by John Fox
The Kirkwall Ba’ is a rite that for just two days each year, Christmas and New Year’s Day, cleaves the friendly, picturesque port town of Kirkwall down its middle—quite literally—pitting friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, even family members against each other. Simple to describe, but confounding to understand, the ba’ is a traditional folk football game in which two “teams” of 100-plus men each compete over a homemade ball—also called the ba’—and attempt to claim it for their side, and for posterity.
The sides, known as the Uppies and the Doonies, represent an ancient, almost tribal, division of the town: the upper inland half and the lower (“doonward,” as they say) portside half. Once the ball is thrown up in the town center to the pack of players, the goal of the Uppies is to move it several blocks up the street and touch it to the wall at Mackinson’s Corner. The Doonies, in turn, must take the ball down-street to the port and submerge it in the bay. There are blessed few restrictions on how the ba’ might reach either fate.
In all its unruly and primitive glory, this contest of wills, historians agree, is one of the only surviving remnants of the earliest form of football as it was once played across Europe—long before civilization or regulation got hold of it. As loyal Orcadians would argue, it is football as it was meant to be played. To take some measure of the distance the game has traveled, from rolling heads to aerodynamically engineered balls, and from the dirt lanes and open fields of medieval Europe to gleaming stadiums and neighborhood pitches around the globe, I decided to go to Kirkwall and experience the ba’ firsthand.
When I arrived in Kirkwall on the penultimate day of 2009, a thick ice coated the cobblestone streets. Shoppers tiptoed by with caution, while the winds slicing through the narrow alleys pushed the temperature well below freezing. Scotland was suffering its coldest, snowiest winter in years. The news was filled with reports of road closings and deadly accidents, salt shortages and families stranded for days with distant relatives they’d only meant to visit for Christmas dinner.
In Kirkwall they were still recovering from the recent Christmas Ba’, which had been even more damaging than usual. One ferrylouper had foolishly left his BMW parked on the street, and the pack of 200 or so burly men went right up and over the car, crushing it like an aluminum can. The Uppies and Doonies were still arguing over which side was responsible for the damages.
Most had moved on and were getting ready for Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year’s celebration—and the culmination of the festivities: the New Year’s Ba’. The whir of drills and rapping of hammers echoed across town as homeowners and shopkeepers erected heavy wooden barricades to protect their windows and doors from the violence of the pack.
My first stop in town was at the home of Graeme King, ba’ player and 1998 champion and, at the age of 47, an emerging elder statesman of the game. A big, barrel-chested Viking of a man, Graeme’s girth was nearly double my own. With a crushing handshake, he welcomed me into his sunken living room, where a fire burned next to a highly flammable-looking artificial Christmas tree. Gathered together were two other former champions—Bobby Leslie (’77) and Davie Johnston (’85), who’d been chosen to throw up this year’s ba’ in honor of the 25th anniversary of his win. Also in attendance was George Drever, one of a handful of craftsmen who painstakingly make the ba’s each year.
All four, I quickly learned, are Doonies through and through.
“Right,” asked Graeme before we’d even had a chance to sit down, “which way did you enter Kirkwall?”
“Well, let me see . . .” I recalled, tracing the route in my head. “I took the road up from the ferry landing and then came past the airport and . . .”
Davie sprung up from his chair. “Door’s that way!” he shouted in mock disgust. “Now you’re walking home!”
“Now hold on,” said Graeme, as though arguing before a court. “He was in a car the whole time. More important is where you first set foot in Kirkwall.”
“Well . . . that was at the B&B down on . . . Albert Street,” I answered nervously, confused by the inquisition.
“Safely in Doonie territory!” declared Graeme with relief, slapping me hard on the back.
Once seated, Graeme explained that on ba’ day everyone—players, spectators, outsiders, foreigners—is either Uppie or Doonie. It’s not something you get to choose. You don’t put it on or take it off like a team jersey. It’s predetermined. If you’re a local, affiliation is a matter of where you’re born. If you’re an outsider, it depends on how you enter Kirkwall for the first time in your life. Post Office Lane is the dividing line. Between that line and the shore you’re a proud Doonie; between there and the head of town you’re stuck being a godforsaken Uppie, forever.
