by John Fox
Inscriptions and scenes from Egyptian tombs from 2000 BC on show that sports were an important part of daily life along the Nile. Competitions, including wrestling, boxing, swimming, jousting, archery, and foot races, were enjoyed by members of the aristocracy and commoners alike. The pharaohs, like so many rulers throughout history, depicted themselves regularly as invincible warriors, hunters, and athletes—physically strong and capable of defeating enemies in sport as well as war. At the annual festival of the Sed, the pharaoh would run around the city to publicly display his stamina and power. And while ball games were mostly played by girls and children for fun, other more ritualistic games were played by the pharaoh himself.
Tuthmosis III playing ball, Temple of Hatshepsut, Deir el-Bahri, Egypt.
The actual balls used in these games have turned up with some frequency in Egyptian tombs, preserved alongside mummified cats and other personal treasures meant to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. Stitched leather balls, bearing an uncanny resemblance to modern-day hacky sacks, were stuffed with straw, reeds, hair, or yarn. Balls made of papyrus, palm leaves, and linen wound around a pottery core have turned up as well. In one case, excavations of a child’s grave uncovered the first evidence of bowling, complete with stone balls and pins, still waiting to be knocked down.
Anyone who believes that the first time a bat connected with a ball was in a Cooperstown, New York, cow pasture in 1839 should see a sculpture from around 1500 BC showing King Tuthmosis III with a bent stick of olive wood batting balls away while two priests pitch and fetch. Tuthmosis was one of the greatest military leaders of ancient Egypt, reputed to have captured 350 cities in military campaigns that expanded the Egyptian empire. The hieroglyphs that accompany the image read, “Catching [of the balls] by the servants of god after he [the king] has struck them away.” You can almost imagine a crowd of worshippers chanting “Tut! Tut! Tut!” as he steps to the plate to play this game, known as seker-hemat.
This ritual game of the pharaohs, which occurs in tomb art 19 times over a thousand-year stretch, appears to have been no ordinary game. The pharaoh is sometimes depicted playing in the presence of Hathor, a goddess associated with the afterlife. Later texts reveal that when the king ceremonially struck the ball it was believed to damage the eye of Apophis, the serpent enemy of the gods. In one image from the seventh century BC, the king runs and throws four clay balls toward the cardinal directions. Although the evidence is fragmented, the message seems to be that while men played other men in inconsequential earthly contests, the pharaoh battled the forces of darkness on behalf of the gods. And, according to these, his commissioned accounts, he always won.
Organized athletics and sport achieved new levels of cultural importance in ancient Greece, where the male athlete was celebrated in art and literature. The Greeks’ word for athletic contests, agon—aptly, the root of “agony”—reflected their attitude toward the role of athletics in society. Men of worth were expected to be as combative in sport as in war, to struggle with all their strength and will to defeat their opponents. As the sports historian Allen Guttmann points out, the fit and muscular body of the athlete was the aesthetic ideal because it stood ready to defend the city-state in war. Every city had its stadiums, gymnasiums, and palaestras (wrestling academies) where athletes stripped nude and rubbed themselves down with olive oil before workouts or competitions. Athens alone had nine public gymnasia, which served not only as athletic centers but also as cultural, religious, and political centers.
Athletic festivals were held to honor the gods in cities and towns across the Peloponnesian peninsula. The oldest and most celebrated of these was, of course, the Olympic Games, which took place every four years to honor Zeus. Unlike the modern Olympics, however, which now include basketball, tennis, soccer, table tennis, handball, field hockey, and both beach and indoor volleyball, no ball game was ever played at the ancient Olympics. Ball games were still regarded as playful diversion and entertainment, not as agon. Never, for example, do Greek accounts of ball play ever mention the words “victory” or “defeat.”
