The Ball

The Ball

Discovering the Object of the Game

John Fox

Dedication

For Stephanie, Amelia, and Aidan.

For everything.

Contents

Prologue

Warm-Up

T
here are few activities that feel as frivolous, and as deeply satisfying, as a good game of catch. There's no score to keep, no winners or losers, no rules. In its purest form catch needs no coaches, leagues, boot camps, clinics, or away games that oblige you to drive your kid for hours across state lines: catch is pre-regulation, pre-industrial, and, almost certainly, prehistoric.

On one of those early June days in the mountains of Vermont, when the grass, still wet from the snow melt, seems to thicken behind you as you run, my seven-year-old son Aidan and I were locked in a timeless, quiet rhythm—the only sound being the repeated
thwap
of ball against glove. Here, on the remote tribal boundaries of Red Sox Nation, baseball was undeniably in the air.

“Dad,” asked Aidan, breaking the flow and puncturing the silence. “Why do we play ball, anyway?”

I could tell immediately that this sudden inquiry wasn't one of those random toss-off questions Aidan, like other kids his age, tended to ask on a regular basis—“What are eyebrows for?” “Is there any chance we're Navajo?” “Do we know any cannibals?”

No, it struck me that this was downright existential. The kind of reflection that arises when one detaches from a scene and looks back in, like an alien discovering a foreign world. With such an altered perspective, the things we do every day, so naturally and without so much as a fleeting thought—things as fundamental as playing ball—can suddenly seem exotic and delightfully inexplicable. Almost absurd, really.

After a weighty pause in the action, we started playing again, now awkwardly self-conscious. We'd been throwing a small sphere of cork, yarn, and cowhide back and forth for the past hour for no easily explained reason.

“Good question!” was all I could muster in response, and I meant it sincerely, though I suspect it sounded lame and dismissive. He moved on, as kids do, to more tangible concerns: what we were having for dinner and whether his friend could stay the night.

I, on the other hand, couldn't let the question go quite so easily.

W
hy
do
we play ball? As I turned it over in my mind in the days and weeks that followed, this basic question split into many more: How long has this love affair been going on? When and where and how did the games we play today first get started? How did something as inessential as chasing a ball around evolve into a $500 billion global industry? How, I asked myself, did the ball come to stake an unrivaled claim on our money, our time, and our lives?

The truth is I was naturally inclined and prepared to go deep on a question that most fathers would have shrugged off or turned into a cozy aphorism: “
Well, son, playing ball teaches us how to win, but more importantly, how to lose. . . .”
You could say that I took up this particular ball and ran with it because I'd been training for the moment for years.

The son of working-class Irish immigrants, I grew up between cultures and worlds, amid the gestures, symbols, and rites that revealed my family's identity. “What are you?” was a standard question in my multiethnic neighborhood on the north shore of Manhattan Island, and every kid kept a standard answer in his back pocket. In my neighborhood, the sports you played defined who you were more than anything else. Many of my friends, whose parents were also off-the-boat Irish, took up Gaelic football and hurling—a primitive game that as far as I could tell centered on whacking your opponents' kneecaps with a heavy wooden stick. Their parents, understandably, wanted them to know what it meant to be Irish by playing the game of their own youth. For them, sports helped bridge the great distance they'd traveled to find a new life.

My father was different. Having scrimped and saved to get as far away from his dirt-poor childhood as he possibly could, he wasn't about to have his kids playing the same “backward” games he'd grown up with. He was determined to raise a son who played American sports and could hold his own some day in the neighborhood bar, talking box scores and batting averages—a pastime from which he'd always felt excluded. So I passed on hurling, protecting my young knees in the process, and declared my allegiance to both flag and father by playing baseball, that quintessentially American game.

