Origin of footbag nomenclature

[Wim]

Okay, so what I wanna see in here are the (legendary) stories of where footbag related names origined (tricks, drills, player nick names,...).

I guess the 'janiwalker' is pretty straightforward, but what about pixie, quantum, mirage, zulu,... you name it.

[james_dean]

I believe pixie and fairy were invented on both the east and west coast of america, at pretty much the same time. One side named them pixie and fairy and one side lighting and thunder. Obviously this was before the days of the internet community so it was some time before they realised. Pixie and fairy stuck. Whose idea was that? Lightning and Thunder sound so much cool

"I hit a thundering mirage!!"

Hm, maybe it makes them sound too dramatic...

[Wim]

That's a pretty cool story to start!

I think I prefer pixie and fairy to the meteorological phenomena. I agree that lightning and thunder make it a little too dramatic, like calling a clipper a corpse grinder. I think it can be a pathetic and artificial way of trying to 'coolify' a trick with an average cool rate (though back when pixie and fairy were invented I guess they were considered pretty sick).

I like how some footbag tricks have this sense of understatement and irony, like big papa smurf, kiwi, little apple, omelette du fromage .

[james_dean]

I think corpse grinder is a toe delay, actually

I had thought it was a butterfly, originally, but since then I've seen it referred to constantly as a toe stall and never a butterfly, so I guess I misunderstood somewhere

Technical names ftw

[Slowsis]

You can tell that our sport has hippie roots.
Seriously....."Pixie"...."Butterfly"..."Fairy"....these just have flower power written all over them.

[Wim]

corpse grinder=toe stall?

I always thought the butterfly was called that because when you repeat it (i.e. infinities) you get this 8-shaped pattern, like the wings of a butterfly. This is just conjecture though, I don't have any east/west coast stories to back this up


Where are all the 'old' players who got some stories first hand?

[Outsider]

I always thought the butterfly was called that because when you repeat it (i.e. infinities) you get this 8-shaped pattern, like the wings of a butterfly.

I wasn't there, I'm not totally certain of this, but... I'm pretty sure that Butterfly is so named because, originally, it was a big jumping kick, a flier. Remember, kids, long ago bags were not as soft, and so stalls did not predominate as they do today. Fliers were a bigger part of early freestyle, so some early common tricks were named for flying things with the word fly in them, such as Butterfly and Dragonfly. Bags got softer as people began to do more stalls and saw the need for soft bags. It wasn't so obvious from the very start that catching the bag on the foot was going to be the way to play.

I can only assume that Pixie and Fairy were so named because they sort of seemed to follow the trend of other common dexterity tricks like Butterfly. Also, those tricks were mostly done on their own, like Leg-Overs and Around-The-Worlds, and they were little tricks, so Pixie and Fairy probably seemed fairly appropriate for cute little moves like that. People did not necessarily foresee combining them with half a dozen other move elements all at once.

Cute little moves... that leads me to Corpse Grinder. I was there for that one, though it was a while ago, and its all a little foggy now. In the late 90's, before the forum, there was substantially less internet footbag chatter, and it was all done by e-mails sent around via three list-serves (is that the right term for it?). One could subscribe to the "Announce", "General", and "Freestyle" e-mail discussion groups (at least one of these groups is still in use and Jan Struz just used it to announce the Hack-to-Beat or something), and it was probably on the Freestyle e-mail discussion group (and also outside of the virtual world, at these things call "tournaments") that the issue of the cuteness of names like pixie and fairy were debated. This was, of course, at around the time that we finally did really start to combine these elements with other elements to make bigger tricks. There was some dissatisfaction with those cute little names, and alternatives were suggested. In response, a very funny guy named Ernest Crvich sarcastically suggested that we shouldn't just stop at Pixie and Fairy. Butterfly, he said, was also not macho enough, and should be renamed Corpse Grinder. The discussion was a little bit chaotic, and probably also featured some comments on the tendancy for little moves to sometimes have big important names, and so the idea that a cute name like Butterfly be re-named Corpse Grinder somehow got confused with the idea that an insignificant little move like a toe-stall be renamed Corpse Grinder. Obviously, neither suggestion was at all serious. The whole thing took on a life of its own because we all found it pretty funny. So, if my memory serves me well, Corpse Grinder was originally and really supposed to be a joking alternative to Butterfly, not toe stall, but it began to be used for both almost right away.

If anyone was really curious, I think that all those e-mails are archived somewhere on footbag dot org, and you could sift through the freestyle stuff from 1999 or so. But I doubt its really worth the effort. Still, Ernest was a very funny guy, and I miss hanging out with him. I know he toured Germany in search of beer at least once. I wonder if any of our current German shredders remember meeting up with him.

[mr.alex]

nice story, jon.
I remembered a thread about corpsesgrinder a while ago and I found it:
http://modified.in/footbag/viewtopic.php?t=6702&start=0

Here's the link to the footbag.org list.

[james_dean]

I was right after all! Corpse grinder as butterfly came first! But I had no idea that happened so long ago, I thought it surfaced somewhere 1-2 years ago. I guess it REsurfaced

[footymatt]

shoot dem stories is purty good! Nice stuff. I havn't been in footbag long enough to have any stories, except that when I was younger the "biggest" trick I saw was a head stall. Watching Vasek's 2002 tourney vid changed my mind of that and hooked right away. I think I was 12 or 13 when head stalls were the big trick. But then again, I was hangin with "hacky sackers" not footbaggers. Newayz keep the stories coming, oh that reminds me, Peter Irish must have some great stuff to tell....later guyz

[Wim]

Wow Jon, cool first hand stories. I could read 'old' skool shit all day.

