It’s 1993. I’m just starting to understand journalism and the sport of Ultimate, and the world championships are coming to town. I knew a guy or three but hardly needed access—except for the last day anyone could come and watch from the sidelines. So I decided to spend the better part of a week wandering the fields, looking for some angle to describe this fairly new and unique sport. I’m not a sportswriter, and settled on the refreshment table run by the mother of one of the best players in the world. I wrote a short story and faxed it to a fancy magazine in New York. And nothing happened. Then, last summer, I stumbled across the copy while cleaning out an old file. I read it and I liked it. Then in December of 2021 I learned that Patti Dobyns had just passed away. A couple of Ultimate friends encouraged me to post this. It deserves a better layout and some of the classic photos from that tournament. But I also wanted to get it online in a timely fashion for friends and family.
By Erik Ness
When New York Ultimate arrived in Madison, Wisconsin for this summer’s world championships, even the tournament program was hostile. Citing recent and uncharacteristic losses, it called the past-champions a team in decline: “Yes, the once feared New York Dreadnought is slipping below the surface and ravenous sharks are circling the weary survivors. Come watch the feeding frenzy!”
A generation’s answer to testosterone and competitive angst, Ultimate Frisbee was invented in 1968 by high school students in New Jersey. Now the fast-paced mix of basketball, football, and soccer is gaining currency–even the Cub Scouts have endorsed it. Once a refuge for bleeding-heart athletes, these days the scene resembles a hybrid cross between Lollapalooza and a rugby club. Frisbee is a flower child no more.
Witness the battle cry of New York Ultimate:
“No mercy, no prisoners, let the war begin. Nothing’s going to stop us till we win, win, win.
“No mercy, no prisoners, our god is cruel but just. We’ll wipe their pagan faces in the dust, dust, dust.”
Ultimate has crowned only eight world champions–thrice New York. A fourth is granted by most observers, as the squad couldn’t afford to defend its title last year in Japan. By virtue of this dominance, New York has essentially forfeited crowd support. Most spectators also play, and repeated losses to New York have nurtured a predisposition to root the underdog, though to little avail.
How did New York Ultimate build this dynasty? A popular theory is that they consistently violate the Spirit of the Game–a sportsmanship clause and Ultimate’s prime directive. This may be partly true, but it’s hard to distinguish mean-spirited mayhem from the rebellious game face New York adopts in defiance of unsympathetic crowds. This explanation also does great injustice to Patti Dobyns, ghostwriter of New York’s genius. Fifty-seven years old, a sun-softened beauty of kindest nature, Mrs. D.’s contributions are twofold. First, her commingled genes take the field in the guise of a compact 31 year-old son, Kenny, one of the few legends of the game. Second, her folding table serves as a portable infrastructure wherever New York plays.
The foundation is Gatorade in six hues: green, yellow, purple, red, orange, and blue. “Remember, its purple, not grape,” says Mrs. D., who is not fooled by food science. She keeps each color at the ready in nine glass bottles, some so old the cap is worn to bare metal. These fit nicely in the milk crate under the table, next to the mix, bought twenty-five pounds at a time. Though “the guys forget to eat,” the table is also decked solid with sliced bananas and oranges, a basket of grapes, raisins, bread, peanut butter, jelly, Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, cookies, even coffee. Milk is in the nearby cooler, next to a tub of juice on ice.
In keeping with more than a decade of boosterism, Mrs. D. journeyed faithfully to Madison, where New York rebounded from one more unexpected loss to pull within a victory of the championship. While she laid the table for the title game against San Francisco’s Double Happiness, her son and his cohort of suntans and muscles incite riot. Chanting in unison, they revel in words belonging to no less a sportsman than Genghis Kahn: “There is no greater happiness than to drive your enemy and scatter him before you. To reduce his cities to rubble, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to draw to your bosom his wives and daughters.”
Rough game. And so, Mrs. D. runs a small dispensary. Ibuprofen by the thousand, eye black, mosquito repellent, sun block, aspercreme, tape, bandages, triple anti-biotic, ankle wraps, ice, and more ice. A final remedy is the three-case cooler in her 1986 suburban stocked with Bass Ale and offerings from local microbreweries. The suburban (and its new engine) is as important as the table, for Mrs. D. no longer lives on Central Park West. Since moving with her husband to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1986, she has logged 230,000 miles and a new engine in support of “the guys.”
No Little League mom, Mrs. D.’s table is open to all, accounting for her status as a patron saint of Ultimate: She has probably disbursed more ice and ibuprofen than a Knicks trainer. For a while the team tried to cover her expenses, but she put an end to it because they “acted like monsters” when anyone else came near the table. She’s still partisan, though. “I don’t like close games,” she admits when San Francisco pulls within two and the crowd thunders with cries of DOUBLE!!…HAPPINESS!!
This Bay area squad is not to be trifled with. Young and fast, they began the year with a victory over New York in Tempe. A few minutes later the crowd is tepid after a New York score, and one player stalks the sideline, shouting at his teammates. “Do you hear that silence? Do you hear that fucking silence? Do you hear it?” He grabs a teammate and rages, eye to eye, at a dangerous volume: “USE IT!”
This, while they’re ahead. What happens when they lose? “They’re awful,” says Mrs. D.
No matter. Kenny, who has played sparingly this week because of a foot injury, has banished pain and come alive on the field, scoring almost at will. He has the disc again, but his shoulders betray a will to strike, and Double Happiness has fallen into a desperately tenacious defense—there is no open throw. Kenny flips the disc back and away, but moments later receives it again, and sees his man break away across the back of the end zone. With a high, arcing, upside-down throw called a hammer, the last nail is driven. New York 21, Double Happiness 15. Kenny raises his arms in victory, Mrs. D. pumps her fists, takes a few snapshots, and lays out the peanut butter and jelly.