The Ultimate Journey

Africa United team dance break at All Africa Ultimate Championships 2019

As a half-assed haiku poet, salty seadog, reefer cheefing semi-professional vagabond and autodidactic happy hour linguist (I have a superb accent and a deep repertoire of colorful curse words in both Spanish and Arabic, and some more polite “where is the bathroom” type material in Portuguese, Hebrew and Swahili), it’s possible that I was always doomed to crash and burn in corporate. There were no other oyster farmers working for the risk management firm that relocated me to Dubai, and my fellow editors were disappointingly unenthusiastic about the Hot Club pens I gave them as gifts. I doubt any of my colleagues knew how to roll a blunt. While granting that rolling a dutch isn’t a necessary skill to thrive in the arena of corporate risk management, I’m trying to get at a broader discussion of what does or does not constitute a life lived to the fullest; based on the relatively short time I’ve spent masquerading as an adult, it seems perilously easy to rope yourself into a future with no room for imagination. My corporate shortcut into a writing career was actually a dead end, and getting fired and thrown into the great wide open was a tremendous gift. Ramadan kareem, indeed. I don’t think there is a substitute for spilling your guts out on the page, and I don’t think I would have come to terms with the lack of work I was putting into my passions if I had remained in Dubai. Catastrophe can be the catalyst for necessary change, and thus was born the Ultimate Journey. The premise is simple: an ultimate frisbee vision quest across the fringe and frontier of the world’s greatest team sport, to break bread and break marks with frisbee players from around the world.

Less ostentatiously put, it’s a frisbee travel blog.

Ultimate Junkies League Stormtroopers ft. teammates from India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey, the United States and Venezuela.

After I got fired, I turned down an offer for a sales position on the grounds that I would rather be broke than be a health insurance broker. I didn’t move halfway across the world just to give up and go home like a bitch, so I left most of my possessions in a friend’s apartment in Dubai and hit the road, opting for a one way flight to Jordan rather than back home to Boston Logan. I have frisbee contacts in Amman from my time playing and coaching with Ultimate Palestine, and the president of the Jordanian Flying Disc Federation (JFDF) has been generous enough to let me stay in his apartment for three weeks while he is home visiting his family in the states. The rest of the JFDF community has been incredible as well, a fantastic group of people who took me in as if we had been friends forever. My twin brother, who in addition to being my favorite human on the planet is a competent, mature adult with a real job, loaned me some survival money. In the spirit of maintaining my family’s equilibrium, I fulfilled my duty as the wildly irresponsible Wolfang brother and immediately spent almost all of the money on a round trip flight from Amman to Johannesburg to play in the 2019 All Africa Ultimate Championships. From a financial perspective, it was a horrendous decision. From the perspective of starting an ultimate frisbee vision quest, I think we can all agree that it was an absolute power move. Joburg was lekker, mate; I stayed with the vice president of the South Africa Flying Disc Association and his weed-growing roommate (it’s legal there, and he grows other plants too, as a longstanding member of “the Succulent Society of South Africa”), played for the Africa United squad with teammates from Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, and Uganda, subsisted mainly on beer and biltong for three days and went out to dinner with a beautiful and charming Kenyan woman on my last night in town. The tournament was amazing, the team dance competition after the first day was legendary, and the weather was sublime. The whole trip was soul medicine. When I left Warren at the end of March, I could never have foreseen myself winding up at a polo field in Johannesburg, crushing Castle Lights in the South African sun and watching a frisbee game between a club team from Kenya and the University of Cape Town. I’m finishing this post on a layover in the Nairobi airport right now, eating some githeri and kelewele and drinking a Tusker lager before I continue on my 20 hour journey back to Amman, and I feel infinitely more at home here, broke as a promise and riding the tides of uncertainty, than I ever did in my gray little cubicle in Dubai.

kelewele and githere and beer

When you only have seven people on your frisbee team, meaning there are no substitutes and you never get to rest, they call it running savage. People act like it sucks but I actually love it, transcending that false plateau of exhaustion to find your second wind, playing your heart out on every point and feeling limitless until the game ends. That’s me right now, in life. Running savage, no substitutes, no breaks, total focus on the present moment. Four months ago, I was working morning crew at the Hot Club, cleaning toilets with a mean hangover and smoking jays in the alley. Two months ago, I was editing political analysis and business intelligence reports for massive corporate clients in the world’s most expensive capitalist mirage. Last month I was playing for a primarily Filipino team in Dubai called Ultimate Junkies, an amazing community that taught me how to eat boodlefight and how to say “hindi ako nagsasalita ng tagalog!” (“I don’t speak any Tagalog!”, a useful phrase to shout when all of the Filipinos start arguing about a call.) Now I spend my days strategizing about development with the JFDF and Ultimate Palestine executive boards, applying for teaching jobs, looking up cheap flights to random frisbee countries (is there a scene in Azerbaijan??) and scribbling postcards on the roof in Jabal Amman.

