Association football is only in its second century of existence.
China played versions of its own game, Cuju or kick ball for two millennia. But the ballgame
of Mesoamerica – today’s Mexico and northern central America - dates back even further,
and lasted for more than three thousand years.
And like our own times the game was so much more than a game.
And what a ball they played with…
“I don’t understand how when the balls hit the ground they are sent into the air
with such incredible bounce…”.said Perdro Martir de Algeria, a Spanish courtier, who
saw the first ball brought back to Europe by the conquistador Christopher Columbus.
Because all the stuff and bladder filled balls didn’t bounce, but in Mesoamerica, some
four thousand years ago, people worked out how to harvest latex from indigenous rubber
trees, and amazingly to mix it with the roots of the morning glory.
Hey presto! this solidified the latex to produce an elastic bouncing ball and who wouldn’t
want to play with that?
The earliest archaeological evidence of the game are the small ball courts found in Chiapas
on Mexico’s southern pacific coast and in the highlands of Oxaca, built between 1650
BCE and 1400 BCE.
The game took its first settled, rule bound and ceremonial forms under the Olmecs who
settled in Mexico’s gulf coast around Vera Cruz between 1500 and 1200 BCE. Here, in the
Olmec’s sprawling cities, hundreds of ball courts were created amongst religious and
municipal buildings.
Either rectangular or I-shaped, they were lined with high sloping walls, some whitewashed,
some painted with complex murals.
Stepped stone seating of some kind surrounded most courts and the largest made space for
a big crowd.
Rubber balls are perishable, and few have survived from any era, but carvings and drawings
suggest that they could been as small as a handball and as large as a small basketball.
Kicking and heading a ball of that size would have been dangerous, and the many clay figurines
and stone-carved reliefs of players that have been found show the use of protective armour,
helmets and gloves used for defence, but also to strike the ball with hands, hips, shoulders
and thighs.
The rules were never written down but it seems that teams of two played a kind of volleyball
across the central line, bouncing the ball off the side walls and into the air, hoping
their opponents would fail to keep it in play.
The Tepatlaxco Stela (Design note: above) - a first century CE carved stone relief from
Vera Cruz - shows a player being dressed by an attendant, wearing a helmet, strappings
on his lower arms, a pad on his knee and thicker armour on his thighs.
These would have been made of a mixture of wood and hides and organic padding and have
long since rotted, but the games’ symbolic weight was so great that we have a treasure
trove of ceremonial versions of the items, but made from stone.
The Yuguitos which mimicked helmets and gloves. Yokes that wrapped around the hips, often
carved with images of the sun and moon, frogs and toads, and psychoactive plants. Some yokes
would be embellished by Hachas - small stone carved heads that slotted into deep notches
on the yoke. They were often rendered as skulls and other reminders of death.
The Olmecs went into decline around 1200 BCE, but the game they had given shape to outlasted
them, spreading across Mesoamerica, taking a variety of new forms.
On the pacific coast of Mexico there were hundreds of architecturally modest courts
each serving a single village.
Around 100 CE, in the great city of Teotihulucan the game was played in much grander spaces,
by nobles, using sticks and clubs to shtik the ball.
Spreading out from Vera Cruz, the game was played on the island of Hispanola and in what
is now Puerto Rico. And it travelled as far north as contemporary Arizona, where it was
played by the Hohokum peoples.
But everywhere it was more than a game. Often accompanied by religious ceremonies, public
festivities and theatrical performances, the game was a pastime and ritual. In some societies
it was accompanied by the human sacrifice of players, perhaps defeated enemies, whose
blood would placate the maize god and, like the seasons on which they depended, turn the
cycle of life.
In the El Tijin ball court reliefs of Vera Cruz (c.CE 850-1100) we see a defeated player,
still in his body armour, about to have has chest opened and his heart extracted by an
opponent.
For the Mayans, who ruled Mexico’s Yucatan and the highlands of today’s Guatemala and
Honduras from the seventh to the tenth centuries CE, the game was the very foundation of the
world’s creation.
In the Popul Vuh, the Mayan’s most important codex, we find he story of two Mayan ball
playing noble brothers, Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu, who were enticed by the dark lords
of Xibalba - the underworld - to descend to their realm and play the game. The dark lords
won, killed the brothers, and buried their corpses beneath the demonic ball court, except
for Hun Hunahpu’s head, which was hung from a calabash tree.
When the underworld goddess Xquic passed, the head spat on her and she was impregnated
and then expelled from the underworld and sent back to Earth. There she bore the hero
twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Called back for the second leg on reaching adulthood, the
brothers defeated the demons and escaped with their father’s and uncle’s corpses, which
the placed in the sky to form the sun and the moon.
Half millennium later the Aztecs, now the dominant society in the region, played the
game for its patron deity Xolotol - the morning star - but also for the purpose of gambling
and pleasure.
The Spanish Conquistadors, when they arrived were appalled and amazed by the ball and the
game. Appalled won out and the game was repressed. Hundreds of ball courts were destroyed.
Democratically annihilated by European disease and enslavement, indigenous Mexicans lost
contact with the game that had made them for three thousand years.