Emerging Sports as Social Movements: Disc Golf and the Rise of an Unknown Sport

By Joshua Woods

This volume examines the rise of an emerging sport as a grassroots effort (or “new social movement”), arguing that the growth of non-normative sports movements occurs through two social processes: one driven primarily by product development, commercialization, and consumption, and another that relies upon public resources and grassroots efforts. Through the lens of disc golf, informed by the author’s experience both playing and researching the sport, Joshua Woods here explores how non-normative sports development depends on the consistency of insider culture and ideology, as well as on how the movement navigates a broad field of market competition, government regulation, community characteristics, public opinion, traditional media, social media and technological change. Throughout, the author probes why some sports grow faster than others, examining cultural tendencies toward sport, individual choices to participate, and the various institutional forces at play.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jul 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030764579

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

J. WoodsEmerging Sports as Social Movements https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76457-9_1

1. Introduction

Joshua Woods¹  

(1)

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, 307 Knapp Hall, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

Joshua Woods

Email: [e-mail]

Paul McBeth, one of the greatest disc golfers of all time, was feeling small.

On September 16, 2017, only days after dropping out of the Green Mountain Championship due to injury, McBeth posted a message on Facebook and Twitter: Being 5′8'' 160 lbs., you’ll never be the favorite in sports. That’s why I like my story.

McBeth’s friends and fans responded. A flood of well-wishes spread across disc golf land: Heal up Champ!!! Hope you feel 100% at USDGC. You’re always my favorite! And yet, no one really embraced his point. No one acknowledged the simple truth that McBeth is an underdog.

Of course, to many observers, this simple truth was neither simple nor true. At the time, McBeth was a four-time Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) World Champion who held the highest PDGA rating in the world. His long-distance drive was, and still is, mindboggling. His putt, fine art. He is an alchemist from one hundred feet, proving, time and again, that lay-ups can be converted into gold. Watching McBeth play disc golf is like watching a jungle panther leaping, nimble-footed, through tree limbs to catch its prey.

In the years following his self-deprecating tweet in 2017, McBeth would retain his dominant, near god-like status in the disc golf world. In July 2018, having played one of the sport’s greatest rounds in history with a score of negative 18, ESPN’s SportsCenter featured McBeth in a one-minute, forty-four-second feature that would become disc golf’s most memorable highlight on an elite sports television network. Later that year, McBeth would sign a lucrative four-year, one-million-dollar contract to be a spokesperson of Discraft, a major disc manufacturer. By the end of summer 2019, McBeth would take home his fifth PDGA World Championship title. In 2020, despite the cancellation of several major tournaments due to the COVID -19 pandemic, he would continue his winning ways and end the season tied with Ricky Wysocki as the highest-rated player in the world. Then, in early 2021, McBeth would extend his relationship with Discraft with a ten-year, ten-million-dollar contract through 2031. To anyone who has played disc golf for even one week, McBeth is many things, but an underdog he is not.

McBeth is talented, no doubt, but to reject his status as an underdog is to ignore the broader context in which he and many others play. To overlook the economic uncertainty, the opportunity costs of playing disc golf as a career, the puzzled looks from outsiders, the often-sarcastic commentary pouring from mainstream sports media, and the sheer courage it takes to go on tour is to miss the sport’s most glaring characteristic. Disc golf is small. Disc golf, like Paul McBeth, is an underdog in the world of sports. And it may never be the favorite.

But then, disc golf is not alone in this respect. Several sports, such as flat track roller derby, Pickleball, parkour, cornhole, drone racing, roundnet, and ax throwing have attracted large followings, but have not broken through to the mainstream. All emerging sports have at least one Paul McBeth, a symbol not only of greatness, but of the high hopes of players, fans, and business owners who wish to see their sport grow in popularity, gain legitimacy, become commercially viable, and reach new players across the globe. Like McBeth’s self-proclaimed stature, all sports were, at one point in their histories, small. And like his explosive talent on the disc golf course, they were perceived by many observers as infused with undeniable potential.

Over the last three decades, many sports grew quickly for a time, solidified a participant base, but lost momentum before reaching a mass audience. Other sports experienced slow, consistent growth, but still never emerged from the margins. In recent years, only a few sports, such as skateboarding, snowboarding, mixed martial arts, and esports, have captured the public’s imagination, inspired legions of players, produced celebrities, filled stadiums with thousands of fans, shaped popular culture, propelled new industries, and influenced public policy.