The Greeks did enjoy ball games, however, and, along with ephedrismos, played a wide variety. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus is shipwrecked on the shore of Phaeacia. Nausicaa, the beautiful daughter of the king, goes with her maids to the seashore to do the laundry and, while waiting for it to dry in the sun, plays a game that sounds a bit like dodge ball: “Nausicaa hurled the ball at one of her maids. She missed the girl and threw it into a deep pool. They all shrieked to high heaven.” The shrieks of the girls at play awoke Odysseus, who was dozing in the bushes nearby. He went off to the king’s court, where he was honored with a feast and after-dinner entertainment that included a game played by young acrobats with “a beautiful purple ball.”
Following the feast, the king calls for the athletes of his kingdom to come together for a sports contest, so “that our guest may report to his friends when he gets home how we beat the world at boxing and wrestling and jumping and running.”
Odysseus resists joining in the competition, which leads the other athletes to taunt him, saying, “I do not see you as a fellow who goes in for games . . . you are not an athlete.” He finally rises to the bait, grabs a discus, and throws it far beyond the other marks, yelling “Touch that if you can, young men!” Young Princess Nausicaa was impressed—she “gazed upon Odysseus with all her eyes and admired him.”
Over time, though, ball games rose in popularity. Everyone who was anyone had a large room dedicated to ball play, called a sphairisterion. An inscription from Delphi describes the construction of one of these ball courts with its floor of smooth pounded “black earth.” The most common sport played in the sphairisterion was episkyros, a team game for which the fourth-century comic playwright Antiphanes passed down what may be the earliest surviving play-by-play sports commentary:
He caught the ball and laughed as he passed it to one player at the same time as he dodged another. He knocked another player out of the way, and picked one up and set him on his feet, and all the while there were screams and shouts: “Out of bounds!” “Too far!” “Past him” “Over his head!” “Under!” “Over!” “Short!” “Back in the huddle!”
Episkyros appears to have been a rugby-like game played with a stuffed ball and two teams of 12 or so players. The ball was placed on a center line marked by white gypsum, and two other lines behind each team marked the goals. The rules of the game aren’t well understood but seem to have involved passing the ball among teammates while advancing on the goal of the opposing team. A scene from a marble vase in Athens shows six nude players in the midst of a game, each in various stages of throwing, catching, or running. Other games were played with balls of different sizes. One was a child’s game played with a pig’s bladder inflated with air and then warmed over the ashes of a fire to help round its shape. Another game similar to basketball, called aporrhaxis, involved dribbling an inflated ball along the ground. A single tantalizing scene from Athens shows two men, positioned like hockey players, competing over a small ball with curved sticks, though no such game is mentioned in any surviving account.
Ball games rose to a higher level of competition in the city-state of Sparta, where all young men in their first year of manhood were generically referred to as “ballplayers.” Inscriptions found there describe an annual episkyros tournament where the winning team was awarded a sickle as trophy. One of the most famous ballplayers of the time was Alexander the Great. After giving up competitive athletics because his subjects always let him win, he turned to ball play for his sport of choice. He employed a professional ballplayer to train with and his endorsement of the game seems to have led to a spike in popularity and the construction of sphairisteria by other members of the nobility.
Following the lead of their predecessors, the Romans were enthusiastic about ball play, though the innocent games could hardly compete for public attention with the infamous spectacles of Rome’s Circus Maximus, which included gladiatorial c
ombat, lion fights, and often deadly chariot races. Ball games, by comparison, were more private affairs that emphasized exercise over spectacle and sportsmanship over violence. The first-century AD poet Martial described four different kinds of balls and the accompanying games played with them:
No hand-ball (pila), no bladder-ball (follis), no feather-stuffed ball (paganica) makes you ready for the warm bath, nor the blunted sword-stroke upon the unarmed stump; nor do you stretch forth squared arms besmeared with oil, nor, darting to and fro, snatch the dusty scrimmage-ball (harpasta), but you run only by the clear Virgin water.
