Ordinary people just don’t understand the fierce pull of an Ultimate tournament. The director of our California Studies program, Mike Kowalewski, for example, was standing in the doorway of his room, looking at me and Alex Nord like we’d lost our minds. It was early February, and the air in San Francisco was cool and clear. It had been four months since either Alex or I had played competitive Ultimate, and we needed to, badly. Alex had begun making competitions out of everything he could think of, just to fill the void in his life: “Dude, I bet I can put these pants on faster than you!” It was starting to wear on our friendship.
“You want to go where?” Kowalewski said. “Tempe, Arizona? Now?”
We nodded.
“That’s like eight hundred miles,” he pointed out. We thought the estimate was pretty conservative, but the road trip itself was part of the pull. “Anything I can say to stop you? Would you still go if I said I’d flunk you?”
We looked at each other, looked back at him, and nodded again. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Well,” he said. “See you later.”
“Oh,” I said, “and Alex Masulis is coming, too.” Kowalewski was already shaking his head and closing the door. Nord and I grinned at each other. We loaded our cleats and tournament clothes into the luggage carriers of his green F-150, picked up Masulis, and got on the road.
We were south of Salinas on 101 when I realized that I’d left my sleeping bag back at the hotel. Masulis looked over at me. We were all three crushed into the tiny cab of the pickup. Masulis was carrying the CD cases on his lap and I was

because his long legs wouldn’t fit anywhere else.
“You left your sleeping bag?” Masulis said. “We need sleeping bags?”
“Christ,” said Nord. He was wearing square, opaque Ray Charles sunglasses. “Honestly. Buncha jokers.”
Just across the California-Arizona border, we pulled into a rest area to call the tourney hotel. It was freezing in the desert, and our legs were aching from the drive. Nord got on the phone and asked what room Josh Quaas was staying in. The receptionist gave him several room numbers and offered to connect him to one of them, but Nord declined, telling me later that “they don’t know if we’re coming or not. It’s all about being mysterious.” He’s weird sometimes.
We pulled into the Hampton Inn in Tempe at three in the morning. We must have tried every propped-open door on the second floor before we found ours. I met Johanna Neumann then, whom I recognized from the previous year’s Callahan hype. She sat up in bed, her hair going in every direction, gave us a surprisingly chipper hello, and gestured vaguely to the other side of the room. A bearded man I didn’t know, and whose name I’m still not sure of to this day, was sprawled out across the other bed. He mumbled something unintelligible and flung the top comforter down to the floor for us. The alarm, Johanna informed us, was set for seven. We curled up on the floor in our clothes and fell asleep instantly.

Playing top-flight club ultimate was a new experience for me, and Tempe was the best place to start. Our team was a rag-tag bunch of Carleton alums, C-Bass players, and Sockeye guys. We introduced ourselves to each other about fifteen minutes before the first round started. The day was windless and blazing hot. Even in the winter, apparently, the Phoenix sun is merciless. The only light I had with me was an old long-sleeved polyester Volleyball jersey, and because of our inability to win the opening flips, I was suffering. But it was okay, because the Weather Channel had sentenced Carleton to wind chills of sixty-below that day. I could think about that and laugh.
Saturday night, exhausted and dehydrated and sunburnt from a tough day of pool play, we went looking for dinner. Lou Burruss showed us how to put together what he referred to as “the perfect tournament meal.” Six of us packed into Roger Crafts’ rented convertible, and Lou steered us to the nearest Carl’s Jr.

“Alright,” he said. “You order a Western Chicken Sandwich and a Western Double Cheeseburger, and then you put ‘em together. So from the bottom you’ve got bun, onion rings, patty, cheese, bun, chicken breast, onion rings, bun, cheese, patty, onion rings, bun.” He called it the “Western Intimidator,” and he actually finished the one he made. We crammed back into the convertible, a feat that was made significantly more difficult by the round of Western Intimidators, and drove around Tempe for an hour searching for the Krispy Kreme we’d seen coming in the night before. Whatever possessed us to devour two dozen glazed doughnuts at that point is really hard to say. We later explained it to Kowalewski by saying that living fast and dying young is what playing Ultimate is really all about.

