by John Fox
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.”
After 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?
A Mazatlán businessman and longtime supporter of the game, Jesús Gómez, has taken the lead in the search for an answer, and the Ulama Project’s researchers have teamed up with members of the Mazatlán Historical Society to experiment with commercial latex imported from as far away as New York City. “If we can’t get natural rubber,” said Gómez, “we need to find another way. Otherwise, ulama will not survive. It’s that simple.”
So far, though, artificial rubber has failed to replicate the look or feel and, most important, the remarkable bouncing properties of traditional balls. “Look at this,” said Chuy after the game at Los Llanitos. He dropped a lumpy white blob of low-grade latex, the result of Gómez’s latest experiments, and watched it bounce erratically off his patio.
“This doesn’t work,” he exclaimed with visible disgust. “It’s not natural rubber!”
As the owner of the town’s lone regulation ball, Gómez suggested, Chuy may have a vested interest in making sure no substitute is found. “Unfortunately, the ball has come to symbolize control of the game.” And for Chuy and his teammates, debates about the ball and the game seem to feed their sense of competition: Who’s going to decide the future of ulama—the players who remain or some well-meaning but meddlesome academics and outsiders?
As I expressed my thanks to the players and their families who had hosted me in Los Llanitos and got ready to head back to Mazatlán, Chuy pulled me away from the other visitors and project members and cornered me with his prized ball in hand, determined to have the final word.
“This ball is special. It’s made from a process that’s thousands of years old.”
He dropped the smooth, heavy mass into my hands. “This ball,” he said, as if holding it were the only way to really understand, “is not of these times.”
Chapter Five
The Creator’s Game
There are two times of the year that stir the blood:
In the fall, for the hunt, and now for lacrosse.
Oren Lyons Jr., faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation
It’s May 22, 2009, at the New England Patriots’ stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and another, much older contest has taken over the gridiron: the NCAA lacrosse championship. Two powerhouses, Syracuse and Cornell, have been pushed to “sudden victory” overtime by an improbable fusillade of goals by the Orange in the final minutes of regulation. Cornell wins the face-off and gets it to one of their top scorers. Syracuse defenseman Sid Smith checks him hard, strips him of the ball, and works it quickly down field to his best friend, attack man Cody Jamieson. Jamieson winds up with a left-hand shot so perfect, so routine, that he never had to look back to know it went in.
Having just clinched the championship, Jamieson, a Mohawk Indian, turns and charges 80 yards upfield, stick over his head and a trail of white-and-orange jerseys in jubilant pursuit, to embrace Sid, a Cayuga Indian whom he’d grown up with on the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve in Ontario.
It was a moment that, by all reasonable odds, should never have taken place. That Syracuse should pull off its 10th NCAA championship win was historic but not surprising. What defied the odds was that an American Indian game banned by early missionaries as “sorcery” should have hung on through four centuries of disease, genocide, and warfare. Lacrosse, which had patiently infiltrated the white culture that nearly extinguished it, had now arrived at the point where it could be played live on ESPN in front of 68,000 fans: this was truly remarkable. Decades after their great-grandfathers had been barred from playing their game, two young men of the Wolf Clan of the Iroquois League shared a victory that, save the efforts of their determined ancestors, could quite easily never have occurred.
But lacrosse is a survivor.
By AD 800 ulama had worked its way across the Rio Grande, influencing the development of a short-lived rubber ball game in ancient towns throughout Arizona and New Mexico. The long-distance running Tarahumara people played a kick-ball game, called rarajipari, across the deserts and canyons of northern Mexico. Shinny, a popular stick-and-ball game similar to women’s field hockey, brought women and men out to play in villages from California to Virginia. And many Indian tribes, from the Inuit of Alaska to those encountered by the first Pilgrims, had their own versions of football. The game of pasuckuakohowog, played by 17th-century New England tribes, for example, involved hundreds of villagers kicking an inflated bladder across a narrow, mile-long field. It was not all that different, the Pilgrims noted, from their own football.
Few of these games are still played, and some are remembered only by archaeologists and museum curators. Some live on in tribal legend or tradition—preserved and reenacted but long divorced from their vitality and cultural relevance. Then there’s lacrosse, one of the fastest-growing sports in the world.
At the time of European colonization, lacrosse was played in one form or another from the western Great Plains to the eastern woodlands and as far south as Georgia and Florida. Despite variation from one region to the next the game was everywhere essentially the same. Teams of up to several hundred men would face off across an open field, often oriented to the cardinal directions, which could stretch for a mile or more in any direction. The only boundaries recognized were natural ones—a rocky outcrop, a stream, a dense stand of trees. Using carved wooden sticks terminating in a pocket made from either wood or woven strips of leather or animal gut, players competed over a stuffed animal-skin ball or one carved from the charred knot of a tree. Through a run-and-pass game they would attempt to score points by hitting a single large post or passing it through a goal formed by two upright posts. Games were known to last for hours or days depending on their purpose and importance.
Three types of sticks were used, representing three different regional traditions, each with its own rules and techniques. The Ojibwe, the Menominee, and other tribes of the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi played with a three-foot stick that had a small, enclosed wooden pocket. In the southeast, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw played a variation of the game using a pair of small sticks with enclosed webbed pockets with which they trapped the ball. In the Northeast, the tribes of New England and the Iroquois Confederacy played with a four-foot stick whose crook-shaped head formed a large webbed pocket.
This crook-shaped stick was first encountered in the early 17th century by French Jesuit missionaries living and spreading the Gospel among the Huron Indians, who lived in palisaded villages just 100 miles or so north of where Cody and Sid grew up. The “Black Robes,” as the clerics were known to the Indians, called the stick la crosse, using a term that the French of the time seem to have associated with any game played with a curved stick. As early as 1374, in fact, a document refers to a stick-and-ball game played in the French countryside called shouler à la crosse. In The Jesuit Relations, a series of field reports the priests sent back to their superiors, Father Jean de Brébeuf provides the first written account of the game, describing with obvious displeasure the association of this stickball game with ritual healing: “There is a poor sick man, fevered of body and almost dying, and a miserable Sorcerer will order for him, as a cooling remedy, a game of crosse.”
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A more detailed description of early Indian lacrosse comes from Baron de Lahontan, a French explorer who in the 1680s was given command of Fort Joseph, a military outpost on the south shore of Lake Huron. Like many other tennis-crazed European explorers of the time, he couldn’t help but compare this very different team racket game with the one he had quite likely played back in Paris:
They have a third play with a ball not unlike our tennis, but the balls are very large, and the rackets resemble ours save that the handle is at least 3 feet long. The savages, who commonly play it in large companies of three or four hundred at a time, fix two sticks at 500 or 600 paces distant from each other. They divide into two equal parties, and toss up the ball about halfway between the two sticks. Each party endeavors to toss the ball to their side; some run to the ball, and the rest keep at a little distance on both sides to assist on all quarters. In fine, this game is so violent that they tear their skins and break their legs very often in striving to raise the ball.
Brébeuf and his fellow clerics sought to understand the Indian culture, games included, so they could spread a native form of Catholicism. Although they shared with their earlier Spanish counterparts in Mexico an unwavering mission to convert the “heathen” Indians, the French had a kinder, gentler, and more laissez-faire approach to colonization. As the 19th-century historian Francis Parkman characterized the difference, “Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him.” The French, whose interests in the New World were largely commercial and centered on the lucrative fur trade, were more likely than the English or Spanish to establish cooperative trade relations and military alliances with the Indians and to recognize tribal rights.