by John Fox
The ancient Maya ball court at Cobá, Mexico.
With a unique architectural form that persists across centuries, the ancient Mesoamerican ball court is as easily identified and as iconic as our modern baseball diamonds. Although the size and features of these courts vary widely according to their age and location, their basic form stayed remarkably consistent: two long, low parallel buildings bordering a narrow playing alley with sloped interior walls extending from the top of the structures to the playing field. The alley, where the action took place, was usually paved with stone and covered with limestone plaster. End zones closed in by temples or other buildings were typically wider than the playing alley, giving many courts a distinctive I shape if viewed from high above.
As with sports stadiums today, almost every midsized town or city in Mesoamerica could boast at least one ball court, usually located right downtown alongside the most sacred temples and elaborate royal palaces. One early archaeologist, bushwhacking his way through Mexico’s densest jungles in the 1920s to record ancient ruins, stumbled upon so many of these courts that he described them as an “epidemic.” Not surprisingly, many larger towns and cities had multiple ball courts, with one presumably fanatical Gulf Coast city containing as many as 24.
When it comes to figuring out what the game was like that took place in these courts, archaeologists have had to patch together scraps of evidence found among the crumbling ruins of ancient courts, a handful of descriptions from 16th-century Spanish chroniclers, and depictions of ballplayers in early pre-Hispanic art.
It’s clear from the diverse representations of players, and variation in the features of the courts themselves, that the game took different forms in different regions and time periods. Most commonly, two teams of up to seven players would face off against each other, separated by a dividing line of some kind. Players would strike the ball with their arms, their shoulders, or, most often, their hips. Players wore a range of protective leather belts, gloves, and padding. Much as in tennis, points were scored when a ball was not returned or was knocked out of bounds or touched the wrong part of the body.
Against all imaginable odds, the ancient game of ulama has survived the rise and fall of the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec civilizations, the devastation and near genocide wrought by the Spanish conquest, and a string of modern revolutions, migrations, and social upheavals. Played today in just a handful of tiny, isolated villages in west Mexico, ulama is hanging on by a thread to a richer legacy than any other living sport can claim. But having made it this far, the game may now be facing extinction for the first time in its 3,500-year history.
The remaining players’ relative poverty and geographic isolation, a lack of available natural rubber, and fierce competition from “newcomer” sports like baseball and volleyball have driven ulama to the brink. In Mexico, the threat has brought together an odd coalition of academics, athletes, and local businessmen trying to preserve and study it for clues to how the ancient Mesoamericans once lived and played.
A battered, sun-bleached sign announced our arrival in the village of Los Llanitos, population 151. In the car with me were James Brady, an archaeologist from the California State University at Los Angeles, and his graduate student, Sergio Garza, from the University of California, Riverside. The hour-and-a-half drive from the beach resort of Mazatlán to our destination had brought us from a jammed coastal highway lined with fast-food joints and high-rise hotels to a bone-jarring dirt road that wound its way through withered cornfields.
At first blush, Brady and Garza appear to be the unlikeliest of sports fans. Brady, a red-haired midcareer academic steeped in the esoterica of ancient Maya ritual, and Garza, a young up-and-coming Mexican archaeologist of Huichol Indian descent, have spent most of their careers doing archaeological investigations of Maya caves. Even by day they sport flashlights on their belts, as if a dark, unexplored crevice might present itself at any moment.
Back in 2003, on their way home to California from a spelunking expedition in the Yucatán, Brady and Garza decided to take a detour through the coastal towns of Sinaloa, having heard that ulama was still being played nearby.
“For years,” said Brady, “we archaeologists were stuck in a major rut. We’d go out, dig up an ancient ball court, date it, and publish an article about it. But we rarely learned anything interesting or new about the game that was played there.” For him, ulama presented a live opportunity to conduct what’s known in the field as ethnoarchaeology: by studying the modern game, he and his colleagues hope to better understand its past. “For so long, archaeology had ball courts without people in them. By recording the game as it’s played today, we’re putting the sport, the enjoyment, and the competition back into the ball court.”
Just past a church and a corral packed with cattle, Brady, Garza, and I pulled up to the tin-roofed home of 28-year-old farmer Chuy Páez. Tan, trim, and wearing buffed cowboy boots and a large silver belt buckle, Chuy (pronounced “Chewy”) stepped over a dog sleeping in the shade of the porch and extended a hearty welcome.
