The Ball

by John Fox

  Take tennis, for example. In a sense, tennis reached its peak of cultural relevance around the year 1600 and lost steam after that. It was the sport of the Renaissance and really elevated sport to a new level of importance in European society. You can see that just in the number of references to tennis that appear in Shakespeare’s writings and other literature of the age. On a more universal level, the story of tennis reflects the way the games we play can signal our position in society. Tennis was branded an elite sport early on and, despite efforts to rebrand it, has never been embraced, like soccer, as a sport of the people.

  Similarly, ulama exposes the symbolic and religious dimension of sport—that in ancient times, and to some extent still today, games were ceremonial rites. The ulama and lacrosse stories remind us that the ball was not invented in one place and spread from there but rather was invented in parallel by many different civilizations. I love the image of tennis-playing Frenchmen arriving in the wilds of North America to encounter Indians playing their own game with a racket and ball— lacrosse! The story of baseball gets at the link between sports and national identity, while American football offers a window into the role of violence in sports. And so on.

  Aside from ulama, did you come across other games—even ones that didn’t make it into the book—that are on the brink of extinction?

  Yes, I came across several traditions in Mexico alone in fact. At the time of the Spanish conquest, ulama was just one of hundreds of ball games being played by indigenous groups there. Some of them died off or were killed off early, but quite a few still hang on. One of the most unusual, pelota purépecha, is still played by around 800 people in the state of Michoacán. Two teams armed with oak sticks attempt to score goals with a ball made of twine and cotton rags that’s been doused in fuel and lit on fire. I’ve seen it described as a kind of field hockey for pyromaniacs! They often play at night, and all you can see is this blazing orb streaking across the night sky. So cool.

  Another pre-Columbian game, pelota mixteca, is a kind of handball played in Oaxaca with a small rubber ball covered with a suede lining. Players in teams of five pound the solid ball back and forth with an elaborately decorated 10-pound leather glove. Although the number of players has dwindled over time, the game is still played in Mexico as well as by immigrants in U.S. communities such as Fresno, Fort Worth, and East Los Angeles.

  What’s great is that the Mexican Sports Federation has actually focused a lot of attention and money recently on preserving these games. They’re building a pre-Hispanic sports center in Mexico City, printing rule books for ancient games, and offering seminars in schools to try to get young people interested. The jury’s still out on whether they’ll be successful, but most kids I know would leap at the chance to play hockey with a flaming ball!

  The ancient ball games you write about, and even games like ulama that are still played, are heavy in symbolism. Do our contemporary ball games—baseball, basketball, and American football (all of which you address)—reflect any latent cultural symbolism that some anthropologist hundreds of years from now might be interested in?

  Certainly in our secular age sports no longer have the overt religious symbolism and ceremony of earlier times. We don’t tend to offer sacrifices before or after important games, for example, or regard the outcome of a game as determining future weather patterns or harvests. But there’s still a lot of symbolism wrapped up in our modern games. Baseball, for example, is steeped in superstition. There’s the Curse of the Bambino, of course, which I’m almost certain is back with a vengeance after the Red Sox’s inexplicable and catastrophic collapse at the end of the 2011 season. Also, batters and pitchers have any number of bizarre rites they perform on the plate or mound to ensure success, such as tugging sleeves, clapping hands, tapping bats on the ground a set number of times. Lots of players won’t step on the foul lines coming on or off the field. Some players, reinforcing an ancient male superstition, will even abstain from sex on game days.

  One of my favorite stories is of the construction worker who in 2008, hoping to curse the Yankees for years to come, buried a David Ortiz shirt under the new Yankees Stadium as it was being built. When the Yankees got a tip about it, they brought in a crew to jackhammer through three feet of concrete and the Yankees president presided over what he called an “excavation ceremony” to remove the shirt and any black magic it might have unleashed. The story reminds me of the Aztec who buried caches of jade and other symbolic offerings inside ball courts when they were built to imbue them with magical powers.

