Forbes

Monday, December 13, 1999

Forbes Life

Sports Disc Drive If you want to connect with the digital crowd over

sports,

put away those videos on how to improve your golf swing. Work on

perfecting

your "huck" and your "scoober."

BY Ann Marsh

ULTIMATE FRISBEE HAS BEEN VERY VERY GOOD to Steve T. Jurvetson. In

1995 Jurvetson, then a 28-year-old partner in the Palo Alto venture

capital firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was wondering whether to fund a

small e-mail directory outfit called Four11.com. It turned out that

Jurvetson and two of Four11's founders shared a passion for ultimate

frisbee, or "disc."

That's what devotees call the game of ultimate frisbee, and these fans

are a devoted bunch indeed. If you plan to make your fortune in the

dot.com world but you don't know a scoober from a blade, you'd better

learn. Ultimate is the high-tech community's version of golf, but with a

lot more heart-attack potential.

Jurvetson liked Four11's business plan just fine, but more important,

he liked the style Michael Santullo and Larry Drebes displayed during

the lunchtime pickup games the three played regularly. It wasn't just

their skill, it was also their teamwork and the code of honor that count

for as much as athleticism in the sport's New Agey ethos. Vince Lombardi

has left the building.

Says Jurvetson, "If someone cheats or constantly criticizes, they may

not be someone you want to hire."

After a particularly sweaty ultimate frisbee face-off, the Four11

founders and the Draper Fisher Jurvetson partners signed paperwork for

$825,000 in seed funding on the hood of a car. Two years later Yahoo

acquired Four11. Today DFJ's investment is worth around $345 million in

Yahoo stock. As they say in discland, that's hot!

Ultimate hasn't quite reached golf's critical mass--yet. It's pretty

hard to count noses, but supposedly there are at least 100,000 people

nationwide who play it regularly. In the Bay Area are some of the

country's busiest ultimate leagues--teams have names like Spastic

Plastic, Saucy Jack and Feral Cows--but most of Silicon Valley can't

commit to a regularly scheduled anything. Games tend to get arranged ad

hoc, say, when everyone finishes inventing the latest Web browser.

Browse over to www.upa.org for

pickup game listings worldwide.

"Without sounding melodramatic, this is a game that mirrors a lot of

the values of the Valley," says Peter Nieh, 33, a venture capitalist

with Weiss, Peck & Greer in San Francisco. Nieh recently invested in

Clip2.com after a referral from an angel investor he met on the field

(if you happen to run into him there, just call him "Nee"). "It's

fast-paced, intense, very dynamic. You never have time to set up. Unlike

football, it just goes and goes and goes."

In fact, ultimate frisbee came about as an antidote to the oppressive,

hierarchical vibes in sports like football. The first game was played in

1968 in Maplewood, N.J. Among the inventors: Joel Silver, who went on

to produce such humongous Hollywood hits as the Die Hard and Lethal

Weapon series and The Matrix. "I moved in the student council that we

investigate getting frisbee onto the high school curriculum," recalls

Silver. Silver and his friends spent the next two years in the high

school parking lot--the grass field was a later refinement--devising the

rules. "At the end of my obit, they'll say, 'He also invented ultimate

frisbee,"' Silver predicts proudly.

Today's game is played on a football-length field with two teams of

seven players each. Players throw the disc past defenders to a teammate

who scores by catching it in one of two end-zones at either end of the

field. There are no "downs" or requirements for yardage gains, as in

football. The team on offense keeps advancing until the defending team

can wrest possession of the frisbee by knocking down or intercepting a

pass. Play continues nonstop.

Players can score by throwing short, crisp passes up the field or by

heaving long, dramatic "hucks" that are far more difficult to catch

because of the frisbee's varying flight patterns in changing winds. The

result is intense sprinting, leaping and volleyball-like "lay outs" for

the disc. It's taxing, to put it mildly.

Just as important to its partisans is how ultimate departs from the

underlying spirit of football, which is probably the reigning corporate

sports metaphor. Unlike football, ultimate is the ideal flat-management

sport. There are no fixed positions, no highly-specialized roles;

everyone is a quarterback and everyone is a receiver. There are no men

in gray flannel shoulder pads on an ultimate field.

The founding nerds also enshrined the spirit of tolerance for spazzes

and other athletically challenged players. They had felt the sting of

rejection often enough themselves. Silver recalls, "The jocks were a

clique. In ultimate, everybody played. It was a nonpolarizing game that

didn't hold to caste lines."

It's not unusual to attend a pickup game where talented athletes share

the field with first-timers dropping the disc right and left. Sarah

Anderson, 33, the new vice president of marketing at Egreetings.com in

San Francisco, just started playing the sport this past summer. You can

see her running around Golden Gate Park like a maniac on Saturdays with

husband Dante Anderson, 37, a former captain of the Canadian national

ultimate team.

Turnabout is fair play. In October Dante got a job as director of Web

content at Everdream.com, which gives away free PCs while charging steep

monthly service fees to technophobes. He went into his Everdream

interview expecting to talk about his resume. "They said, 'Yeah, yeah,

but tell me more about frisbee,"' he recalls.

"Ultimate embraces the idea of people being many things instead of

being a specialized cog in some moneymaking machine," says William

(Willie) Herndon, a schoolteacher from Venice, Calif. who's been playing

ultimate frisbee almost as long as Joel Silver has. Herndon recently

finished his own worshipful documentary on the sport, called Spirit of

the Game, which gets shown privately in ultimate circles.

Spirit of the Game takes its title from the game's revered code of

sportsmanship, painstakingly written by the frisbee founding fathers in

the early 1970s. This is a hallowed document; laugh only if don't give a

hoot whether or not your startup gets funding.

According to Spirit: "Highly competitive play is encouraged, but

never at the expense of the bond of mutual respect between players. And

never with an intention to abuse the agreed-upon rules of the game or

destroy the pure joy of play." Bill Gates, you are hereby sentenced to

remedial gym class.

Players resolve foul calls themselves on the field according to

agreed-upon protocols and, ideally, they acknowledge their own

transgressions. The sport is set to make its debut at the World Games in

Japan in 2001. Without referees.