The question is, what explains the variance in these outcomes? How do small sports become big ones? And, more pertinently, will disc golf become a big one? To answer these questions, Emerging Sports as Social Movements examines the psychological, socio-cultural, economic, and institutional forces that shape the development of small, non-normative sports movements. In this introduction, I will briefly summarize my answer to the why-growth question. Before moving forward, however, I feel obliged to make two requisite pit stops—first, to explain why disc golf merits attention from scholars, parks departments, entrepreneurs, and policymakers, and second, to disclose and defend my role as both a sociologist and an insider with deep personal ties to the sport.

Why Study Disc Golf?

For the uninitiated, disc golf is an outdoor sport and recreational activity that is typically played by throwing streamlined plastic discs into metal baskets from varying distances. It shares some of traditional golf’s rules. Players throw their first shots from a designated teeing area, often referred to as the pad, and attempt to complete the hole in the fewest number of throws. Averaging roughly 200 to 400 feet per hole, disc golf courses are shorter in length than traditional golf courses. Like traditional golf clubs, discs have special characteristics that allow for long-range drives, mid-range throws, and short-range putts.

Disc golf merits academic attention for at least four reasons. First, it represents a curious case of a broader sociological phenomenon. Lacking institutional support and facing scorn from sports traditionalists, how did disc golf survive for more than fifty years, let alone thrive? Meaningful answers to this question require a careful investigation into key sociological topics, including social movements, culture, group dynamics, norms, cognition, gender, race, social class, technology, and media.

Second, disc golf may be reaching a tipping point (Woods 2016b). Born during the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it developed slowly over decades in small regional pockets scattered throughout the United States (Palmeri and Kennedy 2015). Then, in the early 2000s, things began to change. The sport’s governing body, the PDGA, publishes the most reliable indicators of disc golf activity, which include the number of current PDGA members, PDGA-sanctioned events, and disc golf courses. Between 1999 and 2019, PDGA memberships in the US grew from 5403 to 42,006, while PDGA events jumped from 329 to 3464. The number of US courses increased from 851 to 6643 over the same period (PDGA 2019).

Disc golf has thrived in other countries as well. PDGA Europe was established as a committee in 2006, but quickly evolved into a self-governing entity. An official PDGA office was opened in the Netherlands in 2016. Throughout the 2010s, the number of PDGA events, members, and courses grew faster in some European countries such as Finland and Estonia than in the US (Nagtegaal 2017).

The sport also gained prominence in media. As discussed in Chap. 8, over a twenty-year period, local newspaper coverage of disc golf increased faster than the coverage of ninety-two other sports. Like many emerging sports communities, disc golf benefited from the rise of social media in the early twenty-first century. Social media facilitated new forms of disc golf organization and allowed a range of upstart media, such as YouTube channels, online magazines, podcasts, and blogs, to cover all aspects of the sport. Since the earliest disc golf groups emerged on Facebook in 2007, the number of active groups increased uniformly between 2008 and 2015 and stabilized in 2016 with a total of 3471 groups. Given that the sport has grown substantially over the last two decades, it represents an ideal case for studying the roles of media and other institutions in the development of non-normative sports movements.

The third reason to study disc golf involves the social consequences of its growth. If optimistic predictions hold, the 2020s could mark a notable shift in recreation (Woods 2019a). The emergence of disc golf as a mainstream sport would lead to new manufacturing and tourism industries in the US and northern Europe. The utilization of public land, where roughly 90 percent of disc golf courses are located, would surely increase (Oldakowski and Mcewen 2013). At the same time, more research is needed to understand how a rapid increase in the number of players could produce safety concerns and conflicts between disc golfers and other participants of multiuse public parks (Woods 2018b).

