STUDENTS OF THE
GAME. By: Fox, John, Smithsonian,
00377333, Apr2006, Vol. 37, Issue 1
Database:
Academic Search
Elite
WHEN THE AZTEC AND MAYA
PLAYED IT 500 TO 1,000 YEARS AGO, THE LOSERS SOMETIMES LOST THEIR
HEADS--LITERALLY. TODAY SCHOLARS ARE VISITING REMOTE MEXICAN VILLAGES TO STUDY
THE OLDEST SPORT IN THE AMERICAS, ULAMA, NOW ON THE VERGE OF EXTINCTION.
"¡DÉFAMELO!" Jesfús "Chuy" Páez shouts.
"Leave it for me!" The nine-pound black rubber ball arcs high in the
late-afternoon Mexican sky Páez's teammates scatter, fanning out diagonally to
defend their end zone. With a running leap, Páez throws his deerskin-padded hip
into the ball, connecting with a punishing thud and launching the ball fast and
low across the hard-packed dirt court's centerline.
"Your turn, old man!" Páez says as Fito Lizárraga, a
youthful 56-year-old, prepares to return the ball. Bracing himself on the
ground with one hand, Lizárraga pivots his hip to strike the ball low and sends
it skidding back through the dirt. Lizárraga's teammates close in fast behind
him as players from both teams take turns flinging themselves to the ground,
and the ball ricochets between hips like an oversize pinball. Then, with a dive
worthy of New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, Páez knocks the ball past
Lizárraga and his teammates, sending it crashing into a chain-link fence at the
end of the court.
On the sidelines, the 30 or so Los Llanitos hometown spectators
erupt in cheers--a point scored in another Sunday afternoon pickup game of
America's oldest sport, ulama (from the Aztec's word for it, ullamalizth).
Archaeologists say that communities from the jungles of Honduras to the deserts
of northern Mexico have been playing versions of it for the past 3,500 years.
Against all odds, this ancient game survived the rise and fall of the Olmec,
Maya and Aztec civilizations, not to mention the devastation wrought by the
Spanish Conquest.
Yet today ulama faces extinction. The players' relative poverty
and geographic isolation, a lack of natural rubber and competition from newer
sports such as volleyball and baseball have driven it to the brink. The threat
has brought together an odd coalition of academics, athletes and local
businessmen trying to preserve it and study it for clues to how the ancient
Mesoamericans lived.
TWO PROFESSORS at California State University at Los
Angeles--archaeologist James Brady and art historian Manuel Aguilar--together
with their students, form the Ulama Project. They seem unlikely sports fans.
"For years, we archaeologists were stuck in a major rut," says Brady.
"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." Brady and Sergio Garza, his graduate student at the University of
California at Riverside, specialize in ancient Maya caves; even by day they
sport flashlights on their belts, as if a dark, unexplored crevice might
present itself at any moment. For Brady; ulama represents an opportunity to
conduct what's called ethnoarchaeology: by studying the modern game, he and his
colleagues hope to better understand its past. "For so long," he
says, "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."
THE HOUR-AND-A-HALF DRIVE from the beach resort of Mazatlán to Los
Llanitos (pop. 151 begins on a jammed coastal highway lined with fast-food
joints and high-rise hotels and ends on a bone-jarring dirt road winding
through withered cornfields. Just past a church and a corral packed with
cattle, Brady, Garza and I pull 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, Páez steps over a dog sleeping in the shade of the porch and extends a
hearty welcome.
Inside his concrete-floor bedroom is Páez'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, Páez's 11-year-old son,
Chuyito, poses proudly in his deerskin loincloth, holding a ball that looks to
be nearly half his size. As we tour the gallery Páez reaches up into the
rafters and unties a rubber ball from a hanging neckerchief. Then, leading us
back outside, he positions me in one corner of the porch and walks ten feet to
the opposite corner.
"¿Listo?" he asks with a grin. "Ready?" I nod
tentatively He bounces the ball--a little smaller than a bowling ball-across
the patio floor. As I reach out to catch it, the nine pound spheroid smashes
through my hands and into my chest, almost knocking me to the ground. Brady
laughs, having warned me of the weight. "See what I mean?"
