Hello newsletter subscribers! I’ve been locked in my writer cave for the past couple of months, trying to finish a draft. My grandfather and my great-grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and Mountain Gazette was generous in sending me to Europe this summer to piece together their stories for MG 203. I’ve never written a historical narrative before, and it has been a considerable challenge working through thousands of pages of 80 to 120-year-old documents written in Yiddish, Dutch, French, Italian, Polish, and German.
The story is timely not only for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, but also for the wave of far-right extremism we’re currently seeing around the world. While I was reporting in Europe, the AfD — led by a Nazi apologist — became the first far-right party to win a state election in Germany since World War II. In the United States, Trump has proposed “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” employing racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric that sounds very similar to the antisemitic and xenophobic rhetoric used by German and French leaders in 1940. We’re less than a week from the presidential election in the U.S., and I hope America will vote to reject Trump's fascism. I already cast my ballot.
On a related but less depressing note is my latest feature published in MG 202. I spent Independence Day in Indianola, Iowa, documenting one of the most anticipated events on the Disc Golf Pro Tour. The result is a story about camaraderie in the middle of a divided America. Please enjoy a brief excerpt below.
The United States of America: the sole surviving superpower, a troubled nation, and still the greatest in the world. There is no better place to be a journalist. On any other occasion, I’ll write about the defective healthcare system, the dysfunctional justice system, the intolerable frequency of gun deaths, the fall of democracy, and the rise of far-right nationalism. But please allow me just this one to celebrate the First Amendment, the Freedom of Information Act, shield laws, and my enviable privilege to have spent this Fourth of July weekend in the middle of the midwest walking in circles to write a report about the most American sport of all.
Not football. Not baseball. Not pickleball. Forget about balls. This is America, a country of innovation. Give me a ball and a steamroller and I’ll give you something better. The longest football throw on record? A little more than 70 yards. Longest disc throw? Three hundred and seventy yards. I can’t think of much that embodies the spirit of the United States more than a small but enterprising community of nerds earning upwards of seven figures throwing cheap plastic to get views on YouTube. This is what I came to Iowa to see: the Des Moines Challenge, one of the most-anticipated tournaments on the Disc Golf Pro Tour.
Disc golf has been around for decades but has achieved popularity only recently, being one of the outdoor activities, like cycling and rollerblading, that received an influx of new participants during the pandemic. It’s played similarly to ball golf, except instead of swinging clubs, you throw a disc, and instead of aiming for a small hole in the ground, you aim for a metal basket. It’s more affordable than ball golf. And the courses aren’t such environmental disasters. They are supposed to be rugged, like hiking trails. There’s no perfectly mowed grass or obsessive weed control.
Such rapid growth has certainly changed the sport. I’d wondered if there were crotchety Pro Tour veterans who were bitter about the arrival of many talented rookies, especially if it meant not winning so easily. But in an interview at a player meet and greet at a brewery in Des Moines, five-time world champion and Disc Golf Hall of Famer Juliana Korver told me it was just the opposite. “Of course, everybody wants to win, but many of the players now have a living salary from their sponsors. Twenty-five years ago, if we didn’t win, we might not be able to pay for the gas and the food to get to the next event because there was no outside money.” As is often the case in independent sports, more important than podiums for a successful career is a fan base, and the competitors with the biggest fan bases aren’t always the winningest players but the ambassadors who demonstrate camaraderie and enthusiasm for the new entrants into the sport.
Camaraderie is the norm, maybe even the bare minimum, in the disc golf community. Every player I’ve spoken to has told me how welcoming and supportive it is. Korver said there has always been a culture of hospitality, and she relies on this hospitality for her career. She grew up in Iowa but at 52 years old travels full-time competing on the Pro Tour, living out of a van with her husband — at least sort of living out of it. “We don’t sleep in it. We’re both quite tall, so we don’t really fit, but we have so many contacts on the road that we typically stay with people we know,” she said. “That’s actually the best part of it. You know, acquaintances that we see year after year, they become good friends.”
At a time of great political division in America, amidst a loneliness epidemic, the welcoming community promised by disc golfers sounded like one I wanted to experience. I had three days of tournament play ahead to see it for myself.
After the player meet and greet, I hit the road south. The Des Moines Challenge isn’t technically in Des Moines, but close enough. I drove 30 minutes past cornfields and deer carcasses to Indianola, where the main event would be held at a course Korver had helped build in the 90s.
It’s from towns like this one, in Middle America, that many of the best disc golfers hail — towns with wide-open pastures, rolling wooded hills, and working-class church-goers, without much in the way of luxury alpine sports like skiing or mountaineering. As an outdoor culture magazine, Mountain Gazette never neglects the Adirondacks, the Rockies, or the Pacific Northwest. We should give Indianola its due. The sky was dusking when I arrived. I checked into my hotel and stepped back outside to watch the Fourth of July fireworks above the strip mall across the street.
Read the rest in Mountain Gazette 202, available now.