Frisbee player freestyles on Quad

Each day, Kirksville resident T.J. Barton, 49, wakes up and heads off to the Quad.

Santana's soulful tunes float through the air from Barton's radio as he sprays silicon on the back of his Frisbee disc.

Standing up, Barton spins the Frisbee in the air and bounces it on his fingernail before making it roll across his chest and catching it with the opposite hand.

Barton, a freestyle Frisbee player, is considered a Frisbee grand master and practices every day for a few hours to hone his skills.

Unlike traditional, ultimate or golf Frisbee, freestyle Frisbee involves doing tricks, including some that take lots of practice.

"The hardest thing about freestyle is that it's boring," Barton said. "You have to do the same thing 100,000 times to get it, but once you do it's really cool."

People can see Barton practicing on the Quad Monday to Friday. While many have seen him, few stop to ask what he is doing or to throw the Frisbee around, although some have interacted with him in other ways.

"I drew a sketch of him for my drawing class because he was doing lots of crazy positions you don't see everyday," freshman Lindsay Koski said.

Barton shows off his freestyle Frisbee skills at demonstrations and at tournaments. He said competitive freestyle tournaments are similar to gymnastics or skating competitions in that freestyle performances are done to music and are graded on variety, unity of play and difficulty of tricks.

"There's definitely an artistic element to it," Barton said.

Tournaments take place worldwide and throughout the United States. Competitors can participate in a variety of categories including solo, open, mixed pairs, men's and women's divisions.

Competitors usually pick out music in advance and choreograph a routine with their partner before the competition. This doesn't always happen, however.

"You try to put a routine together," Barton said. "Ideally, you have one. If you don't, you go [to the tournament] and find someone else without a routine and put something together. You never do really well with that, but you get to be around the best players."

One of Barton's biggest accomplishments was playing alone in the Pro Disc Freestyle World Championships last year said his partner, Janet Romine, reference desk worker at Pickler Memorial Library.

Each year, one person is declared Grand Champion of the competition.

"I had visions of being a world champion at one point," Barton said. "There's a possibility I could have a shot at it in the grand master's division, age 45-55."

Barton picked up freestyle while attending Bowling Green State University (Ohio). He began by playing with his friends between classes on the quad.

He also was influenced by a group of professional freestyle Frisbee players, including the world champion at the time, who visited to do a demonstration.

"It really opened everyone's mind," Barton said. "It was the first time I had ever seen a nail delay."

Barton said the nail delay revolutionized freestyle Frisbee. It involves balancing a spinning Frisbee on a fingernail before throwing it up in a trick. The nail delay allows the player to continue the Frisbee's flight.

"When a person throws [a Frisbee], they put all their energy into it," Barton said. "Instead of terminating the energy you can ride the spin until the very end. It becomes more of a sequential art instead of back and forth."

Barton, like many freestyle Frisbee players, has glued fake nails onto his own to perfect the nail delay.

Barton dropped out of college his senior year to develop his freestyle abilities. He began bartending at night and practicing during the day.

Barton helped start a small freestyle Frisbee club at Bowling Green to help improve his skills.

After the team had been playing for a few years, it sponsored a tournament. Barton hired a professional team, the Air Aces Three, to do a demonstration at the tournament.

Primarily an indoor team, the Air Aces Three was about to tour in California schools and was going to play outside a lot.

This was Barton's big break."They were afraid they were going to look bad playing outside in the wind," Barton said. "They hired me to play on the team because I could play outdoors. Wind was my specialty."

This launched Barton's professional freestyle career. For the next 10 years, Barton traveled around the country, performing with different teams based out of Chicago and Cleveland.

Barton had corporate sponsorship that helped him get demonstrations all over the world.

He said the most lucrative demonstration he ever did was when he went to Saudi Arabia. Barton and his team toured with a group called the Apple Band, who were Beatles imitators, and a swimming instructor.

"Basically, they sent us out to the oil fields," Barton said. "We mostly performed for Americans. They scheduled our shows in the day time 120-degree weather. The Frisbees turned to rubber, so we rescheduled for night when it was only 90 degrees."

Barton said he tired of the constant travel and decided to break off on his own and move to Hawaii with Romine to continue his freestyle career after 10 years of touring.

In Hawaii, Barton worked as many jobs as he could find, from electrical work to house painting to landscaping, all while continuing to do as many demonstrations as he could.

Barton said it was a hard lifestyle for the two of them.

After eight years in Hawaii, Romine decided she wanted to go back to school and focus on a career for herself.

"I didn't have the drive to do [freestyle Frisbee] all the time, whereas he was willing to give up lots to do what he loves," Romine said.

Romine and Barton moved back to the mainland so Romine could attend graduate school. Barton continued to attend tournaments and do demonstrations.