Every wealthy Roman had his own sphaeristerium—as the Romans called their ball courts—and they were often attached to the public baths. “Stop play,” wrote Martial the poet, “the bell of the hot bath is ringing.” Pliny the Younger had courts in each of his country houses, including one in Tuscany that was large enough to stage multiple games at once for his weekend guests. Another ball court in Rome was heated from underneath for winter games.
When wealthy Romans weren’t gathering decadently to watch slaves fight to the death or to crucify dogs in public, they passed time playing harpastum, the most popular ball game of the empire. Played with a softball-sized stuffed ball, the object of the game is hinted at in its name, which means “to seize” or “to snatch.” The vague descriptions available suggest an elaborate, rough-and-tumble form of monkey-in-the-middle with a player in the center of a circle attempting to snatch a ball passed back and forth between two lines of players.
One of the biggest fans of harpastum was Galen, a former physician to gladiators who rose through the ranks to be court doctor to the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Regarded as “first among physicians, unique among philosophers,” Galen went on to pioneer the science of anatomy, dissecting pigs and apes and Barbary macaques to study their bodily systems. He was forced to draw inferences about human anatomy from these studies since, despite finding entertainment in watching people torn limb from limb, the Romans prohibited the “barbarous” practice of human autopsy. In AD 180, Galen turned his scientific eye to ball games in a treatise entitled On Exercise with the Small Ball, where he made the first scientific case for the benefits of ball play to exercise and physical education. Waxing philosophical as well as scientific, Galen in that early age spoke more eloquently to the boundless joys and practical merits of ball play than any writer over the next millennium and a half.
“I believe that the best of all exercises is the one which not only exercises the body, but also refreshes the spirit,” he wrote. “The men who invented hunting were wise and well acquainted with the nature of man, for they mixed its exertions with pleasure, delight, and rivalry.” Galen celebrated the potential of ball games to unite people across class and status lines, noting that “even the poorest man can play ball, for it requires no nets nor weapons nor horses nor hunting dogs, but only a ball. . . . And what could be more convenient than a game in which everyone, no matter his status or career, can participate.”
Beyond its social leveling qualities, Galen also declared ball play to be the “best all-around exercise” because it worked out all the body parts at once.
When the players line up on opposite sides and exert themselves to keep the one in the middle from getting the ball, then it is a violent exercise with many neck-holds mixed with wrestling holds. Thus the head and neck are exercised by the neck-holds, and the sides and chest and stomach are exercised by the hugs and shoves and tugs and the other wrestling holds.
Despite the popularity of harpastum, Galen apparently felt the need to defend ball games against a critique that would be heard again and again in the centuries to follow: rather than preparing and training men for battle as archery or wrestling did, it did the opposite—distracting and diverting them in so-called frivolous play. Galen, presaging Vince Lombardi, argued that in fact “ball playing trains for the two most important maneuvers which a state entrusts to its generals: to attack at the proper time and to defend the booty already amassed. There is no other exercise so suited to the training in the guarding of gains, the retrieval of losses, and the foresight of the plan of the enemy.”
Galen was way ahead of his time. He was among the first accomplished surgeons to advance scientifically substantiated theories of human anatomy, the circulation system, and even neuroscience. The systems and methods he developed held sway for centuries, dominating medical science until the 17th century. As both scientific observer and, it appears, fanatical player and lover of harpastum, he saw early what we now know so well: that ball games are uniquely capable of exercising and challenging both body and mind, sharpening the senses, and inspiring the human spirit.
Chapter Two
From Skirmish to Scrum
Bruised muscles and broken bones
Discordant strife and futile blows
Lamed in old age, then crippled withal
These are the beauties of football.
Anonymous, 16th century, translated from Old Scots
If you’re searching for the remnants and roots of old ball games—or old anything for that matter—Orkney may be the best place in the world to go looking. A scattering of 70 or so barnacle-encrusted isles and skerries that extend from the northern shores of Scotland into the frigid waters of the North Sea, Orkney is a place where the present can barely hold its ground against the fierce pull of the past—a place where legend still competes with fact, passion with logic, ritual with routine.