I’ll be staying in Jordan until the end of June, attempting a border crossing into Israel next week, sticking around Palestine for a wedding in July and then trying to finagle my way to Estonia in August to represent Ultimate Palestine at the World Flying Disc Federation’s international congress. I have like 700 bucks to get it all done. I don’t have a set itinerary beyond WFDF congress, but getting a job is definitely an idea that merits further consideration. I have applications out in four continents, my only criteria a three-way venn diagram of TEFL work, cheap beer and an ultimate frisbee scene. I am open to anything except for tedious bullshit tolerated in the name of somebody else’s definition of stability. I think the wages are probably better in New York than in Vietnam, and the nightlife is probably more exciting in Ho Chi Minh City than in Kurdistan, but it would be incredible to help build Iraq’s first ultimate frisbee team. The conventional definitions of opportunity and success are quite narrow in the United States, at least within the context of the socioeconomic paradigm I grew up in, but they become much more expansive and interesting when you discard ramrod-straight goal-setting, embrace unique opportunities and wander paths less traveled. I don’t need a New York City salary to get by as the only ultimate frisbee coach in Erbil or the newest digital nomad in Saigon, and at age 26 being tied down is still more terrifying to me than a few moments of emptiness beneath my feet.

Rocking Daddy Pocco’s jersey and my trademark khakis at the Ultimate Junkies Charity Hat Tournament in Safa Park, Dubai. Note the look of admiration on Louie’s face.

I’ve toyed with the idea of being a sportswriter ever since I was about ten years old, when I realized that I sucked at baseball and I would never play center field for the Yankees. The idea really took hold when I first read The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. I was too young to understand everything in the book, but very taken with the whole notion of Kahn’s poignant boyhood memories of the Brooklyn Dodgers manifesting as a writing career. As I grew into an awareness of how idyllic my childhood had been, I became dismissive of my own interest in sports as too frivolous and got increasingly wrapped up in politics, constantly wrestling with the world’s heaviness. However, last December I published an essay in SKYD magazine about my experience playing and coaching ultimate frisbee in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. It was sportswriting, in a sense, but the essay was also quite personal and touched on many ideas and experiences that had little to do with frisbee. Actually finishing a composition and getting my writing published had been my albatross for a long while, and it was gratifying to publish a piece that synthesized so many of my idiosyncratic interests into one cohesive narrative. In the course of writing, revising, and publishing that essay, I found a way to accommodate a fundamental need for joy without sacrificing my relentless quest to seek and disseminate knowledge about some of the world’s more complex political realities. While ultimate frisbee is the theme of the journey and the source of the blog’s pithy title, the writing, I hope, will mostly be about the people I meet and the ways in which ultimate frisbee intersects and overlaps with their daily lives and socio-political contexts. Occasionally, it might not be about ultimate frisbee or politics at all. It might just be about the way the breeze feels in a certain city, the sadness seen in a proud old man’s eyes or the way the air tastes different in the desert than it does at home. In truth, this project is as much about a journey inwards to fully inhabit my stated vocation of “writer” as it is about a journey outwards to build relationships and explore new cultures through the vehicle of ultimate frisbee.

I still remember my first day of tryouts at the University of Delaware, being astounded at the turnout of over 175 guys interested in playing ultimate. I remember my first tournament at the University of Maryland, my first layout, my first time shotgunning a beer (Natty Light, in a College Park motel bathroom). I remember fall regionals at UNC Wilmington on the most beautiful bermuda grass fields my feet have ever felt, the voyeuristic and surreal rookie experience of being a designated driver for the Hellfish barn party at James Madison, Sideshow winning sectionals against Maryland on universe point in the rain, and attending regionals in Martinsville, Virginia, where we may or may not have drunkenly snuck into an empty NASCAR arena after being eliminated on the first day. I remember learning about the World Flying Disc Federation, national associations and club scenes in over a hundred countries, the full scope and incredible depth of the ultimate frisbee community a reiteration on a global scale of my first day at Delaware tryouts. I remember moving to Palestine and finding out through word of mouth that there was a frisbee team that played once a week at the municipal field in Beit Sahur, and taking a taxi there, and seeing that everybody pretty much sucked at frisbee but still being beyond excited to join the community. It was in Palestine, where my two battered frisbees from home constituted a significant percentage of all the discs in the West Bank, that I was electrified by the dawning revelation that I was on the cutting edge of the sport’s introduction to new countries and cultures. I remember traveling with the Palestinian players, who had only ever played pick-up on their town field, to the Middle East North Africa Club Frisbee Championships in Jordan, watching their paradigm get shattered and rebuilt on a grand scale as they played teams from eight countries and met players from over twenty countries. I remember watching the American University of Cairo play the American University of Beirut, a full frisbee game communicated and contested in Arabic with all Arab players on both sides, an undeniable achievement, a manifestation of the sport’s establishment in beautiful countries and cultures so misunderstood by my own society. I remember basking on the turf in Amman, sipping a cold beer and watching the MENA 2017 finals with new friends from all over the world, a handful of colorful characters brought together by a love for this unique and quirky game. There are still moments of pure bliss amidst the madness, especially on the frisbee field. Even though my WordPress looks like a fifth grader designed it the night before his school project was due, I hope you’ll find the stories compelling enough to keep reading. I hope the unique joy of this sport will keep you coming back for more, the way it has for me and so many others around the world. Next dispatch from Jordan, or Palestine, or Spain, or Lithuania, or Kenya, or Kurdistan, or wherever I can get with a dirt cheap one-way ticket, always chasing a disc but really trying to grasp at something much more abstract.