  Then there’s American football. I’ll never forget a game I attended in 2009 at Buckeyes Stadium between Ohio State and Navy. Navy hadn’t played in the stadium since 1931, so it was a big deal. Following “The Star-Spangled Banner,” there was an F-18 flyover and recorded greetings on the scoreboard from military personnel stationed in Afghanistan. For the grand finale, the marching band performed their “script Ohio” ceremony, and former astronaut and U.S. senator John Glenn showed up as the honorary guest to dot the i. The entire experience was a kind of nationalistic spectacle affirming U.S. military strength in a time of war. No one seemed to question why such a rite would precede a ball game. It seemed entirely natural—like part of the game.

  What do you think the future of the ball might be? Will we still be bouncing and kicking them thousands of years from now?

  I’m no futurist and am way more comfortable in the past, but I’m pretty confident that the ball will still be kicking, or being kicked, around for a very long time. Obviously, there’s been a trend toward the virtualization of play and there is definitely some cause for alarm as more and more kids spend their time plugged in and detached from the physical world. I’m no Luddite, and I believe the studies that indicate that kids playing Madden NFL or NBA 2K12 are still playing, or at least their brains are playing. But we’re physical beings who need to move our bodies now and then to maintain at least a modicum of mental and physical health. And there’s really nothing like a plain old ball to engage our bodies and minds completely.

  An interesting study was done recently looking at what happens to our brains while watching sports. The study showed that about one-fifth of the neurons in our pre-motor cortex that fire when we perform an action, say kicking a ball, also fire when we watch someone else do it. So in a very real way, our brains are in the game even when we’re just watching. But that’s still an 80 percent gap in brain activity—not to mention the 100 percent gap in physical activity—between actually playing a sport and just watching it.

  In terms of the ball itself, I do think we’ll continue to see it evolve in interesting ways. Some researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have been developing a “smart football” which contains a tiny GPS and accelerometer to continuously measure the location and speed of the ball. Aside from potentially taking some of the guesswork out of refereeing plays, the developers see applications for training players. With smart balls and gloves, for example, a quarterback can get real-time data on how he’s throwing and make adjustments to improve precision. But even the most high-tech balls will still be subject to the quirks of physics and human error. The Adidas “jabulani” soccer ball used during the 2010 World Cup was a thing to behold with only eight (down from 14 in the previous World Cup) spherically molded panels and a “Grip ’n’ Groove” surface technology designed to make the ball more aerodynamic. Despite such advances, the ball was widely criticized by players and was even blamed for low-scoring games in the first round of competition. Brazilian striker Luis Fabiano decried the ball as having supernatural powers because it changed direction in midair. Portugal, which beat North Korea 7-0 with it, thought it was just perfect.

  Read on

  What About Bocce?

  An Outtake from The Ball

  WHEN I WAS RESEARCHING the murky origins of ball games, I wanted to find a truly primitive game, still being played, that in an earlier form might conceivably have killed our ancestor’s boredom between hunts. So naturally I t
hought of bocce, a Paleolithic game if ever there was one. For the deprived and uninitiated, bocce is played by two teams of three to six players on a narrow 60-foot-long alley. At the start, a round yellow stone ball called the pallino is thrown toward the other end of the court to start the game. Each team then takes turns rolling larger stone balls down the alley in an attempt to get them as close to the pallino as possible, displacing the competitor’s balls to secure the best position.

  An Italian game that became popular in the early days of the Roman Empire, bocce was then spread by Roman soldiers to France, where it is became boules (and the popular contemporary game of pétanque), and to England, where it developed into “bowls,” or lawn bowling. The game in its many manifestations became hugely popular in villages across Europe through the Middle Ages—so popular that, like football, it was repeatedly banned for distracting the peasantry from archery practice.

