Eat up, friends: Now is the time to be gluttonous. This is the calm before the storm. This is the night before the battle.
Our beloved sport is on the precipice of something certainly wild and possibly vile. The money is coming, and that money is going to change everything.
You think I’m kidding? Ask skateboarding.
I know that some of you are thinking about how this inevitable money gets to you. Whether you can get enough YouTube views or hat sales to eek out some sort of living from this coming windfall. A lot of you are banking on Discraft to lead the charge.
Well, I have bad news for you: You’re rooting for the bad guy – inadvertent as they may be.
You see, the most dangerous thing that disc golf can experience now is homogeny. What we need the least is uniformity. We can’t enter this golden of the game with any pre-planned ideas about who and what this sport is. That’s a bottleneck and a pigeonhole, and when has anyone who ever made a living off of frisbees enjoyed being pigeonholed or bottlenecked?
Here is the lazy writer’s version of the future of disc golf, should Discraft rule the world:
11 time world champion Paul McBeth steps up to the 18th tee at the Discraft World Championships, here on the Buzz Course at Terrex Springs Disc Golf Course. Three Time World Champ Brodie Smith is caddying – a profound statement after the two had such a tumultuous relationship on this season of DGN’s ‘The McBrodie Effect’.
Did that hurt a little bit? It should have.
This is the sort of circle-jerking nonsense that we get if disc golf rides this infusion of Ultimate kids and Brodie-nerds into the stratosphere; which, judging by the average amount of time it takes for a tournament to sell out, is right around the corner.
Discraft, who not only employs social media maven Brodie Smith and the best putter in the world, also just threw $10 million at Paul McBeth after having already helped cure the concrete on Pablo’s legacy tenfold with the last deal. If Discraft runs amok in 2021, there is a real chance that this COVID/Brodie influx of players will be funneled into an obnoxiously narrow channel of players and plastic.
So here is where we make the controversial realization that the best thing for disc golf is for Paul McBeth to be competitive…but not dominant.
First and foremost, seeing such a disparity between P. McB and the rest of the field financially, while that disparity exists only as a fraction of itself on the disc golf course, could make some of the other manufacturers, (who don’t make a bunch of their money from Ultimate), reevaluate what their players are worth.
And, if not, those players will soon be coming to a similar conclusion, which, again, adds parity to the situation.
So let’s say, hypothetically, that Paul has an off-year or two. He goes into the cave, if you will, (it is almost Easter, after all).
In the absence of the modern g.o.a.t., the blossoming disc golf world gets a much wider and more accurate view of what disc golf is. They see players and plastics from across the giant spectrums of this sport, as opposed to staring directly into the sun, into the nucleus of this still-niche lifestyle, and blinding themselves to the peripheral action that’s been growing the game all these years.
