Disc Golf Legends: Mike Hughes
A couple weeks ago I was able to talk to local legend Tom McManus, and during that time he introduced me to Mike “Hubee” Hughes. He is a man of many talents and passions, but he is also known for being one of the early disc golf pioneers. He’s got a great disc golf story to share with us, so let’s jump into it!
Mike was born in California, but moved to Tempe, Arizona, “When I was 11 and lived there for 50 years until I recently moved to Chandler, AZ. The funny thing was that it turned out that I lived about 3 miles away from the Wham-O factory. If I only knew!”, Mike says. He is currently 64 years young.
Hubee discovered the flying disc while in high school, winning a distance competition in 1975. He recalls, “I saw the first day of competition at the 1977 Arizona State Championships and was excited to try some of it. I went back the next day and the tournament had moved so I had no way to connect with anyone. I invited my best friend to check it out with me and we were both disappointed.”
But the seed was planted, and it was a couple years later that disc came back into Mike’s life. It was the summer of 1979, and Mike’s friend was getting married, which meant he was moving out of his rental. Mike remembers the phone call: “He called me and said, ‘Hey Hubee, I’m moving and wanted you to know that my room is available, and I live with these two frisbee dudes’. Well that piqued my interest and in a few months, I moved in.” Turns out the two ‘frisbee dudes’ were Van Miller and Kevin McHugh. Van was making a name for himself, doing well in distance competitions and is best known for his world record distance record from 1980 where he threw a 172g disc 142.90 meters, or just over 468 feet. Kevin was also good, taking second place in the 1979 AZ Disc Gold Championships. It was at that same event that Mike entered competition after buying a Blue 141 in a sporting goods store on the same day. Mike performed well and said, “I met all of the players and organizers in the scene that weekend.”
Shortly after that experience Mike found himself on the road to play in his next event in Oak Grove, CA. It was February 1980, and Mike recalls, “It was a great road trip, and it was where I met Tim Selinske and we became fast friends.” Selinske is basically a household name in the discing universe, but a few months later, he also met another legend, Eric Keim who, “Was probably the most famous and travelled of the local disc players”, Mike says. Eric asked Mike to be an official at the 1980 World Flying Disc Championships in Irvine, CA. “I jumped at the chance and that summer met Dan ‘Stork’ Roddick and many of the best US players. I also started to collect discs and was entirely into the scene by the summer of 1980”, Mike reminisces.
Mike went on to run the AZ States events from 1981 to 1989, and he even won the overall championship multiple times. “I went to the US Open in 1983 and won MTA (maximum time aloft), finished 4th in distance, beating Van that year, and finished 10th overall”, he says.
Soon Mike set his sights on disc golf, entering his first world championship event in 1987 in Toronto, where he finished in a very respectable 6th place. The next year he was in Cincinnati, finishing in 14th, and then another great run the following year in Iowa, where he took 7th. “I also became the Regional Director for AZ for the DGA in 1981 and sold and designed some of the first disc golf courses in the state. I also became a wholesaler for Innova Champion”, Mike recalls. In 1990 he convinced the PDGA to let him and his friends run Worlds in Iowa.
Eventually Mike got married, started a new career, and essentially hung up his disc life. Then in 2012, Mike recalls, “A guy came out to the house who wanted to sell my plastic. I loaded up his truck with a ton of stuff but held on to the core of my collection. It piqued my interest in collecting again and with the advent of digital cameras, I started to photograph all my discs.” With the help of eBay and Facebook, Mike was able to reconnect with many of his old friends and colleagues. Five years later, he really started to meditate on his legacy and, “How much I enjoyed the people and the comradery in the disc world in my youth. I also realized that all of us are getting older and that some important historical knowledge was dying.” He recruited some other collectors, some of whom he never actually met in person, and they began to form an idea that eventually became the Flying Disc Museum. “I had explored doing a brick-and-mortar museum, but it just did not pencil out financially”, Mike recalls. So, they chose to go digital and create an online space that debuted in September 2018. Mike proudly says, “I have a great group of people I work with and to make sure it outlasts all of us, I have incorporated the survival of the FDM into my estate plan so it will be handsomely funded at my demise, and someone will be able to carry on our work. I am still an avid disc collector and would argue I have the most complete WFC, IFA and HDX collections on the planet. I also have probably 2,000 minis and have hundreds of “sets of 3 or more”. Collecting is all about the hunt and learning new things. It has been fascinating to create timelines and dig up provenance of discs. Being part of the museum has taught me to really pay attention to the details and I have learned a ton. I recently acquired 7 boxes of paperwork from an organizer, a collector who was active in the 1960s and it will be incredibly exciting to carefully review all of it for the history it will teach us. This stuff, at least to a museum curator is invaluable.” We should all be so grateful for Mike’s hard work to invest his time to record this amazing slice of history.
Mike has truly retired from flying disc, retiring in 1994. But he has stayed active, participating in many outdoor activities like ball golf *gasp*, triathlons, and mountain bike racing. At the young age of 60, Mike found himself on the podium for 8 straight mountain bike races. Then at age 63, Mike says, “I decided I wanted to be a rock and roll drummer, so I bought a nice kit, dialed in my man cave, hired a coach and practiced for 1-2 hours a day. Not sure anything will every come of it, but I can finally call myself a drummer!” Mike is proof positive that you can, in fact, teach an old dog some new tricks.
Does Mike think he’ll ever get back to discing? He says, “I would love to get back into disc play as I am still very fit, but I just can’t squeeze it in between drums, the FDM and mountain bike training. At some point, I may very well get back into disc golf but not sure.” Maybe he can take a cue from Scott Stokely and find himself back on the Pro Tour.
To say that Mike has been at the heart of the history of disc is an understatement, and to really drive that point home, Mike shared with me an amazing story. Mike remembers, “Tim had invited me out to IFA to get ready for a WFC in 1982. Anyway, he told me that he and Dave Dunipace were going to go check out a new disc they were making and wanted to know if I wanted to go. We drove out to a non-descript industrial park and I remember them opening the steel door in the back of this machine shop. I remember watching a guy take a disc off a machine and cutting a big thick round piece of plastic off the bottom of it. Dave, Tim and I went into the parking lot and started throwing it, and we all thought ‘wow, this flies pretty nice!’ Innova Champion Disc was born that day.”
Imagine being one of three people to first place their hands on the disc that literally changed disc golf!? That alone is enough to be remembered in the halls of history, but it is clear that Mike has done so much more for this sport in all its forms, and we should all be aware of his contributions. Thank you, Mike, maybe we’ll see you on the course one day soon!
