We’re Ultimate players and Ultimate players never travel without an Ultimate disc. When you’re traveling, it’s not just a disc, it’s a friend-making tool – friends of the disc.

Having said that, Ultimate players never travel without cleats either, but here we are in KL and neither Julia nor myself have cleats. Perhaps we’re not such hardcore Ultimate players yet. Or perhaps we’ve foregone the 2kg in cleats because Tour D’ Tom Yum is supposed to feature lost and lost of beach sand.

Our compromise was bringing trainers for the two Ultimate sessions we planned – the first one is here in KL and the second we’re aiming for is Soidawgs in Bangkok. Our Sabah Ultimate Guru, Ken Kassim, is now based here in KL, so he invited us out for a game over at KBU. The 3rd taxi we flagged agreed to use the meter and we set off.

We saw the discs flying long before we knew where we where, so it was an easy find. We proceeded to reacquaint ourselves with Ultimate players we previously met at the Malaysian Ultimate Open and also to meet new ones. Of course, their level of play is beyond anything we have in Sabah, so we really appreciated the opportunity.

Ken quickly dismissed Julia’s sneakers as unsuitable to play in and when I took mine out of the bag the gaping soles dismissed mine too. So barefoot we played, which turned out detrimental to Julia, as in one of the first point she managed to stub her foot against the heal of a cleated player, instantly rendering 3 of her toes swollen and red. She would hobble for the rest of the game.

Other than that incident it was a great game in very hot weather and we worked up a suitable appetite, which is just as well, because Ken then carted us off to his usually post-ultimate grazing grounds – banana leaf at Kana Curry House.

Where is Kana Curry House? I have no idea – the road there winded left and right and I don’t know KL that well, so I might well never find the place again. Section 14, says Julia, but what do I know.

Anyway, the size of the banana leaf they placed in front of me was a prelude to how much food was to come. And come it did. For the next 20 minutes people came past with all sorts of food items and if you do anything that looks like a nod you get a portion on your leaf. I appeared to be nodding quite a bit, so before I knew it my banana leaf was stacked. So ate. And ate and ate and ate until I could no more – then I ate some more to clear my leaf, because it’s rude to leave food on your leaf.

Kana Curry House became the second place on Tour D’ Tom Yum where I would pick up weight. This banana leaf was also hands the most expensive banana leaf I will ever have, but I believe it was the large, nearly-half-a-chicken piece that I had that pushed up the price. But good stuff. Burp!

Take me away to Out of Africa

Luckily this was very early on in the day and we had been quite active, because we had Out Of Africa, that fabulous South African restaurant in Petaling Jaya, lined up for dinner. And Ian and Eve were joining, so we knew lots of food and fun was to be had.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. I think Julia went shopping, I can’t remember what I did – I might have been nursing my bloated stomach. Near the evening we met up with I and E and set off to Out of Africa. We repeated a class act similar to our previous time there (except less Vodka).

We started off with biltong and chicken liver pate – it would be rude not to. We followed it up with with pap-en-wors, venison pie and Ian had the ox-tail potjie – trust him to have something of an animal other than meat. For desert we shared a portion each of Cape Brandy pudding and Lemon Meringue pie between the four of us. As usual, everything was outstanding.

We were in time to catch the LRT home and because Ian wanted to take us for one of his action packed activities – which supposedly started quite early – for convenience sake we stayed over at theirs. Again there was some walking involved to get home, but it was all for the greater good as we were stuffed yet again.

Tour D’ Tom Yum is certainly looking like it’s going to leave a few fat people in its wake.

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Well, the weekend before last the Bristleheads went to KL to attend the Malaysian Ultimate Open. And I’m still tired.

Anyway, on Thursday I typed a press release which Julia proofed for me, faxed it off to all the newspapers and it got picked up by 5 newspapers. Three of the English papers and two Chinese features the Borneo Bristleheads going to KL for the MUO. I’m not sure how many people actually noticed it, because I didn’t receive any emails. Clearly we’ll need to do much more marketing for the sport.

As expected, we got our butts kicked at the MUO, but we had some exceptional experiences and met some great people. My only complaint was that it wasn’t as social as we’ve hoped, but now that we know the lay of the land we’ll do better next time.

As a team from Sabah we were well keen to win the party, as Sabahans (and by extension, those who live here) are known to party. However, on Saturday night our entire team was wiped out and tired, and most of us went to bed by around midnight. Only one of our team partied till dawn; Chris. Kadazan. Hardcore partier.

Saturday just took it out of us. Our very first game was up against Freak Show, and damn those guys are serious. Kudos to them for taking their game seriously serious, and they are considered one of the best teams in Asia, but wow, stern man. Anyway, we had loads of fun when we scored 1, and only 1, point against them.

