The Ball (13 page)

Ancient Maya ballplayers compete as musicians sing and dance on a grandstand, from a polychrome vase, ca.
AD
600–900.

M
ore than 1,000 years before the Spanish landed on the shores of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and began their conquest of the Aztecs, the Maya were playing ball in cities like Cobá scattered throughout the jungles, mountains, and lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Guatemala. For the Maya, like the Aztecs, the ball game contest had profound symbolic meaning, featuring prominently in their most sacred creation story—the Maya equivalent of Genesis—known as the
Popol Vuh
.

Though it was first recorded in the mid-16th century in highland Guatemala, archaeologists have found scenes from the
Popol Vuh
depicted on painted pottery and ancient sculptures dating to the earliest periods of Maya history. The creation story traces the many failed attempts by the gods to create humans. It centers on the exploits of two brothers, Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu, and two hero twins who were born to one of the brothers.

The story begins with the first pair of brothers playing ball just above the entrance to the Maya underworld, called Xibalba. The lords of the underworld become annoyed by the incessant pounding of the rubber ball on the earth above, so they lure the brothers down to the ball court of Xibalba, where they are soon sacrificed. The gods decapitate Hun Hunahpu and hang his head in a calabash tree. One day, while a goddess is passing the tree, the brother's head spits into her hands, miraculously impregnating her. She gives birth to hero twins, who soon discover their father's ball game gear hidden in his house and start playing ball, again angering the lords of Xibalba.

History repeats itself as the twins are called down to the underworld to face a series of trials and to play ball against the gods. At one point, one of the twins is decapitated and his head is put into play as the ball, but the twins retrieve and reattach it, ultimately winning the contest against the lords of the underworld. In the process, they also defeat the forces of darkness and ascend into the heavens and bring light to the world as the sun and the planet Venus.

As art historian Mary Miller interprets the symbolic role of the ball game and ball court in the Maya creation, “Life is both taken and renewed in the ball court. The ball court is the place where fortunes are reversed, and then reversed again. It is the ultimate place of transition.” This idea of transition, death, and renewal of life and fertility is a theme that crops up again and again in association with the Mesoamerican ball game. In the sacred books, or codices, of the Aztecs the bouncing ball was compared to the cosmic journey of the sun into and out of the underworld. Ritual ball games were played during key religious festivals to magically enact and maintain the cycles of nature and the cosmos.

The
Popol Vuh
, and a host of other accounts and visual depictions, leaves little doubt that the violent sacrifice of defeated players, or unlucky stand-ins captured in battle, was a postgame rite performed at some, though certainly not all, ball games. These sacrificial games were most likely part of elaborate ceremonies that took place after important battles, where war captives were forced to play against each other in life-or-death gladiatorial contests. The winners would presumably have had their lives spared, whereas the losers were decapitated, their hearts ripped out and offered up to the gods.

In one particularly gruesome depiction found on the walls of the monumental ninth-century Maya ball court at Chichén Itzá, in the Yucatán, serpents and squash plants sprout from the neck of a kneeling, decapitated ballplayer, bestowing fertility on the land and the living. The winning rival stands to the side, wielding a stone knife and the freshly severed head as his bloody trophy. Similar scenes connecting ball play and human sacrifice are repeated on sculptures, pottery, and paintings across Mesoamerica.

Scholars believe that these agonistic rites were played out again and again as reenactments of the creation story. Maya kings, often identified as great ballplayers in hieroglyphic inscriptions, may even have dressed as the hero twins for important ceremonial games. In ball courts that served as symbolic portals to the underworld, these kings appeared before their subjects as the ultimate sports heroes—semidivine warriors and athletes capable not only of defeating their enemies but of vanquishing death and darkness and bringing life and light to the world. Whereas ordinary men played ordinary games with ordinary outcomes, went the message, kings played games of cosmic significance.

Of course, the nuances of the Mesoamerican belief system were of little interest to the Spanish friars who were intent on eradicating all traces of this diabolical pastime. In 1585 the Spanish authorities banned all ball games, citing their corrupting influences on native populations. But on the outer fringes of what was then New Spain, in the remote frontier villages of Sinaloa and Nayarit, the game managed to slip just below the radar of the centralized Spanish bureaucracy.

A handful of missionary and travelers' accounts of
ulama
from the 17th through the 19th centuries give a glimpse of a game still steeped in ceremony, though heads no longer rolled and hearts stayed safely in chests. According to a 17th-century account of a mountain tribe called the Acaxee, competitive ball games between villages involved the entire community and were accompanied by mock battles, singing, dancing, and elaborate feasts. Accounts of the same games from the early 20th century, however, reveal a tradition gradually stripped of most of its ceremony and cultural meaning—one in slow but steady decline.

Manuel Aguilar, an art historian working on the Ulama Project, has been investigating the modern game of
ulama
for traces of its ancient symbolism. “When the Spanish friars drove the game underground,” said Aguilar, “it almost certainly lost most of its religious overtones.” But some intriguing practices might be holdovers from the days when the game was more than a game. According to Spanish accounts, for example, the Aztecs played primarily on religious feast days; today in Los Llanitos, the game is played mostly on Christian holidays. And just as ancient ball courts were often associated with death and the underworld, as the
Popol Vuh
story makes clear, today's
tastes
tend to be located next to village cemeteries.

