Ultimate Glory by David Gessner

Author:David Gessner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-22T13:01:50+00:00

6.

My Forever Love

The Hostages were heading home.

The two teams going to the 1983 Nationals from the Northeast were a New York squad led by Kenny Dobyns and a Boston one led by Steve Mooney. That same sentence could be written annually over the next fifteen years. Moons and Dobyns were becoming the story of Northeast Ultimate and increasingly the story of National Ultimate.

Kenny Dobyns was not yet one of the most dominating figures in the fantasy world of Ultimate Frisbee, but Steve Mooney, the defending National Champion, was. The dislike between the two men was still in its infancy and had not yet hardened into what it would become. But already you could see it growing. It was the sanctimoniousness of the Rude Boys that drove Kenny crazy. The way Moons pretended to be above the fray. To see that the two men already disliked each other, all you had to do was watch them on the field. When Kenny approached Moons he always looked like he was about to relive that moment with Pat King and spit in his face. Of course he would have had to have spit up. To an almost comic degree, they were physical opposites—Dobyns short and thick, Moons tall and thin—and when they did stand next to each other they looked like a silent movie–era comedy team. They were temperamental opposites, too—Dobyns fiery and surly, Moons reasonable and relatively placid.

You could argue that Dobyns was a short man who played a big man’s game, while Moons was a tall man with the skills of a short one. Moons was surprisingly graceful for someone who by all rights should have been all arms and legs. And he was not just the tallest player in Ultimate but arguably the best. It surprised a lot of people on other teams that he was primarily a smart player, rather than a physical one. But while there had been that early moment, famous in Ultimate lore, when David Barkan skyed over him, he would get better and better at using his body as the years passed, and while he never quite became the deep threat that a casual observer of the game might have expected of a giant, he caught everything that came close to him and threw long with the best. Furthermore, he was every bit as fierce as Dobyns, though that fierceness was sometimes hidden under a calmer mien.

The two men contained each other. Dobyns, for all his chest-puffing bluster, was obviously a smart guy, an articulate guy, and, though I never got to know him well, a funny guy. Steve could be funny, too, more of a reactive comedian than a proactive one, but a comedian nonetheless, and despite the fact that many Hostages continued to hate the Rude Boys, like Japanese soldiers hiding out on an island long after the war had ended, I would grow to call him my friend. In the end the ambitions of both Moons and Dobyns did not prove delusional or unfounded.

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