Our second game on Saturday was against Wild Cats, a team we thought we had a better change against, because they weren’t testosterone charged. Nevertheless, our inexperience and clear lack of skill saw us only score two points against them.

By our third game we were seriously ready for action. One of our games got cancelled due to an electric storm, so we had some time to rest. Game three was up against Shiok, another serious Singaporean team who knew we were green and had the attitude to remind us of it. We dug deep and scored four points against them, which grinded them no end. We were chuffed.

On Sunday morning, much earlier than any of us wanted to be awake, we played against a team of mostly expats called Satu Lagi. They were top contenders, but a lot more fun to play against, because although they were serious they still had some time for silly buggers. We lost against them too, but we enjoy it.

Our next game was up against Dengue Fever, featuring the CEO of Air Asia X, and intense man who takes his Ultimate ultimately serious (he would not have stood out in the Singaporean teams). We scored a triumph of sorts, because even though we still lost against them, we managed to cap them, or prevent them from scoring the maximum of 13. The end score was 11-5, so a good result for us.

Our last game was really a friendly, the two bottom teams pitted against each other. Pirates was as near to our level as they had at the MUO and if we weren’t such soft asses who where all injured and tired, we might have been able to give them a run for their money. Instead, we lost 13-4.

Pirates had an uptight-kilt-wearing-finger-waving-rule-mongering captain who made the game memorable for his being pedantic and rubbing our noses in a fundamentalist interpretation of the rules, but as a game of Ultimate it was ok.

The fields were basically grass floating on mud. On the one hand this led to lots of injuries; sprained ankles, twisted knees, it was ugly. On the other hand it encouraged laying out, which meant lots of action as people flew across the field and after the disc. It was tiring though.

Not to mention dirty. I had to scrub my socks and shirts to get the mud out. Some of my clothing will never be the same again. But it’s all in good spirit.

In the end the Borneo Bristleheads, that’s us, won the Spirit Award. I guess when you play as poorly as we do, the only thing you can do is have fun. And we did. And the other teams noticed, so they decided we should win the Spirit Award. Thanks guys.

So now that we know the level of competition that we’re up against, we’ll prepare wholeheartedly for Singapore. There’s a tournament there in August, I think, and this time the Bristleheads will go to win one.

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I intended to take a short power-nap at about 7.30pm last night. Several snooze button pushes later it was 2am and I was wide awake.

I met Julia after work to do some vital last minute shopping before we jet off to KL later today to join the Malaysia Ultimate Open.  Most notably outstanding from our inventory of need-it items were what Julia calls honey shorts and contact lenses for me.

Honey Shorts

In Tony’s book, Ultimate - The Greatest Sport Ever Invented by Man, he talks about the Honey Pass.  All it is really, is when a known couple on the team are the last two involved in scoring a point. You’ve passed to your honey, hence the Honey Pass.

You can now probably guess why she’s calling it Honey Shorts. Simply because a known couple on the team are wearing the same shorts. Sickly sweet, I know. It’s futile to resist.

Contacts

Ultimate is not a contact sport.  Not officially, anyway.  But wearing glasses are well hazardous.  For instance, I was laying out (Ultimate speak for diving like a maniac) for the disc once, caught the disc, hit the ground, jumped up triumphantly with the disc in hand only to realise my glasses flew off somewhere.

It was one of those ‘nobody-move-you’ll-crush-my-glasses’ moments and everybody froze looking around for my specs.  Only once we found it a good 3 meters away from where I landed did the jubilations continue.

Ultimate is also a sweaty sport. You run around; a lot, so you sweat. My bald head has no hair to absorb and evaporate some sweat, so it come streaming down my face and causes my glasses to not be as secure as they could be.

With the running, jumping, looking up and down the whole time, it become annoying to keep on pushing them back, hence the contacts.

Disservice

So anyway, hunting around for the above was a tough walk and afterwards we felt a short power-nap would be justified.  But as it happens, you can only hit the snooze button in a daze so many times before you hit the off button.

At 2am I woke up with a start, had to switch off the lights and my computer, which I left on in anticipation of returning in 20 minutes, and then found myself wide awake an unable to sleep.

The only thing left to do was to get up and do what I wanted to do, so there I was, blogging.  At 3am Julia’s stomach started making odd noises and she declared her hunger.  The only place open at this time of the morning is McDonalds.

I protested, as McDonalds is seriously not something I consider food, but at 4.20am we were sitting there with sausages Egg McMuffins, oil saturated hash-browns and coffee that, seriously, tasted like ashtray.  The novelty factor was quite high though.

