SIDELINE CUT: We probably weren't genetically programmed to be frisbee throwers anyhow

HATS OFF to Mr Walter Frederick Morrison, the man who patented the frisbee and word of whose death circumnavigated the globe yesterday. It came as no surprise that he was the ripe old age of 90: anyone who invented something as wonderfully frivolous as the flying disc must have had a dauntless zest for life.

Dreaming up the frisbee may not ultimately rank with the invention of the radio or the development of penicillin in terms of global significance; nonetheless, Mr Morrison’s contribution to global culture should not be dismissed.

Whether frisbee throwing is a sport, a “lifestyle”, an escape or just something to do on the beach is not important, the fact is, millions of people around the world get a lot of joy out of flinging this plastic tablet across the sky to one another.

The frisbee remains something of a cult here in Ireland. Over the decades, cultural imports like skateboarding, BMX biking and yo-yo playing have come here and enjoyed waves of popularity before quickly fading. There was a time when many houses had a frisbee of some description, often a hopelessly light and cheap-looking affair bearing the marks of several attacks from the house pet and more often than not destined to be carried irretrievably away from its owners by the ferocious Atlantic gales that buffet this country.

Like the Chopper bike, the frisbee was a quintessentially 1970s accessory in Ireland (it struck America a good decade earlier), and even though many youngsters carried them in that decade, everyone understood that they weren’t really suited to here and that frisbee throwing was meant to be conducted in places like California by chaps who resembled the young Art Garfunkel: hippy, slightly daffy and equipped with an elastic agility.

You may well be too young to remember, but in the 1970s the frisbee featured in a series of Government advertisements which aired on good old RTÉ (there was only the one for most of the decade) and were apparently designed to hammer home – with terrifying melodrama – the fact that danger lurked everywhere.

What they did was illustrate several scenes of domestic tranquillity and then shatter your nerves by demonstrating how easily and fatally things can go wrong. So a handsome young farmer who decides to cut corners with his electrical supply, using a bit of tape and matchsticks as props for a faulty plug, ends up getting electrocuted.

They didn’t show the grisly bit; instead, they used Hitchcockian methods of suggestion to leave you in no doubt the farmer had been smoked by his invention.

In another scene, an oldster is enjoying a nap on a picnic chair by the edge of the river on a fabulously beautiful day. He goes to stand up to adjust his radio set, and then the scene cuts to his family, who are getting the picnic ready, and they turn to look in puzzlement at the empty chair by the river.

Other poor souls suffered in terrible ways, and one of these was a young frisbee-throwing go-getter who paid the ultimate price for trying to retrieve his toy/soul obsession from an electrical pylon.

Anyone who has thrown a frisbee in Ireland can vouch for the reality of the scene. You could attempt to throw to a partner just 10 feet away, only to have the disc snatched by a volatile gust of wind and ushered without ceremony not just out of your back garden but sometimes out of the county entirely.

It was easy to imagine a frisbee sent scuttling into the teeth of a telephone pylon, and no matter how many times we watched this most dedicated of frisbee throwers climb the pylon, we yearned for a different outcome and vowed to get him another – you could get ’em for £1.99 in Corbetts shop – if only he could get a pass for this one time.

But no, every time the message was the same. Leave the damn frisbee in the pylon. The ESB have a frisbee mountain at this stage.

They used to show these warnings in the middle of the day and they may have turned a generation of Irish children off frisbee for life.

We probably weren’t genetically programmed to be frisbee throwers anyhow. The ideal aim of frisbee throwing – that the person you fired it at would leap and catch it in an aesthetically pleasing way – was rarely executed here.

More often than not, the Irish version of frisbee throwing meant delicately stepping through seaweed and rock pools to retrieve the yoke while your friend shouted through the gale, “Sorry! I was trying to put spin on it.”

And although it is never explicitly suggested in the advert, there is little doubt the old-timer by the river fell into water after he was accidentally clocked on the head by a frisbee delivered by his grandson. The guilt this youth must have suffered!

But there is, despite those nightmarish adverts of yesteryear, a frisbee culture in this country. As far as I know, we have an international frisbee team who travel the world to play other nations. This global fraternity has a code of conduct which places a premium on sportsmanship and brotherhood: it would be absolutely unheard of, for instance, for the best frisbee practitioners to glory in a victory like a Premiership football club, or for a star to demonstrate his displeasure by butting an opponent, a la Zidane.

The competitiveness is framed within the vaguely Zen art of making this thing fly, of securing its flight from your hands to those of a friend.

Because there is a great contentment to be had in flinging a frisbee back and forth for no reason at all. People bring their own quirks to the art of throwing and catching. Some people go in for big, elaborate gestures. Gaelic footballers tend to catch the thing with two hands and dip the shoulder when they hit the ground again, braced for a hit.

Other folks, if they successfully leave the earth for a nanosecond and catch the frisbee, will indulge in a little jog when they descend, clearly delighted with themselves.

And there is nothing more funny than a child’s face the first time he/she is confronted with an approaching frisbee, how slowly and hypnotically the thing seems to travel through the air until suddenly it is just feet away from them, big as a spaceship and heading straight for their nose and the only thing to do is to dive for cover.

If you think hard enough, you will probably remember where your own frisbee is. Ideally, it is in the boot of the car, but more probably it is under a hedge or stuck in the neighbour’s tree or acting as a base for a flowerpot.

If it is lodged in a nearby electricity pylon, best write it off and get another.

But if you do have a frisbee knocking around, you could do worse than dust it down this weekend and let fly in honour of its inventor.