A Parking Lot Game Spread Around the World

Nov. 26, 2008 — -- On Thanksgiving night, a group of adults, including some pushing 60, will gather in an unused high school parking lot for the holiday tradition of playing a game of Ultimate Frisbee.

That parking lot in the New Jersey suburb of Maplewood is where the game of Ultimate Frisbee began and this year's game will mark the 40th anniversary of the sport.

In a corner of the lot is a weathered metal plaque embedded in a rock that proclaims "Birth Place of Ultimate Frisbee Created by Columbia High School Students in 1968."

Cooperstown it's not, but from that cracked splotch of pavement, Ultimate Frisbee -- or Ultimate as it's known to players -- has spread throughout college campuses and around the world.

It has become so popular, and in some places so competitive, it has spawned an official rule book, a regulatory body known as the Ultimate Players Association and dueling national championship games.

"I marvel at it sometimes," said movie producer Joel Silver, who is to Ultimate Frisbee what Abner Doubleday was to baseball.

"It's kind of a shock that it's reached such proportions," Silver, better known for his "Matrix," "Lethal Weapon" and "Die Hard" series, told ABCNews.com.

As a Columbia High School student in 1968 and a member of the school's student council, he won a vote, almost as a joke, to have the game declared a club sport. He and a couple of fellow students refined the rules from football's first-down rules to the fast paced free flowing game that has swarmed across hundreds of college campuses and around the world.

Silver recalled, as a teenager, watching the game he helped invent and saying to another student on the sidelines, "Someday they'll be playing this game all over the world. And the kid said, 'Yeah, right.'"