Not that
ulama
was ever an entirely spiritual affair. Even when players weren't risking their heads and hearts to the game, there were some pretty high stakes involved. Elite sponsors provided housing and food for the best ballplayers, trained them rigorously and then challenged other teams to competition, wagering significant sums on the outcome. Durán describes how some players “gambled their homes, their fields, their corn granaries, their maguey plants. They sold their children in order to bet and even staked themselves and became slaves to be sacrificed later if they were not ransomed.”

A
fter a day in Los Llanitos, I hopped back into our jeep with Chuy and the archaeologists and drove 12 windy miles to the rival village of El Quelite to track down local
ulama
legend Rafael Lizárraga y Barra. El Huilo, “the skinny one,” as he's known to his friends and fans, is the oldest living
ulama
player. At 95, he still has the cockiness and competitive streak of a revered athlete, despite the fact that it's been 30 or so years since he last put hip to ball.

Within minutes of pulling up at his modest roadside house, El Huilo, without provocation or the benefit of teeth, began teasing and baiting Chuy, strutting like a cock in a hen house. “Ha! You players today! You're just sissies compared to how we were!” Chuy unwrapped his ball from the folds of his neckerchief and bounced it over to the old man. El Huilo caught the ball expertly, turned it in his bony hands, clearly assessing its quality. Bouncing it up and down like a kid, he recalled the days when sponsors would take him and other players “into the hills” for intensive periods of training. “The man who used to organize the games really watched the players. He wouldn't let them have any women or drink. And since we couldn't work while they were training, he'd take care of us, like good horses.”

“And the women,” he broke into a wide, toothless grin and swiveled his hips. “The women
loved
us ballplayers because we knew how to move our hips, if you know what I mean . . .”

Back in his youth, when
ulama
was literally the only game in town, money was always on the line when the players stepped on the court—just as in the days of the Aztecs and the Maya.

“What was your most memorable game?” I asked.

He described point for point an epic two-day battle with a neighboring village. “They said I hit the ball so hard that day it looked like I wanted to kill someone!” He wasn't just playing, but was betting his opponents 20 pesos a point. “Boy, I made a lot of money that day!” he laughed, rubbing his hands together, still pleased with his performance—which, I came to learn, took place in 1934.

Back then,
ulama
dominated the western Mexican sports annals, and being a top player could win you fortune, fame, and women. But today, few local youths are interested in taking up a sport as obscure, difficult, and physically punishing as
ulama
. The day I watched Chuy and his teammates face off on the
taste
, 20 or so teenagers packed the nearby volleyball court. I couldn't resist asking Chuy which was harder, volleyball or
ulama
.

He looked at me and scoffed. “
Ulama
, of course! It takes years of practice and most players don't have what it takes. You can't have fear. You need to be strong.” The implication was clear: volleyball, unlike
ulama
, is no sport for real men.

There are no opportunities for scholarships or professional contracts for
ulama
players. Although Chuy and other players have been invited to faraway Cancún to perform for tourists in faux-Maya extravaganzas—complete with drums, feather headdresses, and face paint—most decline, regarding the displays as exploitative and inaccurate. On the website of Xcaret, a beach resort south of Cancún on the Mayan Riviera, ballplayers are shown prancing about in campy costumes that would be perfectly at home in the Broadway production of
The Lion King
. The accompanying copy claims that “Xcaret has rescued and disseminated a millenary tradition. What was once only imagined from the archaeological remains of ball courts throughout Mesoamerica has come spectacularly to life at Xcaret.” Of course, given the choice, some things may be better off left to the imagination. For Chuy and his teammates,
ulama
is an aggressive blood sport, not a curiosity to be exploited for tourist theater—especially if there are feathers involved.

But as challenging as it might be to keep the
ulama
tradition intact and alive among the younger generation in the face of competition from modern alternatives, the game's survival may ultimately hinge on something far more basic: the availability of rubber to make balls.

At one time, Los Llanitos and the surrounding lowlands was a booming center of rubber production. The Codex Mendoza, a 16th-century Aztec document, records that a nearby area of coastal Mexico paid an annual tribute of some 50 tons of rubber to the Aztec ruler, to be used for medicinal, utilitarian, and ritual purposes—including the production of balls. Brady's team calculated it would have taken about 1,300 acres of land and 427 full-time rubber tappers to meet this annual levy.

But since then, the rubber trees that once grew here have been wiped out by the spread of beach resorts and other coastal developments, and the people of Los Llanitos now have to travel hundreds of miles into neighboring Durango, a region increasingly under the control of local drug lords, to find rubber trees to tap. A recent chilling news story underscores the challenge presented by the drug trade in this region. The body of a member of the Juarez drug cartel was left in seven pieces on the streets of a town to the north of Mazatlán. In what almost seemed a sadistic homage to the region's ancient sacrificial rites, the victim's face was stitched onto a soccer ball and left in a plastic bag in front of the town hall!

As a result of rubber's scarcity and the dangers involved in acquiring it in Mexico's wild west, the price of a single
ulama
ball has soared to a staggering $1,000—about $250 more than the annual income of the average player. Remarkably, Chuy's prize ball is one of only three balls in Los Llanitos and the only one in good enough shape for competition. Being made of natural rubber, the more the ball is used, the more it shrinks and deforms over time.

Which leads to the question: How can you keep a ball game alive if you don't have balls to play with?