Interestingly enough it was busier than we had expected. They had about 6 staff members on duty, and 3 other tables were occupied.  Even more interesting was that there were 4 delivery guys in addition to that.

They all sat in a circle on the side-walk outside the McD’s… drinking beer!! At 4am the bike delivery boys at McDonald’s were drinking beer on the side walk. Not sure what the manager thought of that. If he noticed, he sure didn’t care.

We laughed our way through McDonald’s nutrition guide which has lots of colourful fruit and vegetables on the cover. In there they try debunking rumours that their meats aren’t 100% and that their apple pie doesn’t contain real apples and their juice isn’t real orange. Hehe.

Anyway, shortly after we were back at home, going at it again.  The theory is is that we just keep going and crash tonight after the flight, which gets us into KL at after midnight. Then hopefully we’ll be fresh and ready for tomorrow’s first game in the Malaysia Ultimate Open.

I hope that theory works.  Maybe I should go do some packing…

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We had the privilege of playing Ultimate this weekend past with Pasquale Anthony Leonardo, the author of Ultimate - The Greatest Sport Ever Invented by Man.

Tony is a bearded Ultimate aficionado who’s a good 6′5″, so he’s too tall to throw over and has way to wide a reach to throw around. Hope this guy never marks you in a game.

Actually, he’s playing at the Malaysian Ultimate Open in KL this weekend, on the Thailand team no less, so there’s a real possibility I might have to face him. Anyway, we bought his book, so I’ll ask for mercy based on that.

The book entitled Ultimate - The Greatest Sport Ever Invented by Man will not improve your game, said Tony. Our faces dropped, because why else would we want to buy it then?

Because it will make you a better player. The book teaches you the culture of Ultimate. For a game that is self regulated, have no umpires and whose number one rule is Spirit of the Game, culture is a major issue.

But Tony sells himself short, because I’m not 10 pages into the book and already I feel as if my game has improved.

Julia and I went to throw around the disc at Likas Sports Centre this evening. We need all the practise we can get, as although we’ve sort of got the knack of both the backhand and forehand throw, we need to build supreme confidence this week so that it’s really second nature by this weekend.

I’ve also learned a valuable lesson about t-shirts. We managed to get our team t-shirts sponsored and went to have it silk-screened. We realised that the t-shirts are not really great for playing in. They’re not as big as we thought (perhaps it shrunk during the curing of the paint?) and they’re not as breathable.

And what we imagined would be great big lettering on the back of the t-shirt, turned out no bigger than what I had designed it in CoralDraw, and that was an A4 page. But what to do?

50 t-shirts have been printed and the smallest of our team and those who over-estimated their shirt sizes, should be comfortable - the rest of us will hopefully bite their lips and pretend it’s the greatest things they’ve ever had the pleasure of wearing. Go Team Borneo Bristleheads! Ka kaaa! Ka kaaa!

Next time we’ll get samples for approval before we do the deed. This time we were inexperienced and excited about what we were doing. At least our sponsors will get their exposures and material and sizes aside, the shirts look good.

What we hope to gain from this tournament, other than experience of course, is lots of wannabe Ultimate players joining us on Sundays. We are aiming to take more than 1 team to the tournament in Singapore, so we better gets those eager people out to the field soon.

As you know, Ultimate in Sabah is played in Kota Kinabalu at the Likas Sports Complex, right next to the hockey field and behind the hostel, every Sunday.

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Today was the last Malaysia Ultimate Open team practise before the tournament next weekend. My knees are hurting and my legs are numb, but I guess that’s all the preparation we can do for now.
The Malaysia Ultimate Open is next weekend and we’ve been preparing for the last few weeks. Chances are we’ll get our asses kicked, but we’re looking forward to scoring some decent points, winning a game or two, and gaining loads of experience.

Not to mention all the new people we’ll meet and the things we’ll learn. Actually, the last few weekends have been pretty insightful, as we’ve had interesting players join our games.

A Canadian and a few America frisbee players saw our Ultimate Frisbee activities in Sabah on a website somewhere, and decided to join us, something we encourage everybody to do. They gave us tips and experience as to the level out there.

At our stage, we’re happy for any experience and I think our game has solidified a little bit in the last practice sessions.

Yesterday Ken and I did some sprint races and I think that might have been a bit more than I could handle, because my legs really hurt. This week will involve a lot of Frisbee throwing, some light jogging and a few sprints, tapering down towards the weekend. Carbo-loading is also in the mix.

We’ve said goodbye to a few team mates who we’ll only get to see in KL again, so for the rest of the week it’s each to his own.

Anyway, I guess this week I should also get some decent sleep this week and now is a good time to start.

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