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A Brief History of Disc Golf

    In 1955 a guy named Fred Morrison begin marketing a plastic flying disc called the "Pluto Platter" and in 1957 he sold the design to the toy maker Wham-O. In his early days Morrison had sold tin pie pans as flying toys. The Frisbie Pie Company was a bakery that happened to be near Yale University and their name was on the pie tins so the students would call them Frisbies. Wham-O played around and modified it and Named it the "Frisbee" and in 1959 started retail sales of their version. It was not until 1964 When Wham-O hired Ed Headrick as General Manager and VP of marketing that the Frisbee became a success. He reworked the early model and added more weight and little ridges to the rim to add more speed and control. Headrick also changed the marketing to make it a sport instead of a toy. Soon he created a heavier "Professional Frisbee" version and founded the "International Frisbee Association". The sport started with throwing and catching competitions.

    In 1965 a recreation councelor named George Sappenfeld was playing golf and thought it would be great to play golf with the newly popular Frisbee. In 1968 George became supervisor of Thousand Oaks Parks and Recreation in California. So George contacted Wham-O and Ed Headrick sent him Frisbees and Hula Hoops to set up a course at his park. Not much more came of it so Wham-O put disc golf on the back burner for a short time. In about 1970 a group of guys in Rochester, New York were playing their own version of Frisbee golf and created rules and started tournaments and leagues. By 1972 they held the Rochester Disc Golf Championship. Disc Golf came about as way to practice by throwing at targets and poles, but it was now gaining a life of its own. In 1973 they found out about Headrick's International Frisbee Associations newsletter and decided to promote Frisbee Golf by inviting frisbee enthusiasts from around the country and it was called the 1973 American Flying Discs Championship. They were not sure if any would make the trip so they took a gamble and bought a brand new Datsun B210 to give away to the winner. This peaked Ed Headrick's interest in disc golf again, so he decided to hire the 1974 AFDC winner Dan Roddick to head up Wham-O's Sports promotion dept. He now had another disc golf guy at Wham-O. Now Dan was able to promote disc golf at Frisbee events all over the country.

    Headrick was so convinced disc golf was his calling, he quit Wham-O and started the "Disc Golf Association Company" in 1976. He wanted to create a new "pole hole" he was unhappy with the poles, trash cans and hoops that were being used at the time, and the disagreements that would occur about whether a target was made or not, so he worked on many different designs until a design for a good basket target was created. It had to be make-able from all directions. This way if the disc stayed in the basket it was good "no guessing".