After getting eliminated by Jam in the Semis the next day and watching the Finals in the ninety-degree Arizona afternoon, our team began to disperse. The sun was setting over the purple desert as we climbed wearily back into the pickup, still wearing our ultimate clothes. For some reason, they smelled distinctly like kelp. The stars were just coming out when we hit I-40 at Flagstaff and turned to the West.
Masulis, being from the South, flatly refused to let us drive by the Waffle House he spotted from the interstate. It was eight o’clock at night, and the place was pretty empty. Two huge men in oil-stained shirts sat at the counter, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee out of mugs that looked like toys in their enormous hands. They watched us all the way to our booth, eyeing the scabs on our forearms, the angry sunburn on our faces, and the telltale limps. The waiter came to take our order, and he seemed to stand farther away from our table than normal. When he left, Nord pulled his shirt up to his nose, inhaled, and declared that he didn’t blame him. We laughed and ate quickly, anxious to get going again. We had to be back in San Francisco by seven the next night.

It was much harder to stay awake on stomachs so pleasantly full, and Masulis didn’t even try. When we got back on the interstate, he shamelessly leaned his head on my shoulder and started snoring away. We finally pulled off the road six miles shy of Needles, intending to save money by crashing out in the desert. The night was shockingly cold. Nord unrolled his sleeping bag on the ground, pulled his wool hat down over his eyes, wished us both luck, and went straight to sleep. Unbeknownst to us, we had parked the truck less than a hundred yards from what must have been the most heavily traveled railroad in the world. Fully loaded freight trains thundered by every fifteen minutes, shaking the ground under us. It didn’t matter one bit to Masulis or me, of course, because we, sleeping bag-less, were more concerned with the temperature than the noise. Winning a big-time Rocham, I tried to sleep in the cab, but it wasn’t much warmer than outside, and the seatbelt clips poked me in the ribs with every shift of my weight. Masulis tried at first to roll himself up in Nord’s tent like some kind of nylon burrito, but eventually gave up and went for a long run to get his blood flowing. We ardently hoped, Masulis and I, that this was one of those things that you eventually look back on with a smile. We woke Nord at the first pastel hint of dawn and sped into Needles for coffee and the afterthought of breakfast.

After crossing the rust-colored Mojave desert (during which time Nord made me lean out the window at seventy miles an hour and take a picture of the “Platonically perfect Joshua tree”), we stopped for lunch in the Great Central Valley. A restaurant called “Mohammed’s Pad” in a farming community like Wasco, California, seemed too good to pass up. It gaudily advertised “Texas-Style Pastrami Sandwiches” and “Hot Beef Cakes,” whatever those are. We didn’t have the courage to find out. It must have been the local high-school’s lunch hour, because there were hordes of kids strutting around the tiny lunch counter. One gutsy lad came up to me and asked if we played basketball. Not feeling up to the task of explaining what Ultimate is, I said that yes, we played for the Lithuanian National Basketball Team, in fact. I don’t know if he believed me, but he went away, which I figured was good enough.

Masulis had fallen asleep and was drooling on my shoulder again when we crested the hill overlooking Berkeley and Oakland five hours later. The sun was setting over the Bay, shining its last light on the peach-colored clouds above the horizon. Nord had driven nearly the whole way, and he looked like he might collapse at any moment. As we pulled onto the Bay Bridge, he turned and looked at me with those ridiculous sunglasses slipping down his nose.
“Do you think Kowalewski’ll really flunk us?” he asked.
The odor of three-day-old ultimate clothes and stale coffee filled the cab. I shrugged, watching the sunset behind his head. He smiled at me, and I smiled back. Sometimes there are better things, I figured, than passing classes.

— Derek Gottlieb
Derek was the co-captain of CUT this college season.