  Armed with this admittedly thin historical background, I decided to explore the game in all of its primitive glory and find out what’s kept it popular for all these centuries. Although I could have just dropped in on one of the regular Saturday matches on the waterfront in Boston’s Italian North End, that seemed far too easy. In my research, I encountered an “extreme bocce” movement that was attempting to bust the game loose from the confines of the traditional alley. I corresponded with a guy in Oregon who organized weekend matches on open mountain trails in the Cascades. And I talked to some hipsters who played an urban version on the streets, skate parks, and empty lots of Brooklyn.

  Intrigued as I was by the extreme bocce angle, I decided to follow a more traditional course and cover the World Series of Bocce, held each July in Rome—Rome, New York.

  Rome is a gritty, industrial city that straddles the Erie Canal 90 miles west of Albany. The Toccolana Club, located just down the street from an olive oil bottling plant and a steel plate factory, is a dedicated bocce facility with 15 indoor and outdoor courts that has hosted the World Series for more than 30 years. Started by Rome’s mayor back in 1973 as a way to promote the city’s Italian heritage and bring in tourists, the World Series has never quite lived up to its international name. But neither has baseball’s World Series, locals happily point out.

  “Hey, we’ve got Canadians here,” said Pete Corigliano, 78, one of the event’s organizers. “Last time I checked that was another country.”

  When I arrived at the facility, Pete’s team, Corigliano Insurance, was battling Anger Management in an early round of competition. Even in the shade of corrugated metal shed roofs, players mopped their brows with handkerchiefs, trying to stay cool in the 90-degree heat.

  “Good ball, Frankie!” yelled Pete as his teammate, an expert point man, gently curved his ball through a warren until it hugged the pallino.

  “Kiss it!” shrieked an elderly lady with a bouffant hairdo from her folding chair.

  Pete’s father came from Calabria, Italy, where the family had a bocce court in the backyard. “My father and his friends would play all day in the shade of grapevines, drinking wine, arguing politics,” he said. “It was a social thing. Still is.”

  Beer seems to be the choice of bocce players these days. The Toccolana Club goes through 20 to 25 kegs each year, the club owner told me—and a similarly impressive volume of sausage and pepper hoagies.

  In search of shade, I made my way to the club’s indoor courts, where Donna Ciotta and her Liquor Express team were on their usual winning streak. Donna and team, her son boasted, are the proud holders of the Guinness World Record for “Most Wins of the World Series of Bocce (Female Team),” having taken home the tournament’s prize money nine times over a 20-year stretch. On the next court over, Barton’s Place Quality Assisted Living was living up to their team motto, emblazoned on their T-shirts: “I Don’t Sweat You!”

  To be honest, I’d never taken bocce seriously as a sport. Like croquet and horseshoes, it always seemed like a social activity designed to keep your other hand occupied while drinking beer. That was until I met Dr. Angel Cordano, a pediatrician with an elegantly trimmed beard who has teamed up with his son and grandson. Angel was born in Genoa, Italy, but immigrated to Peru as a young man, playing for years on that country’s national bocce team. He then came to the United States and joined the national federation team. For Angel, bocce, when it’s played well, is a demanding sport.

  “If you are not in shape, forget it,” he cautioned, patting his trim stomach. He and his family team practice 12 hours a week on a court behind their home in Naples, Florida. Although he makes the long trek to Rome every year, and enjoys the field of competitors the tournament draws, he’s less than impressed with both the conditions and the quality of play.

  “This court is for pasture, not for bocce!” he complained after a carefully placed ball veered suspiciously into the back corner. “Play this side, add five yards; play that side, take away five yards!”

  His team having lost position, Angel directed his son to rearrange the field with a well-placed “spock.” He wound up and whipped a fastball down court, blasting his opponent’s well-placed ball away from the pallino.

  Angel wistfully recalled the level of professionalism and competition of his Federation days, mocking the casual style of play that passes for bocce here in the wrong Rome.

  “There’s no finesse here,” he said, shaking his head and gesturing to the courts around him. “It’s like the difference between checkers and chess.”