For Brady, as for me, just absorbing the ball's impact for the
first time was a revelation. Sure, he'd read in the writings of Diego Durán, a
16th-century Spanish friar, of the physical abuse endured by Aztec ballplayers,
who "got their haunches so mangled that they had those places cut with a
small knife and extracted blood which the blows of the ball had gathered."
And though I'd written a 300-page doctoral dissertation on ulama, I had never
before felt the blow of a ball against my hip. "It's one of those things
you can read about all you want," says Brady, "but until you feel it
for yourself and have the bruise to, show for it, it's meaningless."
After a mid-afternoon lunch of pozole, a traditional Mexican
hominy stew, Páez leads us to the town's playing field, or taste (pronounced
TASTAY), a name believed to derive from tlachtli (TLASH-TLI), the Aztec word
for ball court. Scholars have documented about 1,500 of them and excavated
about 450. With their two long, low, parallel mounds forming an I-shaped alley,
ulama courts are as distinctive as baseball diamonds.
Sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers of the New World, most of
them Franciscan friars bent on spreading the Christian faith, described with
awe their first encounters with this peculiar sport, played with a solid ball
that appeared to have magical properties. Hernando Cortés was so impressed with
the game that he brought a team of players back to Spain in 1528 to perform in
the royal court. But the friars soon learned that for the Aztec and other
Mesoamericans, ullamaliztli was as much religious rite as sandlot sport. In
their codices, or sacred books, the Aztec compared the bouncing ball to the
cosmic journey of the sun into and out of the underworld. Highly ritualized
ballgames enacted at key religious festivals helped to ensure the continuous
cycles of nature and the cosmos. Ball courts in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital
(in what is now Mexico City), were adorned with sculptures depicting local gods
and other supernatural beings. Priests initiated important games with offerings
of incense in nearby temples.
At least some of the games saw human sacrifice. The losing
players--or unlucky stand-ins captured in battle--could literally lose their
heads in post-game ceremonies. In one graphic depiction 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
player, bestowing fertility on the land and the living. A rival player wields a
stone knife and the freshly severed head as his grisly trophy.
In 1585, the Spanish, citing such practices, banned the ballgames.
But in remote frontier villages, ulama survived. "When the Spanish friars
drove the game underground," Aguilar says, "it almost certainly lost
most of its religious overtones." But some intriguing practices seem to
hint at a residual link to ancient beliefs. According to Spanish accounts, for
example, the Aztec played primarily on religious feast days; today in Los
Llanitos, the game is played on Christian holidays. And while the ancient ball
courts were often next to pyramid temples, today's tastes tend to be located
next to village cemeteries.
Not that the game was ever entirely spiritual. In an early account
of the sport's dark side, chronicler Diego 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."
THE LOS LLANITOS taste hardly suggests the grandeur of its ancient
precursors; it is a long, narrow alley of hard-packed clay lined with palm
trees, about 12 feet wide and the length of roughly half a football field. At
two o'clock on a Sunday; the first of eight players arrives. He is soon joined by
others in a corner of the court that serves as a makeshift locker room. They
strip to their underwear and put on fajados, four-piece leather-and-cloth
girdles that protect the stomach, hips and buttocks. As the players take to the
field to warm up, spectators stake out the best, and safest, spots--mostly in
the end zones, the better to avoid a hurtling ball, which travels upwards of 30
miles per hour. Young boys, wearing fajados and the occasional baseball cap,
imitate the players on the sidelines, while toddlers play safely behind the
chain-link fence.
The game begins when a team of three to five players throws the
ball high (male por arriba) or rolls it low (male por abajo) across a
chalk-marked centerline. Play continues back and forth, with contestants using
only their hips to strike the ball, until a point (raya) 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. The first team to total eight rayas wins,
though due to a complex scoring system that not only awards points but also
takes them away, games can go on for hours or even, when halted by nightfall,
days.
For Brady and his colleagues, what began as a purely academic
study has turned into an all-out effort to save one of the Americas' oldest
traditions. The pair recently petitioned the Mexican Ministry of Tourism,
without success, to nominate ulama for UNESCO recognition, to attract more
interest and support. But in the end, ulama's survival may hinge on something far
more pedestrian: the availability of rubber balls.