That nearly half the kids on my Little League team were Dominican or Cuban, my dad's cheers drowned out at games by a Spanish chorus, was a delightful irony not lost on me even back then. I learned, however, that my Caribbean friends weren't playing for the same nationalistic reasons that I was, trying to assimilate. As far as they and their fathers were concerned they were playing the national game of their homelands, a game that's been evolving its own Latino flavor since U.S. sailors first brought it to Cuba in the 1860s.

About the same time I started playing baseball, my mother organized an urban youth tennis league in our neighborhood park. Like most of my friends, I regarded tennis as effete, foreign, and snobby. It was the 1970s and tennis was still mostly played by white people wearing even whiter outfits on groomed lawn or clay courts in members-only country clubs. I didn't want to play and tried to get out of it by wielding my racket like a baseball bat, hoping to wear down my mother's patience. But Arthur Ashe was winning Grand Slams and breaking new racial barriers, and my mother was determined that every neighborhood kid, including me, should play the game she'd loved since she was young. So she solicited donations for rackets from local businesses and secured sponsorship through the New York City Parks and Recreation Department, and pretty soon a ragtag mob of Irish, Hispanic, and black kids were swinging rackets like baseball bats while my mom tried to instruct us on the proper forehand stroke. The regular players weren't exactly happy that we'd decided to take up their game and take over their courts. I can remember the turf wars that erupted as kids with Afros and headbands chased stray balls.

“You kids belong over there,” I recall one man scolding us, pointing to the basketball courts nearby. Part of me agreed and wished I could abandon my mother and jump the fence, but the other part of me was having too much fun participating in a social movement just by hitting a fuzzy yellow ball over a net.

Years later, it was sport that had captured my studies along with my imagination. As a young graduate student in anthropology, looking for adventure far from home, I signed onto an archaeology project in the wilds of Central America. The team was searching for the ruins of ancient Mayan houses and temples left crumbling in the jungle over a millennium ago. It seemed about as exotic and as far from the familiar as one could get.

Our first step was to scour satellite images shot from Honduran military planes looking for the orderly rectilinear patterns of ancient foundation walls and buried courtyards beneath the tropical canopy. In short order, we identified 30-plus ancient sites previously undiscovered and waiting to be explored. Next to the repeated pattern of houses grouped around patios, I spotted another unusual grouping at each site formed by two long parallel buildings separated by a narrow gap. The same pattern repeated itself in each of the satellite images.

“What are those?” I asked my professor overseeing the project.

“Ball courts,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Those are definitely ball courts.”

Dead center in each one of these ancient sites, long buried under farm fields or hidden away beneath a chaotic tangle of tropical vegetation, were the ruins of stone stadiums where kings and commoners once played one of the world's earliest sports.

I was hooked.

I spent the next three summers crouched with trowel in hand and swatting mosquitoes in the sweltering Honduran heat, scraping back the remnants of these ancient stadiums. Layer by layer, I revealed the sloping stone walls and hard clay playing floors where forgotten athletes once knocked a solid rubber ball back and forth to entertain their kinsmen and their gods. The game had many names in multiple languages, but it is most commonly known as
ulama
. I wanted to learn more about this game, to shed light on its meaning and importance for the Maya. All around the courts, I found piles of broken bowls and jars tossed aside by generations of feasting fans after downing venison and
chicha
, an alcoholic drink made from fermented corn—the ancient Mayan equivalent of hot dogs and beer.

Back at my university, I probed just as deeply into arcane research on the subject. I studied drawings of carved stone monuments depicting kings striking balls with their hips, the most common method of play, while wearing lavish uniforms that included feather headdresses and heavy jade jewelry. I read the decoded hieroglyphic captions that described the rulers as great ballplayers and undefeated warriors, as though the two were somehow connected. I learned that the game itself was rich with religious symbolism. Along with serving as a playing field, the ball court was also regarded as a kind of temple, and the playing of the game akin to a ritual act. And the best part of all? The losers of this ritual contest were sometimes sacrificed through ritual decapitation. This, I discovered with delight, was no ordinary game.