A rise in the disc golfer population would likely have positive effects on community health and well-being (Maller et al. 2008; Maroko et al. 2009; Center for Disease Control 2001; Kahn et al. 2002; Crompton 2000). During a typical eighteen-hole round, disc golfers walk an average of 5613 steps or about three miles (Menickelli et al. 2016). The sport may also attract participants who are less interested in traditional sports like football, basketball, and baseball (Vernegaard et al. 2017). Disc golf, in other words, may remedy inactive lifestyles. However, questions remain about who benefits from the sport. The underrepresentation of women and racial minorities suggest that the physical and psychological benefits of disc golf are not distributed equally across US society (Woods 2019a).

Compared to ball golf courses, which utilize hazardous fertilizers and require six to seven times more land area, disc golf courses are environmentally friendly (Woods 2018a). Some research has also shown that disc golfers would be willing to play at courses built in underutilized urban spaces, such utility corridors, urban washes, and abandoned factories, which would help alleviate the problems associated with deindustrialization, while making disc golf available to the diverse communities of large urban centers (Plansky 2013). Nevertheless, the environmental impacts of disc golf are understudied and the problems that do exist have not received much consideration from parks departments or the disc golf community itself (Woods 2020).

A proliferation of disc golf clubs may also strengthen community ties, promote social capital and encourage volunteerism (Perks 2007; Putnam et al. 1994). Most disc golf facilities and clubs have been created by volunteers and funded through local donations (Palmeri and Kennedy 2015). Based on a survey of 158 experienced disc golf course designers, 65 percent of them had never been paid for their design work, and 74 percent had never been paid for their installation and construction jobs (Leekha and Woods 2018). Although some efforts have been made to get disc golf into schools, it generally receives little support from established sports institutions. Disc golf in the US has been built on a do-it-yourself, not-for-profit model. The sport’s physical and social infrastructure represents an ongoing community development project that has been paid for and developed in large part by grassroots clubs and other groups. At the same time, the more recent trends of privatization and commercialization may be destabilizing the grassroots, volunteer-based foundation of public disc golf. Considering developments on the business side of the sport, several questions involving the social consequences of disc golf’s growth demand more attention from scholars.

The fourth justification for pursuing a sociology of disc golf is straightforward: Despite its potential benefits and costs, it has received little attention from social scientists. There are several important books on the topic, but most of them are self-published or trade publications and focus on either disc golf history or on how to play disc golf (Menickelli and Pickens 2016; Palmeri and Kennedy 2015). While the PDGA collects some demographic information on its members, the sport has never appeared in a nationally representative participation survey. No one knows how many disc golfers exist. Available guesswork on the population size in the US has produced widely varying estimates, from 90,000 to two million (Woods 2016a). There is little information about the demographics of disc golfers or what motivates participation. The socio-economic disparities in disc golf course distribution in the US are unknown. No study has examined how new communication technologies and social media have affected the disc golf movement. Little is known about the community’s social, cultural, and economic evolution over the last decades. The aim of this book is to provide theoretical and empirical research on this potentially transformative sport movement.

An Insider’s Outside Perspective

Scholars have long understood that the outcomes of empirical research are influenced by the backgrounds of those who carry it out. Simply put, researchers who belong to the group they are studying are considered insiders and researchers who are not members are outsiders. Insiders benefit from their special understanding of the group, while suffering from a potential bias that can harm the reliability of the study and distort its conclusions. Outsiders are less emotionally invested in the subject matter and therefore more reliable, but they lack a well-informed, nuanced perspective, which can degrade the validity of results. If understood as a continuum, rather than black-and-white categories, the distinction between insiders and outsiders can help audiences evaluate how a researcher’s background may influence a study. At the risk of sidetracking the main goal of this chapter, I offer the following personal narrative to further acquaint the reader with my perspective as both a disc golfer and a social scientist.

Growing up white, male, and straight in a middleclass neighborhood in the Midwest, I found plenty of opportunity to play and worship traditional sports like basketball, football, soccer, and traditional golf. Frisbees were toys. Soccer cleats were athletic equipment. It wasn’t until my college years that I even heard of disc golf. In the late 1990s, a friend and I visited a disc golf course at Grand Woods Park in Lansing, Michigan. Disc golf, it seemed to me, was an excellent excuse for drinking beer in the woods, but a serious sport it was not. After my first official round, I remember seeing a large group of men milling around the first hole. It must have been their league night. These were not children, but men, middle-aged men, older guys, all carrying specialized bags filled with discs and other accessories the likes of which I could not fathom. Given the vagaries of memory, I won’t speculate about my first impression of competitive disc golfers, but I do know this: I was not inspired. Having given in to personal conceit and stereotypical thinking, my disc golf life would not begin in the 1990s. Twenty years would pass before I realized what I had missed.

