Hitting the Frisbee Links in Prospect Park

For most golfers, bad weather usually means a cancelled tee time.  But in the case of the Prospect Park disc golfers, a loose collective of a dozen or so enthusiasts who have turned the park into an ad hoc Augusta, the opposite is true.

Park denizens aren't in the habit of responding to frantic shouts of "Fore!" so for safety reasons the course must be virtually empty to play.  Only on the wettest, coldest, rawest days do the disc golfers indulge their quirky hobby.  As the weather gets colder, their peak season kicks into gear.

In the beastliest of conditions, they huck discs – don't call them "Frisbees" – the length of football-fields, curving them around celebrated landmarks.  They aim in the direction of trees, flagpoles, and signposts that function as "holes."

If you were unaware of these Prospect Park disc golfers, look around the park and you'll see traces of them.  On the southeast portion of the Nethermead are two orange bricks submerged into the ground – that's the "tee" for "Hole" 8.  If you look closely at the tree nearest to the right front corner of the Music Pagoda, you'll notice a small dot of white paint.  That dot marks Hole 3, which is the tree itself.

Prospect Park disc golfers see the park differently than most people.  The elegant Beaux Arts building with Venetian arches on the water?  Most people just admire it; savvy Brooklynites know it as the Audubon House – but Prospect Park disc golfers know it as the landmark for Hole 4, which is the flagpole in front of it.  (The location of the tees and holes of the Prospect Park Course is available online.)

The group goes by the name of the Brooklyn Crawfish, so-named for the unexpected visitor who crawled out of the water hazard one day to join a round.  Two recreational ultimate players, Dave Grossman, 42, from North Slope and David "Mel" Meltzer, 53, founded the group several years ago.  Meltzer introduced Grossman to the sport, which Meltzer had been playing for around a decade.  For several years, the two of them played in recreational tournaments outside of the city. 

In 2005, the pair surveyed the park and began plotting the course, appointing themselves course "ams," as distinguished from golf course pros.  It is mostly confined to the Nethermead and the peninsula that juts into Prospect Park Lake.

"We were driven by the desire to have a course that was accessible," said Grossman.  "We did a lot of walking around the park and saying, 'We can start there and have a hole there.'  And it evolved over time."

One example of this evolution is Hole 10, the original version of which was blown down during September's tornado.  The new hole is another tree 30 feet beyond the original.

Grossman said the sport appealed to him initially as a way to stay active into middle age.  He described disc golf as having a similar appeal as the sport he calls "ball golf."

"You throw, you walk to your disc, you throw again.  And guys stand around and chat.  It's a slow-paced game, you need a lot of accuracy, and because there's no running you can play until you're pretty old," he said.

Another member of the Crawfish, Tim Graves, said, "It poses similar challenges as regular golf.  It's just you against the course.  But it requires more creativity, more different kinds of shots.  You have more options and freedom."

He added, "But it's much less expensive to play."

The holes range from 262 to 599 feet from tee to hole, roughly a third of the length of ball golf holes.  The types of shots and the discs used for them follow similar terminology as ball golf.  Drivers, used for tee shots, are the flattest discs.  Putters bow out a little more, and like their ball golf counterparts are the smallest instruments.  A strong driver like Grossman can huck it between 350 and 370 feet.

Most members of the Crawfish play in competitive tournaments in the tri-state area.  For semi-serious golfers like most of the Crawfish, this means roughly 5 to 10 tournaments per year. 

At competitive tournaments, each hole is a complex apparatus involving a basket and a halo of chains that deadens the impact of the oncoming disc, thereby enabling it to drop into the basket.  In Prospect Park, such holes are not possible.

For this reason, Prospect Park is not a tournament-worthy course according to the PDGA, the Professional Disc Golfers Association.  No member of the Crawfish is a professional, but many of them are members of the PDGA, which gives amateurs ratings based on their success in tournaments, much like in chess. 

Disc golf was formalized as a sport in the 1970s.  The PDGA now counts 40,000 members, and there are 3,000 courses in the country.  The sport is most popular in the south and southwest, where there is bountiful space to play.

The best professional disc golf players – who Grossman said he could "never get within 10 strokes of" – make around $45,000 a year.  That's a tiny sliver of what ball golfer Tiger Woods reportedly paid mistress Rachel Uchitel to stay silent about their affair.

Eugene Patron, a spokesman for the Prospect Park Alliance, expressed mild disapproval about the Prospect Park course's "holes."  "Purposely throwing a Frisbee into a tree is something we would discourage because you could injure the tree.  As mighty as an oak looks, if you take its bark off, that's an injury."

However, he said the Alliance encourages creative, quirky uses of the park.  "Olmstead and Vaux wanted it to be used for recreation.  While Frisbee golf is something they could have never envisioned, the fact that the park draws people for all of these sports is a great thing."