Inside his concrete-floor bedroom we encountered Chuy’s personal Wall of Fame. In one photograph, he’s captured in midair, arms out and hip thrust forward, just seconds after striking the ball. In another, Chuy’s 11-year-old son, Chuyito, posed proudly in his deerskin loincloth, holding a ball that looked to be nearly half his size. As we toured the gallery, Chuy reached up into the rafters of his house and untied a rubber ball, his prized possession, from a hanging neckerchief.
Leading us back outside, Chuy positioned me in one corner of the porch and walked 10 feet to the opposite corner.
“¿Listo?” he asked with a grin. “Ready?”
I nodded tentatively. He bounced the black ball—a little smaller than a bowling ball—across the patio floor. As I reached out to catch it, the ball’s nine-pound solid mass smashed through my hands and into my chest, almost knocking me to the ground.
Brady laughed, having warned me earlier of the ball’s punishing weight and superball-like action. “See what I mean?”
A player holds an ulama ball.
For me, absorbing the ball’s impact for the first time was a moment of utter revelation. I’d written a 300-page doctoral dissertation and several academic articles on the ancient game and had lectured on the topic at conferences. I’d dissected the game’s ritual meaning and political symbolism and diligently pieced together and cataloged thousands of pottery fragments excavated from the ruins of courts. But I’d never before felt the blow of a ball against my body.
“It’s one of those things you can read about all you want,” said Brady, “but until you feel it for yourself and have the bruise to show for it, it’s meaningless.”
With virtually no real-world experience playing a game in which hands, feet, and sticks are all considered off-limits, it had always struck me as odd that the ancient Maya and Aztecs played ball with, of all body parts, their hips. But in that moment I finally understood why. The hip is one of the only parts of the body that can safely withstand the force of a solid, heavy rubber ball without risk of serious injury or death. At the time of the conquest, Diego Durán had described games where Aztec players were killed when the ball “hit them in the mouth or the stomach or the intestines.” And even when they struck the ball properly, the players still “got their haunches so mangled that they had those places cut with a small knife and extracted blood which the blows of the game had gathered.”
After sharing a huge midafternoon lunch of pozole, a traditional Mexican hominy stew, with Chuy’s extended family, we followed him across town to the playing field, or taste (pronounced TAS-tay). The word taste is thought to derive from tlachtli (TLASH-tli), the Aztec word for ball court, much as the name ulama derives from the Aztec word for rubber, ulli, and the ancestral game, ullamalitzli.
The Los Llanitos taste hardly suggests the grandeur of the ancient stadiums that were its precursors; it is a long, narrow alley of hard-packed clay, about 12 feet wide and the length of roughly ha
lf a football field, lined with palm trees and ringed by a chain-link fence. At two o’clock on a Sunday, the first of eight players arrived. He was soon joined by others in a corner of the court that seemed to serve as a makeshift locker room. They stripped to their underwear and put on four-piece leather-and-cloth girdles that protect the stomach, hips, and buttocks.
As the players took to the field to warm up, spectators staked out the best, and safest, spots—mostly in the end zones, the better to avoid a hurtling ball, which travels upward of 30 miles per hour. Young boys, wearing smaller girdles and the occasional LA Dodgers baseball cap, imitated the adult players on the sidelines, while toddlers played safely outside the fence.
The game traditionally begins when a team of three to five players throws the ball high or rolls it low across a chalk-marked center line. Play continues back and forth, with contestants using only their hips to strike the ball. A point is scored when a team fails to return the ball, as in tennis, or when the ball is driven past the opponent’s end zone, as in football. Faults are called if a player hits the ball with a part of the body other than the hip or crosses the center line, among other reasons I failed to understand.
The first team to achieve eight points wins, though owing to a complex and utterly confounding scoring system that not only rewards points but also strips them away, games can go on for hours, or even days. One match on record from 1930, between the nearby villages of La Palma and Puerto de Las Canoas, is said to have lasted a week before La Palma claimed victory.
On November 8, 1519, the forces of Hernán Cortés first entered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, the ruins of which lie beneath the busy streets of Mexico City. The conquistadors were awestruck by the city’s magnificent scale and grandeur. With an estimated population of more than 200,000, this city, built on a lake, was five times the size of Madrid and nearly three times the size of London at that time. While crossing one of the many causeways that connected the lakeshore to the city center, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Cortés’s personal chronicler, found himself at a rare loss for words: “I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.”