When I finally did fall in love with the sport in the summer of 2013 and quietly began conducting research on it in 2016, my own willingness to exclude disc golf from the real world of sports became a subject of increasing interest. My doctoral training in sociology had illuminated the causes and consequences of status hierarchies related to race, class, and gender, but now I was noticing similar status rankings of all aspects of life, from vacation destinations and television shows to sports and sociological topics. I learned, for instance, that some sociologists placed the topic of sports below the threshold of meaningful academic work (Frey and Eitzen 1991; Eckstein et al. 2010; Malcolm 2014), and that the perceived value of sports sociology among athletes and fans was even lower.

As Bourdieu (1988) wrote, One of the obstacles to a scientific sociology of sport is due to the fact that sociologists of sport are in a way doubly dominated, both in the world of sociologists and in the world of sport (153). If the sociology of sport was scorned by sociologists and despised by sportspersons (Bourdieu 1988, 153), where might a sociology of emerging sports like disc golf fall in the pecking order of academic topics and sports commentary? In the minds of most people, disc golf was a child’s game, like red rover or monkey in the middle. Playing it infrequently, accompanied by children, was acceptable enough, but devoting vast portions of one’s time to both playing and studying it was immature, and a little weird. For this reason, in the early 2010s, I had zero interest in writing a sociological book about disc golf.

But that was then. And now … well, now is different. Now I am living through what some might call a midlife crisis, but what I have termed my sports renaissance period. Following my sports-obsessed youth and then a gradual, numbing, long-term divorce from sports during the early years of an academic career and fatherhood, I am back. Miraculous athletic endeavors are suddenly, stupendously awesome again. My sports renaissance period officially began when I started playing disc golf, but I did not really appreciate the experience until three years later. The awakening was delivered by a disc golfer named Philo Brathwaite, who carded an albatross on an 850-foot hole at the Beaver State Fling held in Milo McIver State Park on June 11, 2016. The video crew from Central Coast Disc Golf captured the stunning shot in all its mystifying, glorious detail. Like watching Michael Jordan’s free-throw line dunk, it was, at least for disc golfers, the kind of iconic, televised athletic feat that you can watch again and again and still feel a slight electrical charge as the shot goes in. A Google search for Brathwaite albatross will return a video that is sure to astound anyone who views it.

Much has been written about the attractive flight of a Frisbee. But Brathwaite’s second shot for albatross was remarkable for its un-Frisbee-like qualities: the raw, kinetic power and distance of the throw; the disc’s magical, gyroscopic turn and graceful fade; its arresting proximity to the trees below; its ruthless, knifelike descent and the resounding slash of chains. A Frisbee has never accomplished these tasks and never will. This was a disc golf moment.

David Foster Wallace (2006) wrote a piece for the New York Times about tennis called Roger Federer as Religious Experience. In it, he describes the experience of watching truly great shots as transformative: These are times when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K. That sums up my initial reaction to the albatross. But this throw was more than exhilarating entertainment to me. It seemed to mark the moment when my commitment to and enthusiasm for playing, organizing, and researching disc golf intensified. At the time, I was playing in PDGA-sanctioned league events, often twice a week, competing in tournaments, advising a college disc golf club, serving as a board member of two other disc golf organizations, writing and editing a disc golf blog called Parked, guiding research projects for a PDGA committee and other groups, and contributing occasionally to disc golf media outlets, such as Ultiworld Disc Golf and Release Point. I would later become a member of the PDGA’s Diversity and Outreach Taskforce. Shortly after watching the albatross, I began toying with the idea of writing this book.