“Once you’ve tied your colors to the mast,” Graeme said, “there’s no going back. You can’t say, ‘Oh, I think I’ll be an Uppie this year.’ You are what you are for life.”
I had apparently, by sheer luck of having chosen the right accommodations on the Internet, been spared a fate worse than death.
The origin of the Uppie and Doonie division is believed to date back eight centuries to the founding in the 12th century of St. Magnus Cathedral, the spectacular Romanesque structure that marks Kirkwall’s town center. At that time the town was co-ruled by the Norse earls and the bishop of Orkney. Everyone who lived “down-the-gates” ( gata being the Old Norse term for road) between the cathedral and the shore was considered a vassal of the earl. Everyone who lived “up-the-gates” above the cathedral was a vassal of the bishop. Over the centuries, a deep-seated rivalry emerged and identities hardened around which part of town you were born in. One of us—or one of them.
It’s not hard to imagine that this may not have always been just a friendly rivalry. Violent clashes between the two groups, if they indeed occurred, would have threatened the order and stability of the small island community. In this scenario, the ba’ may have come about as a way to settle conflict and work out differences without suffering the damages of petty wars.
In the tribal divide between Uppie and Doonie we can see the deeper roots of the greatest football rivalries: Real Madrid versus Barcelona, Celtic versus Rangers, Manchester United versus Liverpool. And that’s just association football. American college football is equally famous for its annual clashes, such as Army versus Navy, Harvard versus Yale, and Texas versus Oklahoma, the “Red River Rivalry,” named for the body of water that separates the two states. In fact the word “rival,” which comes from the Latin rivalis, means “someone who uses the same stream as another.” True to the name, a good rule of thumb for rivals is that the closer they are geographically, the more deep-seated the hatred. Of course, most great modern rivalries manage to exploit and exacerbate other divisions along religious, class, ethnic, or political lines. Il Superclásico, the epic derby in Buenos Aires between the River Plate and Boca Juniors clubs, has been cited by the London Observer as number one of the “50 sporting things you must do before you die.” The two teams emerged in the early 1900s in the same working-class portside barrio of Boca, but River Plate moved to an affluent suburb soon after, earning the nickname Los Milionarios along with the eternal enmity of Boca supporters.
Now that I was a bishop’s man and a Doonie, I was determined to embrace my new identity, and at least for the next couple of days I would find good reasons not to trust my Uppie enemies. But I didn’t have to wait that long. As he waxed on about what it meant to be a Doonie, Graeme lamented that since he’d claimed the ba’ for the Doonies back in 1998, they had managed to win just one other time—in 2006. Put in starker numerical terms, over the past decade the Doonies had a pathetic 1–20 record. My newly adopted club was, statistically speaking, a losing franchise. And we weren’t happy about it.
“To be honest, it’s annoying,” said Bobby, a 69-year-old retired librarian who still joins the fray every year against his wife’s wishes and his doctor’s counsel. “The Uppies have had the bragging rights for too long. You can’t walk aroun
d with your shoulders high at this point.”
Debate ensued among the men over how they’d become perpetual underdogs. One blamed the construction of the town’s hospital in the late 1950s in Uppie territory. This meant more and more people since have been born Uppies—giving them unfair advantage in a contest determined as much by the size and weight of your team as anything. There have since been more than a few Doonie women who have chosen home birth over the alternative. Due in part to the arrival of the hospital, the convention for determining your affiliation began in the 1970s to shift away from your place of birth toward which side your father and grandfather had played on.
“We go around to the schools now to educate the next generation about the tradition,” said Graeme. “Kids naturally want to be on the winning side. But we explain that’s not how it works. We’ll meet a lad who lives in Uppie territory who’s sure he’s Uppie, but we’ll ask a few questions and find out, ‘Oh, you had a granddad who won a ba’ for the Doonies, did you? Well you’re a Doonie then.’ ” Graeme and his mates were, in other words, in full recruitment mode.
