The “Founders”: Joel Silver, Bernard “Buzzy” Hellring, and Johnathan “Jonny” Hines

In the summer of 1968, Joel Silver was introduced to a “frisbee football” type game while participating in an educational enrichment program at the Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Mass. After returning to Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., that fall, he got a motion passed at the student council to introduce Frisbee into the curriculum. Together with his friends Bernard “Buzzy” Hellring and Jonathan “Jonny” Hines, they got other students to play their new game and refined the rules, producing a written “first edition” of the rules for the sport Joel dubbed “Ultimate Frisbee” and naming their group the “Columbia High School Varsity Frisbee Squad” in early 1970.

The three classmates laid the foundation required to permit the transformation of a recreational activity into a sport over the following years. Ultimate today is still played largely according to the rules developed by Joel, Buzzy, and Jonny. Joel Silver is currently an accomplished Hollywood producer, producing dozens of films including the Lethal Weapon series, the first two Die Hard films, and The Matrix series. He is married to Karyn A. Fields, has one son, and currently lives in Burbank, Calif.

Jonny Hines, who founded the Princeton team and played in the first college game ever — the Rutgers-Princeton match-up played before more than 1,000 spectators in 1972, is now an international attorney splitting time between New York and Moscow. He is married to Olga Dyuzheva and has two sons. Tragically, Buzzy Hellring died in an automobile accident while returning to college at Princeton University in the spring of 1971.