If an idealistic love of the game inspired my interest in playing disc golf, I had an equal enthusiasm for using the tools of sociology to make sense of it. In other words, I consider myself an insider to the sport with an outsider’s perspective. Some sociologists have argued that taking such a position is the best way to notice patterns in a group that insiders cannot see and outsiders cannot imagine (Mesny 2009; Mills 1974; Simmel 1950; Becker 1973). In the course of writing this book, rather than regard my insider status as a potential source of bias, I leaned into it for inspiration and insight. This is not to say I was always happy with what I found. In these pages, I will cover the sport’s socially redeeming qualities, but also reveal its endemic problems, such as sexism, racism, commercialism, safety issues, and harms to the natural environment. I should also admit that five years of sociological research on disc golf chipped away at my idealistic view of the movement. The extent of my bias in favor or against the sport will ultimately be determined by the reader. But one thing seems clear to me: Developing the thesis of this book would not have been possible without my lived experiences as both a disc golfer and a sociologist.

Rise of an Unknown Sport: A Summary

How do small sports become big ones?

When answering this question, scholars and sports fans alike often point to the economics of sports and media. These industries work well together, as sports provide valuable content and audiences for media organizations, and media coverage offers needed exposure and revenue to sports organizations (Bolotny and Bourg 2006; Grant and Graeme 2008; Rowe 2003, 2011). It seems simple: A sport grows when mainstream media pay attention it. Increased media coverage attracts more participants and consumers, which accelerate the growth of related businesses and product development. In some cases, the number of participants keeps rising, a non-participant fan base emerges, bigger private firms and outside sponsors enter the space, the sport reaches into the public consciousness and goes mainstream. A sport that enters this stage is nearly impossible to miss, as its star athletes endorse products that are unrelated to the sport itself and large-scale media organizations package the sport for a mass audience of non-players. For this reason, in the year 2021, most forty-five-year-old Americans, even those who had never set foot on a basketball court, could probably still remember the Be Like Mike jingle in Michael Jordan’s famous Gatorade commercial of 1992.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, several sports were reaching their fast-growth stages. Skateboarding was headed to the Olympics and regularly appeared on television and in fashion magazines. Energy-drink-powered teens were pulling down big paychecks from esports megaevents. The Ultimate Fighting Championship was filling large arenas with fans and pouring mass-mediated adrenaline into mixed martial arts. Even a few lesser-known sports were on the rise. Spikeball, the main promoter of roundnet, landed deals with Shark Tank and ESPN. Cornhole was appearing on ESPN and courting moneyed sponsors like Johnsonville Sausage. Ax throwing and wood chopping were being nationally televised.

Most of the available scholarship on sport development focuses on traditional athletics such as football and basketball in the United States, major sporting events like the Olympics, or general categories of physical activity such as outdoor recreation (Beamon 2010; Boyle and Haynes 2009; Kidd 2013; Maguire 2011; McGillivray 2017; Rober 2013; Sanderson et al. 2016; Bernstein and Blain 2012). These studies provide important insight on commercialization processes and the cultural politics that arise as emerging sports transform into profit engines (Wheaton 2013). But the economic lens has its limits when it comes to small, non-normative sports.

Participation in disc golf has grown consistently for more than fifty years, but much of this growth cannot be explained by the strategies of private business. Disc golf is a uniquely public endeavor (Woods 2019b). Most of the world’s tournament directors, league managers, and disc golf clubs are not motivated by profit, nor do they use profit as a key measure of success. Put simply, some things that are profitable have little social value (reality TV anyone?), just as some things of high social value are not profitable (disc golf anyone?). If alternative motivations, such as friendship, community, identity, camaraderie, self-actualization, the great outdoors, and the love of the game, suddenly vanished, so too would disc golf.

The disc golf community consists of a growing, global network of individuals, groups, and organizations. Most of the groups are local disc golf clubs of various sizes, which function as voluntary associations and produce little or no profit. Two of them, the PDGA and the World Flying Disc Federation (WFDF), are large non-profit organizations that depend on talent donations from community insiders. There are also several national organizations aboard and regional bodies in the US that rely on volunteers. For-profit firms manufacture equipment and provide services, but, as discussed in Chap. 7, most of these businesses were founded by player entrepreneurs whose influence on the sport should be characterized as movement commercialization rather than mass-market commercialization (Edwards and Corte 2010, 1144). As argued throughout this book, these groups and organizations represent the building blocks of a social movement, and for this reason, theories of social movements should be used to explain disc golf’s development in addition to the business-oriented models of commercialization.

A Social Movement

Establishing the groundwork for this argument, Chap. 2 conceptualizes the disc golf community as a social