MARQUETTE - In 1958, after a family member found and bought a "Pluto Platter" Frisbee in a store in Minneapolis, Tim Healy started throwing the disc near his home in Eagle Harbor, and ended up inventing a sport that would eventually be played on an international level.
"The sport was invented at my uncle's baptism in Escanaba," said Mike Houle, a grandson of Tim Healy. "They (the Healy family) were just throwing the Frisbee around and decided to make up a game. They were just throwing it harder and harder at each other, and by the end of the night the game was born."
Guts Frisbee, a game in which two teams of five players each line up facing each other like Civil War soldiers and whip a standard-sized Frisbee at one another at speeds up to 80 miles per hour, was first officially played in a Fourth of July tournament in Escanaba in 1958, and the Invitational Frisbee Tournament was born.
The sport thrived through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and is still being played today, but for an unknown reason, membership has been starting to fall off.
"It went real strong through the 80s, then for whatever reason, not as many people were playing all of a sudden," said Buck Buchanan, a 2005 Guts Frisbee Hall of Fame inductee. "Now, we're trying to get as many young players involved in the sport as we can."
The Invitational Frisbee Tournament was won by Houle's grandfather's team for the first nine years, before a team of players from California was invited to the tournament, and won.
"I guess that's what got it spreading in California, and people watching it just caught on to the game. Basically just seeing the game is the main way that it spreads," Houle said.
"We'd like to be able to spread it on ourselves. We'd like to see more high school teams get involved, and they could pass it on to their friends and we're trying to get the game back to what it was in the 60s and 70s when there were 65 teams playing at the IFT."
There's a tournament in Marquette on Aug. 8-9, and both Houle and Buchanan said they hope that more local youth will want to get involved in the sport once they see it played.
"One of the things that really attracts people is that it's one-on-one, and you're throwing the disc at 80 miles per hour, and there's no better feeling than catching the disc clean out of the air with one hand," Buchanan said. "It's like hitting a home run."
Houle said his team - the Advance Sports Training team comprised of himself, Josh Johnson, Justin Verigin, Cam Verigin and Adam Gannon - practices three times a week, and gets together as often as possible to throw the Frisbee around whenever they can.
"Any Marquette ultimate disc players or disc golfers who want to come down and give us a try, we practice every Tuesday and Thursday at 7 p.m. at Tourist Park in Marquette," Buchanan added.
The U.S. Guts Players Association will be hosting a tournament this weekend in Hancock, another on Aug. 8-9 in Marquette, and then the U.S. Nationals will be in downstate Sterling Heights Sept. 5-6.
For more information, visit the Marquette Guts page on Facebook, USGPA.com for the national organization, and gutsfrisbee.com for general information.
