How disc golf built its map

Four of them turn out to hold one function each of a young sport: where the game was made into a product, where its equipment comes from, where its biggest competitions are run, and where its newest star grew up. They are linked by a few people who carried the sport from one place to the next, and by something golf never had: free land. The fifth place, Norfolk, has no part in the history at all, and that turns out to be the most useful thing on the list.

Los Angeles: not the invention, the product

The usual story begins in Pasadena. Ed Headrick, an executive at the toy company Wham-O, got the idea for disc golf during lunch breaks, when he and colleagues threw Frisbees at a trash can.¹ Wham-O did not want the game. In 1975 Headrick left, coined and trademarked the name "disc golf," and designed and installed the first course in Oak Grove Park in Pasadena.¹ In 1976 he and his son Ken founded the Disc Golf Association to manufacture discs and targets, and he founded the Professional Disc Golf Association to set standards and sign up members.¹ He sold lifetime PDGA memberships for $10 at tournaments, taking, as one early member remembered, "cash, checks, IOUs, whatever he could."² The target he and Ken developed, a basket under hanging chains that catches a disc from any direction, is the one on nearly every course.¹

But Los Angeles did not invent the game. In August 1970 a group in Rochester, New York, was already playing disc golf competitively, with tournaments and a weekly league, without having heard of Headrick's Frisbee association.³ The same year in Toronto, Ken Westerfield and Jim Kenner played Frisbee golf every day on an 18-hole course they laid out in Queen's Park; students at Berkeley had a standard 18-hole object course; in the early 1970s so did the University of Michigan's arboretum in Ann Arbor.³

People everywhere were throwing discs at trees. What Los Angeles added was everything that turns a pastime into something that can spread without its inventors: a standard target, a company to sell it, a public course anyone could wander onto, and an association with a membership list. Pasadena Now put the difference well on the course's 50th anniversary: the 1975 installation "made the sport accessible to anyone who wandered into the park."⁴

The city also produced the sport's first modern superstar. Paul McBeth, born in Huntington Beach in 1990, won four world championships in a row from 2012 to 2015, and six in all.⁵ His most famous contract was signed with a company across the country.

Michigan: the man who carried it

Jim Kenner, the Toronto player, is the link. Discraft began in 1978 in London, Ontario, and in 1979 Kenner and Gail McColl moved to Michigan and started what became Discraft Inc., today based in Wixom.⁶ One of the people who had found the game on his own in 1970 ended up making the discs other people throw.

Michigan kept a second institution. The Great Lakes Open in Milford held its 41st edition in 2023.⁷ That puts its start in the early 1980s, three decades before the Disc Golf Pro Tour was founded. It is played in county and regional parks: Kensington Metropark, Hudson Mills Metropark, Independence Lake County Park.⁷

In 2021 Discraft extended Paul McBeth's sponsorship with a ten-year deal worth $10 million.⁵ A player from Los Angeles became the face of a disc company from Michigan, whose founder learned the game in Toronto.

Peoria: the director and the parks

The Great Lakes Open's tournament director is not from Michigan. He is Nate Heinold, whose company, Ledgestone, hosts it.⁷⁸ Ledgestone is from Peoria, Illinois.

Heinold has described how his event grew. The Ledgestone tournament began in 2011 with one course and 105 players; by 2021 it used 12 area courses and expected 1,975 players, which he called the largest disc golf tournament in the world.⁹ The 2019 world championships were held in Eureka, Illinois, just east of Peoria.⁵ In 2016 Heinold and Steve Dodge founded the Disc Golf Pro Tour, the sport's top professional series.¹⁰

Asked why Peoria, Heinold did not talk about the city's size or money. He talked about parks. "We have very supportive parks and cities who allow us to continue to build these courses," he said, naming park districts and city parks across the area, which "allowed their venues to be an open canvas for us, and we go out and we paint our picture."⁹ He counted about 25 permanent courses in the region, some dating to the 1980s.⁹

Golf courses can be public too, but a golf course has to be built: graded, seeded, irrigated, maintained. A disc golf course needs a parks department willing to let someone put baskets among trees that are already there. So a disc golf capital does not have to be rich or large. It needs one organizer and public land that will say yes, repeatedly. Peoria had both, and the event's title sponsor completes the circuit: the radio station that interviewed Heinold called it the Discraft Ledgestone Insurance Open.⁹

Iowa: where courses are thick on the ground

The newest star is from Urbandale, Iowa. Gannon Buhr, born in 2005, won the United States Disc Golf Championship in 2022 and the world championship in Finland in 2025.¹¹ He was seventeen at the first.

Iowa is one of the states with the most disc golf courses per person, alongside Kansas and the Dakotas.¹² It would be too neat to say the courses made the champion; one player is not a pattern, and talent comes from many places. But the direction is plausible. A sport that is free to play on public land produces players where courses are dense relative to people, which is not where the people are. A teenager in a state with courses in every town can play several rounds a week for nothing. That is closer to how basketball makes players than how golf does.

Norfolk: the ordinary unit

Norfolk, Virginia, has no part in any of this. Its name does not appear in the histories of the sport's founding, its equipment, its tour or its stars. Why it is on the list is a question for the person who wrote it.

What the city does have is a page on its parks website. "Local disc golf advocates Charles Barrie and Wes Landfear approached Norfolk Parks & Recreation in the spring of 2018 to bring the sport to Norfolk," it says. Poplar Hall Park was chosen for the first course; a second went into Lafayette Park in the summer of 2019.¹³

That is a whole history in three sentences, and it is the most common one in the sport. A large city had no permanent course until two residents asked for one. Nothing about Norfolk had to change: not its economy, not its institutions. Two people, one parks department, a field and some baskets. The same act that Headrick performed in Oak Grove Park in 1975 and Heinold's team repeated across Peoria's park districts is performed by volunteers in ordinary places every year.

If the other four places on the list show where disc golf's functions ended up, Norfolk shows what they are built from.

The map

Put the places back together and the story is not a timeline but a set of carriers. Kenner carried the game from a Toronto park to a Michigan factory. Headrick carried it from a company that did not want it into public parks. Heinold carried an event from one Peoria course to a dozen and then ran Michigan's long-running tournament too. Discraft's money carried a California player's career. A dense web of free courses may have carried an Iowa teenager to a world title.

Each carrier needed one thing a young, cheap sport has in abundance: public land that can be borrowed. Golf needs capital for every course, so its map tends to follow money. Disc golf needs one person and a parks department willing to listen, so its map follows people. That may be why its capitals are Peoria and Wixom and Urbandale rather than the largest cities, and why the next one could be anywhere two residents ask the right office.

The same feature cuts the other way. A sport that anyone can start in any park can still be run from very few desks. One Peoria company runs the event its director calls the largest in the world and Michigan's long-running Great Lakes Open, and its head co-founded the sport's top professional tour; one Michigan maker sponsors that event and the most famous player. The bottom of disc golf is as open as a public park. The top, so far, is a short list of names, and the five places on the list are as much a map of those names as of the sport.

There is one place the list leaves out. Headrick's ashes, at his request, were mixed into discs that were sold to fund a museum and disc golf centre in Columbia County, Georgia.¹ The founder's last act was to carry the sport one more place.