Anyone know who came up with 'osis', and why, and when?

[james_dean]

We stole it from flying disc

[Wim]

Seriously?

who came up with 'osis', and why, and when?

I guess that leaves the "why".

Why did we do such a thing?

[ville]

Because the whole trick was from freestyle flying disc and many early bag players also played freestyle flying disc.

[Colin]

There's still the 'who', isn't there? I believe Kenny put the name osis on the footbag move. As for why, it's because the disc osis is basically the same move as the footbag osis, with hand and disc substituted for foot and footbag. (spinning underhanded behind the back type catch, caught with the hand opposite the direction of the spin)

The above is not fact, just some foggy footbag folklore buried in my head. Anyone want to confirm / support / shoot down?

[janis]

The above is not fact, just some foggy footbag folklore buried in my head. Anyone want to confirm / support ?

Yeah I've heard the same thing too about osis

[max]

I've been told that "dada curve" also comes from freestyle disk

[mattkain]

Freestyle disc is of paramount importance to the development of footbag freestyle. Here is what Kenny Shults has to say about the whole thing in a post to the discussion list back in September of 2000:

I think this list needs some historical perspective. There have been a number
of distinct eras in freestyle. Neither the benefits nor the shortcomings of
the Add system can be assessed properly without an understanding of this
history. The following provides a brief outline of some of the important
milestones in the evolution of freestyle and the part the Add system has
played. I hope this is helpful.

The Early Years (70's - mid 1984)
This era is marked by a few key points. Tricks were done one at a time and
separated by basic kicks. Tricks included mirage, around-the-world, flying
clipper, dragonfly, flying butterly, spins, spinning flying butterfly,
double-atw. At Worlds in Boulder in 84 there were only two players doing
consecutive around-the-worlds, myself and Andy Linder. These were pretty much
the first "combo's".

No The's (Fall of 84 ->)
In the fall of my freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin I met
some of the best freestyle disc players in the world including Bob Coleman,
Dave Schiller, John Houck, and Gina Sample of Austin as well as frequent
visits from Deaton Mitchell, Jim Schmall and Peter Laubert. I played about as
much freestyle disc that year as footbag. The importance of this to freestyle
footbag is that these top disc players had developed a concept that they
called "The". A "The" was an unrestricted delay of the disc. The top players
all stressed the importance of going from trick to trick without using
"The's" in between. I brought this philosophy to my approach to freestyle
footbag. This launched an explosion in my freestyle repertoire as I learned
to meet the new challenge of linking tricks together. I believe that this was
essentially the birth of modern freestyle. As a side note the Osis was a disc
move that I converted to footbag. I don't know it's origin. The DaDa curve
was also a disc trick that I converted to footbag. And those of you doing
double-cheek-overs and calling it a DaDa curve have given a decent trick a
bad rep.

The Add System
The Add system was "invented" by myself and Rick Reese while driving to a
tournament in Santa Rosa, CA from Eugene, OR. I don't recall the exact
motivation for the discussion but it is a long drive so it seemed to pass the
time pretty well. A point rating system with defined categories of elements
gave us a systematic means of thinking up new tricks to try. We just had to
imagine different combinations of elements trying to build harder and harder
tricks. While the Add system may have outlived it's usefulness, it is almost
solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the global freestyle
vocabulary. It has certainly led down some blind alleys but each of those
wrong turns has the potential to lead to something cool. How many Adds a
trick has isn't the destination, but the pursuit of bigger Adds has resulted
in some pretty cool tricks. For every Reverse Whirl or Symposium Butterfly
there is also a Mobius and a Vortex. And keep in mind that from Symposium
Butterfly to Superfly is a very short trip. "

As you can see, footbag freestyle is greatly indebted to freestyle disc. The whole concept of continuously linking tricks as well as things like "the", osis, dada curve, and I'm sure much more all come from freestyle disc.

[mattkain]

Here's a great story about how blurriest got it's name courtesy of a post to the old discussion list by Rick Reese in December of 2000:

It was an ominous evening back in 1993, a few of us had gathered in the
infamous Holiday Inn, Golden Co. I had recently purchased what I thought to
be the coolest video camera around. It weighed in at a mere 37.5 pounds,
hard to keep on ones shoulders, O.K., it wasn't quite that heavy, but a VHS
tape could fit inside it, remember those days? Anyway, I had just invented
Blurriest, Kenny and I had an argument, he didn't think I had performed the
third dex of the move, others thought I had, I yelled in a rage....... thats
why it's called Blurriest.... it happens so fast,YOU couldn't see the dex.
We rewound the gargantuan video recorder to in fact see that I had done the
triple-dex move. He apologized, we hugged, we won Worlds. There was a slight
amount of writers embellishment there, but it is close to accuracy.

[mattkain]

And here is a short story by Rick Reese from the same post about the invention of mobius:

Just one more quick story, I think it was 1988, I was visiting Kenny in
Eugene Or., He was going to school there and I had come into town for a
freestyle tourney. Dave Yevin was there, Jon Lind, Dennis Ross, Jack
Schoolcraft, Etienne Constable. All these pre-bap shredders deserve props
for all they taught me. Kenny had just invented Mobius.... I believe after
the works of the great Escher, Yes, mobius, in 1988. Kenny invented it, but
that Dave Yevin kid could hit it like nobodys business.....He truly could
have been one of the best ever if he didn't drop out of sight in 1991, crazy
talent.