  But everyone—young and old, family and old friends—seemed to be having a great time. The beer was flowing, clouds of sausage smoke wafted through the air. In the beer line, I ran into Al Cerra, who’s been coming every year for nearly 25 years. Al offered a different philosophy on the game.

  “The beauty of bocce is anyone can play. All you have to be able to do is roll a ball. That’s why it’s universally loved.”

  He paused and corrected himself: “Actually, my wife hates it. But you can’t please everyone.”

  Recommended Reading

  MY TASTES IN SPORTSWRITING skew, predictably, toward the anthropological and sociological. I like books that purport to be about sports but are actually about something else, something bigger than the game. Of course, I love everything Roger Angell has ever written for The New Yorker and genuflect to Frank Deford, John Feinstein, Michael Lewis, and the other giants of the genre. But rather than retread such hallowed ground, I thought I’d offer up some titles that readers might be less likely to stumble upon. To me, each of these books exposes something deeply fascinating, or deeply disturbing, about the sports we play (or once played) and the power they wield over us.

  Games of the North American Indians by Stewart Culin

  This 846-page, 1,000-illustration tome, published in 1907, captured a vast array of American Indian sports and games before they were silenced by conquest and assimilation. Culin got hooked on games after curating an exhibition on the world’s diversions at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. Inspired, he spent the years from 1900 to 1905 traveling from one Indian reservation to the next, meticulously documenting the fast-vanishing games and sporting traditions of American Indians. In this time-traveling book (now available in part via Google Books), you can read about chunkey, a game played by the Creek and other southeastern tribes that involved throwing spears at a rolling stone disc, as well as shinny, double ball, foot-cast ball, and hot ball. And, of course, lacrosse— one of the few survivors.

  Levels of the Game by John McPhee

  Speaking of lacrosse, no author has written about that sport as lovingly and precisely as honorary “Lax Bro” John McPhee. But this is a guy who has written with equal insight and eloquence about basketball, nuclear science, the geology of the American West, and . . . tennis. Levels of the Game opens with the ball tossed for the serve and ends with the scoring of the winning point. In between, he probes and prods the backgrounds and psyches of opponents Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner—black vs. white, liberal Democrat vs. conservative Republican, disenfranc
hised vs. enfranchised—as they battle it out at the 1968 U.S. Open semifinals. “Physical equipment being about equal,” he writes, “the role of psychology becomes paramount, and each will play out his game within the fabric of his nature and his background.”

  Amen: Grassroots Football by Jessica Hilltout

  If, after reading my book, you have any lingering doubt that the ball is central to the human experience, I urge you to view this collection of photographs. On the eve of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Hilltout traveled 15,000 kilometers across Africa, exchanging new soccer balls for homemade balls made of rags, plastic bags tied with twine, clay, and whatever else was lying around. One photo shows a ball from old rags stitched by some mother’s loving hands—complete with hexagonal and pentagonal patterns. The caption reads, “Am I kicked, beaten, used, crushed and trampled? Or am I strong, resilient, determined, unbeaten, proud? I am both. I am proof that with so little we can do so much. I am proof that simple pleasures are enduring. I am a ball. I am an African ball.”

  Among the Thugs by Bill Buford

  On the other extreme—actually, on the extreme of the other extreme—I felt bruised and beaten when I finished Buford’s gutsy, from-the-trenches account of England’s soccer hooliganism in the 1980s. To me, at least, this is as much a book about soccer as any other written, though balls barely factor in and most of the action takes place in the dark alleys of England’s working-class cities rather than on its stadium pitches. Buford’s account of the lager-soaked Red soldiers of the Inter-City Jibbers is as riveting as it is hard to read. His confessions to the allure of mob violence are stunning. My favorite chapter is his description of tensions rising on the terraces of Cambridge’s Abbey Stadium as the mob waits for a goal, hopes for catharsis, but gets only another scoreless draw: “Five shots. . . . And again, each time, the sheer physical sensation: I could feel everyone round me tightening up, like a spring, triggered for release. Except there was no release. There was no goal.”