Ten years later, I turned in my trowel and left academia behind. I returned to Central America on assignment from
Smithsonian
magazine to cover
ulama
as a journalist. This time, however, instead of picking through pottery sherds or ancient texts I decided to seek out one of a handful of remote villages where the game was still played. In the span of several days, I learned things about the game by watching and playing it that six years of research had never brought to light.

When Aidan asked why we play ball, though, I'm quite sure he wasn't asking about dead or dying Mesoamerican traditions (though he'd enjoy the human sacrifice part!). He was wondering why we play the games he can't get enough of—baseball, soccer, basketball, football, tennis, lacrosse—the games that are still very much with us today.

However unscientific and perhaps unprovable, I deeply believe that there are seeds of meaning and values planted early on in these games that are still there, subliminally shaping how we think and play, even centuries later. That soccer began in the Dark Ages as a brutal no-holds-barred mob game played between neighboring villages is still dangerously present in the stands every time Manchester United faces archrival Liverpool. That tennis arose in medieval monasteries and the courts of French kings might explain why my friends and I weren't so welcome to pick up rackets and play the game ourselves.

But I think Aidan was also asking why playing ball matters. Why it's worth it. What it does for us that's unique and utterly irreplaceable. As I'd already learned from my time among the ballplayers of western Mexico, no game or sport can be truly understood in the abstract or explored from the quiet comfort of a library carrel. No dry history can bring to life the visceral thrill of a fast break or a perfectly executed corner kick or a bottom-of-the-ninth home run. And so I took to the road to experience the games we love firsthand. This book will toggle back and forth between past and present to explore what's changed, what's remained stubbornly the same, and what might be essential to carry forward to the future.

Now seems a particularly relevant time to explore the importance that playing ball, or playing anything for that matter, has in our lives. Recent research by psychologists and others concerned with the well-being of our kids suggests that they are playing less than their parents did, and far less than they should. This “play deficit,” as it's been called, could have lasting effects on their development and on society. The decline in children's play over the past several decades has been well documented. According to a 2004 study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, children now spend 50 percent less time playing outdoors than they did in the 1970s. The study found that children ages 10 to 16 spend an average of just 12.6 minutes per day in vigorous physical activity. As schools are pressed to boost test scores and achievement levels or lose funding, many are choosing to eliminate recess. Kids these days, many parents and researchers lament, are overscheduled, overstructured, overweight, and missing out on something fundamental to childhood. If anything, what I found in my research and travels suggests that the cost of this play deficit could have greater ramifications, socially and culturally, than research studies have accounted for.

My travels took me not to multimillion-dollar corporate-sponsored arenas and ballparks, but to small-town playing fields, gyms, and pitches from Ohio to Massachusetts. They took me to places I never would have thought to look: a French palace, an Indian reservation, a remote Scottish isle, the Amazon rain forest, and a Florida marine park, among others. Along the way, in my search for the meaning and roots of ball games, I didn't run into a single famous athlete, nor was I really expecting to. Instead I met ordinary players, coaches, die-hard fans, and keepers of the games who sew their own tennis balls, turn cowhide into footballs, craft lacrosse rackets from hickory wood—individuals whose extraordinary stories add up to as satisfying an answer to Aidan's question as I could ever hope to match.

One central character that gets kicked and batted around throughout the book is the ball itself: that deceptively simple, universally adored orb whose invention and evolution put the bounce, dribble, roll, and spin in the games we play. “Probably no other plaything is as easily recognized, easily played with and universally enjoyed by people of all cultures, skills and ages.” That's what the curator of the U.S. National Toy Hall of Fame had to say about the ball when it finally got inducted in 2009 to join such Johnny-come-lately distractions as the bicycle, kite, jump rope, and Mr. Potato Head. “High time!” I thought when I saw the announcement. The fascinating 5,000-year plus technological and social evolution of the ball, from papyrus to polymers, has never received its due—and my goal is to make up for that here.