Saylordisc was thought of and created by, Eric B. Hill #6907 R.I.P., somewhere around 1990. EBH ran the ‘weekly mini’ golf tournaments on weekends in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area. Every weekend, rain or shine, he would drive from Fritz Park in Irving to Skyline Park in Dallas (B.B. Owens after skyline closed) , and then on to Shawnee Park in Plano, to sell frisbees and run the minis. 10am and 2pm, Saturday and Sunday.
If you cashed out at a mini and you were a Pro, you got cash money. But if you won or placed as an Am, you got widgets as payout. Widgets. Eric kept a spiral notebook with every mini on it with everyone’s widget payout, sort of like a bookie or something.
Sometimes you’d see him in his Karmann Ghia VW or the Black Night El Camino, but most of the time Eric would be open for business sitting inside a blue and white VW bus. He had bins of frisbees in there and you could come in and sit down and browse the selection. There really wasn’t any stores that sold plastic back then. The Gas Pipe had some gumbputts and stuff, but there were no retail shops. Oshman’s had aviars once I remember that. But, ya. And there was no internet yet. Eric and I put up one of the first internet pages for selling frisbees, around 1995-1996 maybe, with his direct phone number on there as contact. It was on flash.net or fastlane. I forget. But it was still dial-up internet. Anyways, there was no online checkout method or anything like that – storefronts hadn’t been invented yet. Or online payment systems. There was barely a WWW back then.
We really didn’t have any special plastics or anything. Regular golf frisbees were $6-$7, and custom stamped frisbees usually a dollar or two more. Eric would have some frisbees that were unusual, or unpopular, and those were the ones I would buy from him. I still threw a Super Puppy after everyone else stopped using them, so those were one I would buy a lot of. Or no-thumbtrac Birdie putters. Discraft phantoms. Innova Zephyrs and Fenix. Lightning B-17 bombers. I threw a bananna yellow B-17 for a long time. Stealths. Dauntless. Lots of different lightning molds. And all the other weird stuff he would come across. We pretty much only had like whammo, innova-champion, discraft, lightning, and dynamic/destiny discs. I remember when john houck came out with millennium and brought them up to Dallas. That was the first ‘new’ manufacturer i can think of after the old standard ones.
So anyways, those weird frisbees I would always seek out – those became the ‘saylordiscs’. EBH would see me and say ‘hey I got some new crazy saylordiscs for you’ and they were like deadhead puppies or a dimple disc from Jan Sobel or whatever strange kind of frisbee it was. That’s how saylordisc was created. Now you know.