Here, cheerfully stubborn and oblivious to the ways of “ferryloupers” from beyond the Pentland Firth, men still gather in cobblestone streets on the coldest, darkest days of winter to play football the old-fashioned way: two large mobs, one sawdust-stuffed ball, no rules, and nearly four centuries of grudges to keep things interesting. Here they don’t play games. They play the Kirkwall Ba’.
The narrow road from the ferry landing on mainland Orkney winds its way through a stark but stunning landscape of treeless hills and rocky coves, interrupted by the occasional small farmstead. Amid otherwise ordinary fields, seaweed-eating sheep rub themselves casually against megalithic standing stones and graze over the top of low burial cairns. Farther along, dominating a high plateau above two shimmering lochs, stands the mystical Ring of Brogar, a 5,000-year-old Stonehenge-like monument made up of 27 massive stones set within a deep circular ditch.
Clinging to the battered coast nearby is the Neolithic village of Skara Brae. Resembling Bedrock, home of the Flintstones, the site’s remarkably preserved stone furniture, including cupboards, dressers, and pre-Posturepedic beds, has earned it the nickname “the British Pompeii.” And at the heart of the island’s Stone Age landscape lies the unassuming grassy knoll containing Maes Howe, a spectacular tomb formed by 30 tons of flagstone slabs stacked like Legos to form a perfect beehive-shaped tomb for Orkney’s earliest chieftains. On the winter solstice, a shaft of light pierces the darkness of the chamber to illuminate the rear wall, an event that draws an annual pilgrimage of New Agers and born-again pagans from all over.
What was a sacred site for the Neolithic people of Orkney was little more than a shelter in the storm for later Viking marauders who sought refuge here in a snow squall in 1153, an incident recorded in the Orkneyinga Saga, an account of the conquest of Orkney and the establishment of a Norse earldom here. Out of boredom or a desire to mark their turf, the invaders scrawled runic graffiti on the walls of the ancient tomb. The 30 or so inscriptions accommodate Viking stereotypes nicely, including such literary gems as “Thorni fucked, Helgi carved,” and “Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women” (carved, disturbingly, next to a drawing of a drooling dog).
After ruling the isles for nearly 400 years, the Norse handed Orkney over to the Scottish earls in the late 15th century. But Viking influence remains ever-present in place names and in the lilting local dialect, which the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir described as “a soft and musical inflection, slightly melancholy, but companionable, the voice of people who are accustomed to hours of talking
in the long winter evenings and do not feel they have to hurry; a splendid voice for telling stories in.”
One popular story still told on winter nights over peat fires, and captured by local historian John Robertson, is of how the unique and ancient ball game known as the Kirkwall Ba’ came to be:
Hundreds of years ago the people of Kirkwall, Orkney’s capital town, were oppressed by a Scottish tyrant called Tusker, named for his protruding front teeth. After years of oppression, the locals rose up in revolt and forced him to flee to the islands. With the people still living in fear of his return, a brave young man stepped forward and vowed to hunt Tusker down, cut off his head, and take it back as proof that their days of misery were over. He went off by horse and soon succeeded in his task. But while returning home with the bloody trophy swinging from the pommel of his saddle, Tusker’s lifeless teeth broke the skin of the young man’s leg. By the time he reached Kirkwall the leg had become infected and he was close to death. With a dying effort, the hero staggered to the Mercat Cross in the town center and threw the bloody head to the people. Grieved at the young man’s untimely death, and riled by the sight of the hated Tusker’s head, the people began kicking it angrily through the streets of town.
This, some say, is why twice a year a crowd of hundreds gathers at the very same town cross to knock each other senseless over a stuffed leather substitute for Tusker’s head, called ba’ in the local dialect. The story may well be apocryphal and revisionist, but it’s as plausible as any other explanation of this unusual rite of excess. Grievances, I would soon come to learn, die slow and hard in Orkney. It’s strangely satisfying to watch all these centuries later as old Tusker still pays the price for his tyranny.