At one time, during the Aztec Empire, the southern Gulf Coast of
Mexico was the heartland of rubber production. But since then, the rubber trees
that once grew there have been wiped out by development, and the people of Los
Llanitos and nearby communities have to travel hundreds of males into Durango,
a region increasingly under the control of Mexican drug lords, to find rubber
trees to milk. As a result the price of a single ulama ball has reached a staggering
$1,000, or about $250 more than the annual income of the average Los Llanitos
player. The town has only one playable ball--and regular use is shrinking it.
Mazatlán businessman Jesús Gómez, a longtime supporter of the
game, has taken the lead in the search for an artificial substitute, and the
Ulama Project's scholars have teamed up with members of the Mazatlán Historical
Society to experiment with commercial latex from as far away as New York City.
"If we can't get natural rubber," says Gómez, "we need to find
another way. Otherwise, ulama will not survive. It's that simple."
So far, artificial rubber has failed to replicate the look, feel
and, most important, remarkable bouncing properties of traditional balls.
"Look at this," says Páez after the game at Los Llanitos. He drops a
lumpy white blob of low-grade latex rubber, the result of Jesús Gómez's latest
experiments, and watches it bounce erratically off his patio. "This
doesn't work," he says with visible disgust. "It's not natural
rubber." But the researchers have not given up. In La Savila, a
neighboring village, Aguilar says players are field-testing a ball made of
another artificial compound, and he remains optimistic that a substitute may
soon be found.
After rubber balls, what ulama may need more than anything is
followers. Although players have been invited to resorts in the Yucatán to
perform for tourists in faux-Maya extravaganzas-- complete with drums, feather
headdresses and face paint--most decline, regarding the displays as exploitative
and culturally inaccurate. For Páez and his teammates, ulama is a living sport
that tourists should appreciate on its own terms, not a curiosity. Aguilar and
his colleagues are working to convince Spanish-language television networks to
sponsor a tour that would bring ulama to the streets of Los Angeles and other
Latino population centers in the United States. Perhaps here, in a nation
increasingly proud of its Latino roots, the oldest sport in the. Americas will
find the fans sufficient to carry it through another millennium or two.
PHOTO (COLOR): PROBING AN ANCIENT PASTIME, RESEARCHERS (SERGIO
GARZA AND JAMES BRADY) OBSERVE THE PUNISHING SPORT OF ULAMA
PHOTO (COLOR): TRADITIONALLY (A COURT AT C. NINTH CENTURY
XOCHICALCO, MEXICO) THE BALL SYMBOLIZED THE SUN. IN SOME VERSIONS, PLAYERS
KNOCKED IT THROUGH A HOOP (AT CHICHÉN ITZÁ) SCORING A POINT--AND EVOKING THE
PASSING OF THE SUN THROUGH THE UNDERWORLD
PHOTO (COLOR): CHUY PAEZ IN LOS LLANITOS "HIPS" A BALL
PHOTO (COLOR): ULAMA WAS SO KEY TO MESOAMERICAN CULTURES THAT IT
INSPIRED THE HEMISPHERE'S FIRST SPORTS IDOLS (A 700 TO 900 A.D. MAYA FIGURINE
WITH A LOINCLOTH, BALL AND DEER HEADDRESS)
PHOTO (COLOR): THE OLD BALLGAME HAS A FOOTHOLD IN REMOTE WEST
MEXICO VILLAGES, WHERE GENERATIONS (IN LOS LLANITOS, CHUY PAEZ, 28, FITO
LIZARRAGA, 56, AND RAFAEL LIZÁRRAGA Y BARRA, 95, WITH A NEPHEW) HAVE SUITED UP
FOR THE GRUELING CONTESTS
PHOTO (COLOR): ULAMA'S FATE DEPENDS QUITE LITERALLY ON HOW THE
BALL BOUNCES: NATURAL RUBBER USED IN A TRADITIONAL BALL HAS BECOME SO SCARCE IT
CAN COST $1,000, WAY BEYOND THE MEANS OF MOST CONTESTANTS (FOLLOWERS IN LOS
LLANITOS). ULAMA FANS ARE SEARCHING FOR NEW RUBBER RESOURCES
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (COLOR)
~~~~~~~~
By John Fox
John Fox, who conducted research on ulama for his doctorate in
anthropology from Harvard, is a freelance writer in Vermont.
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