Along with their accounts of monumental pyramids, lively marketplaces, and lavishly appointed royal palaces, the Spanish described with great interest the presence of ball courts in the heart of the city’s ceremonial precinct, and were captivated by the games that took place there:
The playing of the ball game began. And the spectators sat above the ball court on both sides; all the noblemen, or lords, or seasoned warriors sat divided into two sections. And on each side above the ball court, each on his own side, sat the contenders to whom the ball game pertained. And to each side of the court was attached a [circular stone] called tlachtemalacatl, which had a hole [in the center]. And he who put [the ball] through it, won the game.
The man who sent the ball through the stone ring was surrounded by all. They honored him, sang songs of praise to him, and joined him in dancing. He was given a very special award of feathers or mantles and breechcloths, something very highly prized. But what he most prized was the honor involved: that was his great wealth. For he was honored as a man who had vanquished many and had won a battle.
Not surprisingly, some chroniclers of the time compared ulama to the games they were familiar with back home, particularly tennis. Antonio Herrera y Tordesillas, described ulama as “being like our tennis” and repeatedly referred to the Aztec ball courts as simply “tennis-courts.” Cortés was himself so delighted by the game that he brought a team of players back to Spain in 1528 to perform in the royal court of Charles V.
When my son Aidan was 8 we spent a family vacation in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. After days baking on the beach in the hot Caribbean sun, we packed into a jeep and drove to Cobá, an ancient trading center that at its peak had a population of more than 50,000. Entering the welcome tropical shade of the ruins, we rented bicycles and wound our way along ancient raised limestone roads, called sacbe by the Maya, that once connected Cobá to a network of other cities hundreds of miles away. Climbing 120 vertigo-inducing steps to the top of the site’s highest pyramid, we gazed out across 50 square miles of jungle canopy, imagining the scene as it might have appeared 1,000 years earlier: colorful temples, children chasing each other through streets and courtyards, bustling markets filled with goods from distant ports—and somewhere down there, a game of ulama under way in the site’s ball game stadium.
We descended carefully, got back on our bikes, and found our way to the ball court, a spectacular stone structure meticulously reconstructed by archaeologists. Facing each other across the 12-foot-wide alley, Aidan and I imagined ourselves as ancient Mayan athletes. I explained how we would have knocked the rubber ball back and forth, banking it off the sloped playing walls to make it bounce and spin and ricochet off the hard playing surfaces. I pointed out the small vertical hoops—the tlachtemalacatl, as the Aztecs referred to them—protruding from either side at a height of 10 feet or so off the alley floor.
“They had to get the ball through those?” asked Aidan. “With their hips?!”
That was the game clincher, I explained. There were other ways to score points and win, like field goals and safeties in American football. The court was divided by a marker and further separated into zones by chalk lines that marked the alley, as in a tennis court. Aidan nodded, struggling to picture it. Aidan then shifted his gaze downward to examine the stone marker embedded in the center floor of the playing alley.
“Dad, why is there a skull in the middle of the court?”
The Spanish were asking the same question 500 years earlier when they first learned about the Aztec beliefs surrounding this game. That was when their delight at the game gave way to dismay. They noticed that prominent ball courts were often decorated with sculptures depicting skulls along with sinister-looking Aztec gods, which for these fanatical Catholics might as well have been images of the Devil himself. They soon learned that when important games were played, they were accompanied by elaborate pagan rituals. Herrera described in great detail how some “tennis-courts” were ritually consecrated before use:
On a lucky day, at midnight, they perform’d certain ceremonies and enchantments on the two inner walls, and on the midst of the floor, singing certain songs or ballads; after which a priest of the great temple went with some of the religious men to bless it; he uttered some words, threw the ball about the tennis-court four times and then it was consecrated, and might be play’d in, but not before.
And right next to the city’s central teotlachtli, the “ball court of the gods,” the Spanish encountered a grisly sight: a small structure, known as the tzompantli, lined with wooden racks that held the skewered skulls of thousands of slain war captives and sacrificial victims. Ulama, the Spanish discovered, was for the Aztecs as much a religious rite as it was an athletic contest—and it had a dark side unlike any sport that has been played before or since.
Ancient Maya ballplayers compete as musicians sing and dance on a grandstand, from a polychrome vase, ca. AD 600–900.
More 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.
T
he 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.