Soaring Ambitions : From a Passion for Frisbees Comes a Career

For 40 years, Dan Roddick has believed in flying saucers.

It started when he was 5, flinging plastic disks in the back yard with his father. It continued as he grew up and won 19 world titles as a disk-throwing champion and wrote several books on the “disk arts.”

Roddick’s obsession is also his livelihood. As director of sports promotion for San Gabriel-based Wham-O, the company that created the Frisbee, he has been putting his own spin on the classic for the last 17 years.

Wham-O has sold more than 100 million Frisbees since the product’s debut in 1957. Officials of the privately held firm, which declines to reveal any financial data, figure that the Frisbee has outsold most of Wham-O’s other well-known products, including the Hula-Hoop and Hackey Sack.

“How many products are there that are essentially American icons?” asks Roddick. “It is American culture.”

Icon or not, the disk sports that Roddick promotes have made the Frisbee more than a diversion.

There is disk golf, which substitutes a flying disk for a golf ball; freestyle, the disk answer to rhythmic gymnastics, and ultimate, a football-like sport, most popular in Europe, in which teams vie to score goals.

Roddick has held at least one world title in all of them.

The myriad of disk events keeps him busy as a participant, organizer and consultant, all of which enables him to stay abreast of hot trends in the world of flying disks.

His job has taken him as far as Japan for the World Disc Championships and as near as the grassy strip outside Wham-O’s headquarters, where he can often be found honing his disk golfgame.

Frisbees and flying disks of every color, shape and size fill his office, spilling from the leather sofa onto the floor. Roddick estimates he has 6,000 of them, not counting the bronzed ones that hang on the walls as awards from competitions past.

He says there has been a recent upsurge in interest in the Frisbee, a trend he attributes to the expansion of disk-related sports. Twenty years ago, for example, ultimate-Frisbee teams at the college level were a rarity. Today they exist on most major campuses.

There are unspoken rules around Roddick’s office, such as the one that memos are never simply handed in--they must be flung.

“Everybody in my department plays disk sports,” Roddick says. “I mean, I hired them. . . . It is likely that you will walk in and a disk will be rolling down the hall.”

When Roddick was approached by Wham-O in 1975, he was a graduate student in sociology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, set on becoming a college professor. When he wasn’t studying, he was organizing flying disk events and sneaking into the college copy room to produce the first independent journal on disk sports.

So it was an easy decision for Roddick when Ed Headrick, then CEO of Wham-O, asked if he would come west to work with Frisbees full time.

“I guess I hoped that I would have a playful job,” Roddick says. “I wanted to be a professor . . . but it happened that this hobby grew up, and flying disks are my job and sociology is my hobby.”