly. Nor should we. Being deep inside of something is important—maybe we need to lose ourselves.

So, then: why? Why really? There is real aesthetic pleasure in playing a round with my few remaining good friends from college in the morning, before most people are up, and after those who are unfortunate enough to be up and not to be us are already at work. I love the sight of the disc in the air, its predictable motion as it flattens and turns, then turns back around a stand of trees towards the Mach V basket made from chain link steel. The power is addictive—being able to throw these things over four hundred feet—and this is the first physical thing that I’ve been really good at, so there’s that, too, the pleasure not of mastery perhaps, but at least of competence. There is the appreciation of a really well-designed hole, like Grand Rapids, Michigan’s Riverside Park number fifteen, two hundred feet out to the basket on the end of a peninsula with the lake cresting up around it. And the sound of it, too—not the plunk of the ball as it drops quietly into the hole, but the satisfying crash of disc on chain. There is aesthetics, an appreciation. Yes. But also there is fellowship, the round played best with friends, the friends I’ve made out on the course (something about the game lends itself to talk more than ball golf does, and the people are mostly nicer on the disc golf course since they’re all not moneyed dicks). And there are the satisfactions of technology, the new yearly lines of discs, the new plastics they cast them in, with the kickass (and sometimes lame) new names and new learning curves for all—and all for usually twenty bucks or less. And then there’s nature and a kind of controlled isolation, the pleasure of that good walk spoiled (to hit up Twain, sort of). Sort of what I imagine hunters get out of being out in the woods, but without shooting the crap out of everything or freezing silently in a tree stand. And there is the pleasure of obsession itself, immersion in the world of esoteric detail even in spite of (or maybe because of) the derision of the patzers who just don’t get it, what it is to lose yourself in something, and who cares, finally, what? So in the end I am left with this: the view from the long hole 18 (pro tee—one almost always plays the hardest tees) on Wisconsin’s Elver Park course (which my friend Leonard memorably played over a hundred holes of golf on in one Cool Hand Luke sort of day when he was out against the world on a day off from being the best worker at a the worst job at Taco Bell at the East Towne Mall that summer that we lived in Madison) that stretches out five hundred feet with a three hundred foot vertical drop down a huge hill towards the fields, a hole in which you can get it there with one good strong throw with a chance of hitting an ace, of crushing the plastic direct into the chains with a gallery of potheads and other malcontents watching at first listlessly and then with much enthusiasm. Now that is something to remember, and a reason to keep playing.