Glow Discs

Everyone makes glow discs — Trilogy, Innova, Discraft, Gateway, MVP. Name a disc golf company — a real disc golf company — and Marshall Street has some of their glow discs.

Trilogy calls all its glow discs Moonshine, and MVP/Axiom dubs them Eclipse.

Once we put a bunch of glow discs in the closet and the brightest ones were, 1st, the now discontinued DGA Glowfly (Blowfly), followed by Lightning. All the others started out kind of dim and went dark after 20 or 30 minutes.

The best way to use glow discs is to take a UV light with you, which charges them quickly. Other solutions for glow golf include UFO Glow Tape, and Flight Disc Lights. Most others are either too heavy or force you to punch a hole in your disc, which is kind of silly.

The funny thing about glow discs is that most people who buy them aren’t really interested in using them for nighttime frisbee golf, but because the stuff that glows makes the plastic feel and maybe behave differently.

Disc golf in the dark is generally illegal, physically dangerous, and usually played by loud, drunken people, many also on drugs. And not always soft drugs.

We had a party here at Pyramids in the early 2000s, and Felix Rentschler brought maybe 50 of his musician friends, along with a cast of disc golfers. The party officially lasted till 5 a.m., when my wife insisted I kick everyone out of the house. But it continued — with bongo drums and other percussion instruments — until around nine in the morning.

It was the greatest party ever, and one of the very last times we allowed glow golf at Pyramids. Maybe we got old, or maybe Joel Brown’s words finally sank in: “Night golf is just plain wrong.”

There is one thing that happens often, and that is people having their best rounds at night. We speculate this is because they can’t see all the trees and other obstacles, and are therefore more focused. Either that or people just play better when they’re really drunk and screaming and falling down.

At any rate the absence of light in disc golf goes hand and hand with the absence of sanity. And if you don’t believe me, ask Franchi. He knows.