Aerobie

Aerobie is an interesting company, and most famous for its Aerobie Ring Frisbee, which easily flies farther than any disc, is not only illegal but impractical for disc golf, and the first really good flying ring (I think). Other copycat flying rings would soon follow.

Wikipedia says:

“Designed in 1984 by Stanford engineering lecturer Alan Adler, the Aerobie has a polycarbonate core with soft rubber bumpers molded onto the inner and outer rims. The outer rim has a spoiler designed to impart stability.”

Pretty sure they don’t mean stability the way we mean stability, which we use, depending on our level of play, as a synonym for overstable OR understable OR that stable thing that’s between the two.

Aerobie became a whole company with a bunch of other stuff sold around the world: a smaller flying ring called the Sprint Ring, along with a combination ring/boomerang called the Orbiter that is hilariously exhausting and hard to control and generally, especially in stiff wind, winds up suspended high on roofs and in trees.

Aerobie also makes Nerf footballs with fins. These only work if thrown with a righty overhand. When thrown lefty they resemble a bird shot in mid-flight. Glow balls, lightweight rubbery discs for kids and dogs, a really excellent top, some golf discs, other strange toys.

Aerbie’s most important golf disc is the Epic, with a concentric rim that’s wider on one side than the other. The other difference about the Epic is that it flies best when thrown upside-down. Epic throwers throw overhead, period, and very far. Another  unusual aspect of the Aerobie Epic Driver is that it can corkscrew 360 degrees. In other words, you throw it upside-down and it finishes, if thrown correctly, upside-down. In between it turns all the way around on an imaginary axis in my non-mathematical mind.

The only time you’ll ever see the Epic 2 or 3 or SuperEpic is in the Marshall Street Newsletter, and only in the April 1 edition.

Other Epic oddities: won’t hold permanent marker, floats on water, flies farther into headwind. As a disc it is whacked in so many ways, often banned from distance competitions, and one of those discs that allow a certain subset of disc golfers — who in general are already different — to be even MORE different than the rest.

Flies best when thrown by players with complicated psychological issues.