Graeme ducked out of the room and returned with a shining black and brown sphere, which he ceremoniously placed in my hands. “There she is. The sacred orb herself.”
Expecting to see some roughly stuffed and stitched facsimile of a ball, I gasped aloud at the obvious craftsmanship of what I held. Approximately the same size as a soccer ball but three times as heavy, the ba’ is lovingly handstitched with eight-cord flax from top-quality leather donated by a German shoe company. Assembled with eight panels, painted alternately black or brown, and coated with a heavy shellac, the ba’ is crafted not only to survive the punishing pressure of the pack on game day but to live on as the most cherished trophy of the man fortunate enough to take it home. At that moment, I wished Aidan could be there to hold that ball and feel with his own hands the care and artisanry that went into it. It was a thing of beauty.
George, a stocky, bearded 62-year-old whose day job is on a North Sea oil rig, estimates he’s made close to 50 such balls over a 27-year span. Each ba’ takes maybe 40 hours to produce. The stitching alone can take two days. The core is formed from crushed cork that came originally from the packing material in old fruit barrels and today is imported from Portugal.
“Ach, the stuffing is merciless work,” he said, looking at his callused hands. “You leave a wee hole in one of the seams and keep packin’ doon and doon and doon.”
Rumors and accusations still fly that a Doonie ba’ maker will slip a bit of seaweed in the ball or an Uppie a bit of brick from the wall to draw it magically back to its source. When asked if he’d ever attempted such sorcery himself, George pleaded the fifth. “Well, now I’ve heard the same stories . . .”
With a look of impatience, as though my fascination with the ball itself might distract me from the game’s deeper meaning, Davie Johnston, a successful businessman in his late 50s who moved away from Orkney when he was 19 but has returned every year since to play the ba’, leaned in to me and rested his hand solemnly on the ball.
“This isn’t a trophy. This is heritage. This is history. This is tradition. This is what I won and my granddad and his granddad won before me and that’s what it’s about. It goes back that far and that deep. It’s hard to understand the depth of feeling we have for it. It’s huge.”
Despite some recent efforts to trace the murky origins of football to the Chinese kick ball game of cuju or to the Roman game of harpastum, there’s no evidence that those or any other sports of the ancient world had any direct influence on the development of football as it emerged in medieval Europe. Cuju, a game that may date as early as the fourth century BC, became wildly popular in the royal courts of the Han dynasty and eventually spread to Korea and Japan. The game, which resembled modern football in some ways, was described in a poem of the time:
A round ball and a square wall,
Just like the Yin and the Yang.
Moon-shaped goals are opposite each other,
Each side has six in equal number.
The stuffed ball was eventually replaced by one with an inflated pig’s bladder and goalposts replaced gaps in walls as the target. Although the game played an important role in Chinese daily life and enjoyed an impressive run of more than 1,500 years, it never appears to have spread farther than the royal courts of East Asia. And while it’s quite possible that Roman soldiers brought their game of harpastum with them when they invaded Britain, there are no accounts of Romans mixing it up with their subjects on British pitches. As one British scholar has humbly pointed out, harpastum, which involved assigned positions covering zones of play, was a more sophisticated game than early English football. In fact, it would take until nearly the 19th century for football to gain the level of organization and sophistication that the Roman sport—or cuju, for that matter—had achieved by the first century AD.
As scant as the historical record is when it comes to games and pastimes, football as it’s played today can be confidently, if circuitously, traced to early medieval villages of Britain and France. One of the earliest mentions of a football-like game is from the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, a mythologized account of the earliest Britons. In the fifth century, according to the author, Vortigern, a Celtic king from Kent, was attempting to build a tower, but it kept mysteriously collapsing. The king’s sages called upon him to sprinkle the tower’s foundation with the blood of a boy born without a father, so he sent out emissaries far and wide to find such a boy. When they finally located him, he was in the middle of playing an undescribed game of ball ( pilae ludus) with a group of boys. The fatherless child, possibly Britain’s first recorded footballer, grew up to be none other than Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend. (Apparently, Harry Potter wasn’t the first young wizard to play ball!)
