Reflecting a little on the meaning of Spirit of the Game, Moses says, “The basic idea is this: It drives me nuts when people say that it’s ‘unspirited’ to call picks when they occur, etc. To me, Spirit means agreeing to play by the same rules as your opponent without a need for an external eye to enforce that.

he first time I ever saw Moses Rifkin play, it was on a videotape. I was a freshman at Carleton trying to make the A team, and one of my friends was showing us games from the previous year’s Amherst Invitational, sort of like a scouting exercise. On the tape there was a skinny kid in a black shirt with big, curly black hair who was making life miserable for the teams he played against. “That’s Moses,” said my friend. “He goes to Brown. He’s our year. He’s going to be trouble for us.”

Indeed. Two years later it was Moses Rifkin launching perfect full-field forehands to Fortunat Mueller time and again in what was (for us) a very long national championship game. I vividly recall standing on the line with my hand raised, ready to start the next point, and remembering the videotape and that statement: “He’s going to be trouble for us.” I would have laughed, but I was losing.

Moses started playing ultimate in the eighth grade; at high school ultimate was held out as a reward for finishing all of one’s work early. Through high school he played with the budding program at Paideia, which traveled to the Amherst Invitational during his junior year “expecting to get killed,” as he recalls, but which in fact took third place and won the tournament’s spirit award as well. From Paideia (and after a stint at Worlds with the U.S. junior national team), he went on to Brown, feeling “fortunate to have made a decision unrelated to ultimate (they had lost to Amherst High the year before).” Unrelated to ultimate or not or not, at Brown he joined Fortunat Mueller and Justin Safdie, the core of a young team on the rise. Two years later he was throwing big forehands to Mueller en route to a college national title. These days he’s an integral part of the elite Boston team he once idolized, DoG. Who’d have thought it?

“When the UPA Newsletter started publishing articles written by DoG players (Jim Parinella, Steve Mooney, etc.) about how to think about the game of ultimate, I devoured them. I cut them out, pasted them in books, read them over and over. Steve’s thoughtful and calm explanations about how to break the game down to its core principles were very influential.”

Perhaps even more influential was the way DoG carried itself on the field. “I loved the fact that DoG was regarded as a great team and a spirited one,” he says. “I would talk wide-eyed to my non-ultimate playing friends about how there was this team that was the best out there and put such stock in the respect between players. I was always the one in county soccer who would admit to the refs when I had been the last to hit the ball when it went out of bounds...so ultimate (and SOTG) was a great fit for me.”

And so it came as little surprise when Moses was elected the winner of the inaugural Farricker Spirit Award last fall, which recognizes the most spirited player of the four teams who make the national semifinals. Of all his honors, Moses likes this one the best: “The Farricker Spirit Award was absolutely, hands-down amazing.”

In that light, Spirit is competition, in the sense that competition to me means testing yourself against an opponent to test just how good you really are. Spirit ensures that that testing is pure—ideally, there’s no question of which way the ref called the game, or who got away with what...the winner is the team that was better at the game of ultimate.”

When asked if he thinks that the award—the fact that only national semifinalists are eligible—represents a shift in the way people think about Spirit, he says, “I hope it’s a shift in the way Spirit is treated. Not that I should be held up as the paragon of balancing competition and respect...
but seeing that those things can go together is a powerful step. I’m honored to be the one pointed out as doing that, but I hope that it starts to influence people’s belief that it’s possible to combine the two.”

Moses feels good about the immediate future. He’s more comfortable with his role on DoG and is optimistic about the team’s goal: a 2003 national championship. He states his personal goals like this: “I feel like I just started to hit my stride this past year and I’m looking forward to continuing that this year. It’s intangible, but I’d like to continue to make a substantial positive contribution to the team this year and get us that title. I don’t know: ‘kicking ass...with respect?’”

—Derek Gottleib

Derek is a journalist currently playing and residing in Denver, CO.

Modesty has always been a big part of his game. He doesn’t mind recognitions of his Spirit, but he likes to play down his ability. Despite his selection to the U.S. junior national team, despite the college national title he helped secure, despite being the runner-up in Callahan voting his senior year at Brown, he maintains that none of it was his fault. “I was never the most athletic or talented player,” he says. “I still believe I was the 7th-best player on our high school team.”

Moses considers himself a cognitive type of player, not the kind of superstar who jumps over everyone on the field and wows the spectators with breathtaking grabs. Among his biggest influences he counts Steve Mooney and the DoG team of the mid-nineties.