Coincidentally, the first appearance of the words “ball” and “ball play” in the English language also has an Arthurian connection. Around the year 1200, an account of the festivities surrounding King Arthur’s coronation describes how the guests “drove balls far over the fields,” an ambiguous reference that may or may not suggest a variation of football.
From its earliest appearance, “mob football,” as the game came to be known, was played across England and France as part of festive celebrations, particularly those connected with the feast day known as Shrovetide. Celebrated elsewhere in the Christian world as Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras, Shrovetide was traditionally the last hurrah of partying and excess before Ash Wednesday kicked in and Lenten fasting and penance began. Originally a pagan springtime celebration, Shrovetide involved a wide range of games and festivities, like bell ringing, cockfighting, cock throwing, and ball games.
What some regard as the earliest record of a football-like game in England is a description of Shrovetide games that took place in London in 1174:
After dinner all the youth of the city proceed to a level piece of ground just outside the city for the famous game of ball. The students of every different branch of study have their own ball; and those who practice the different trades of the city have theirs too. The older men, the fathers and the men of property, come on horseback to watch the contests of their juniors . . .
Game of la soule in a village in Normandy, France, 1852.
Around the same time a nearly identical game, called la soule, was just beginning to take off in the villages of Normandy and Brittany. Played with a ball made of leather wrapped around a pig’s bladder or stuffed with hemp, bran, or wool, la soule pitted parishes or villages against each other. Festive games took place at Shrovetide or at Easter, Christmas, or parish patron saint days. As with other variations of mob football, there was no limit to the number of players and no rules to speak of, with play involving huge violent scrums and chaotic melées. The goal, as in the ba’, was to capture the ball and force it back to their home village, submerging it in a local pond to win the game. Some games ritualistically pitted married men against single men. One game in the town of Bell
ou-en-Houlme was reported to include 800 players and 6,000 spectators! After the games there would be the medieval equivalent of tailgate parties, with drinking, dancing, and carousing well into the evening. The game’s early popularity in France is suggested by a deed from 1147 in which a lord specifies the settlement of a debt with the delivery of “seven balls of the largest size.”
La soule and other forms of football were played not just for the sake of recreation but as magical rites to promote fertility and prosperity—thus the deep connection with Shrovetide and the arrival of spring. In his classic study of European mythology, The Golden Bough, J. G. Frazer interpreted early ball games as contests in which capturing the ball would ensure a good harvest or a good fishing season. In some villages in Normandy, for example, it was believed that the winning parish would secure the better apple crop that year. Another theory, put forward in 1929 by W. B. Johnson, is that the spherical ball for many early civilizations symbolized the sun. The captured ball represents the sun brought home to promote the growth of crops. The word soule, some linguists believe, may in fact derive from sol, the Latin word for sun.
In Orkney, there are similar long-standing beliefs that a win for the Uppies means a good potato harvest, whereas a win for the Doonies means the fishermen can expect a bountiful run of herring. To this day, Uppies will tell you that the potato blight that brought famine to the islands in 1846 began when the Doonies won the ba’ that year and continued until 1875, when the Uppies finally broke their losing streak. That year, an old man was heard to comment, “We’ll surely hae guid tatties this year, after the ba’s gaen up.”
It was just past noon on New Year’s Day when the first spectators began to assemble on the sandstone steps of St. Magnus Cathedral. They staggered out of doorways and alleys, bundled in thick overcoats and shielding their tired eyes from the sun cresting above the glazed rooftops. The whole town, myself included, was still shaking off the dog that bit us at the previous night’s Hogmanay festivities, highlights of which included the requisite bagpipe brigade and the ceremonial passing of countless bottles of Famous Grouse. I staked out a choice spot along the cathedral wall next to the Mercat Cross—the spot from which the ba’s been thrown up for the past 200-plus years.