Take me out to the ballgameIt is a strange coincidence that many popular sports played today with a ball, big or small, were first played in the latter half of the 19th century. Only cricket set its rules earlier, in 1788. Basketball was invented in 1891. Other sports had antecedents: soccer, rugby and American football were all formalised in the 1860s and 1870s from what appears to be a common origin, while baseball was standardised around that time, as was golf — though many Scots claim earlier origins. Tennis as we know it today was devised by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, a British army officer, for the entertainment of guests at his country estate in 1873. Tennis, though, is an exception in that the indoor form of the game was played with formal rules in England and France at least as far back as 1600. But even this is recent compared with ulama, a game once played all over Mesoamerica, from the American Southwest to Peru.The oldest ulama court, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, was built around 1500BC, while latex balls used by the Olmecs, farther west, have been carbon-dated to 300 — 500 years earlier. This is not to say the rules of ulama have not changed over the years-ritual sacrifice of the losers is thought to have died out in the 1300s. But, says Manuel Aguilar, a professor at California State University, in Los Angeles, who studies the game, it is unique in having a continual recorded history stretching back almost 4 ,000 years.Dr. Aguilar and his colleague James Brady have been directing a group of students in Sinaloa, a state in western Mexico. They have started a comprehensive study of ulama de cadera, one of three forms of ulama surviving in Sinaloa, which is perhaps the only place where the once-widespread game is still played. Dr Aguilar speculates that this is because Sinaloa was a frontier during the time of the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, when ulama was largely eliminated by the intervention of Catholic missionaries who decried its pagan associations.Ulama is played on a long, narrow court, called a taste, which is 60 metres long and only four metres wide. The opposing sides, of five players each, take turns serving the four kilogram rubber ball and thereafter trying to move the ball up the field, hitting it only with the hip or upper thigh, which are protected by special garments. Points are scored if one team fails to return the other’’s serve across the halfway point of the taste, or if the serving team succeeds in getting the ball past the opponent’’s end line. The first team to score eight points wins.However, as Dr Aguilar and his colleagues point out in a series of papers forthcoming in the May issue of Estudios Jaliscienses, a Mexican journal, the rules of ulama are still today in flux, and often not even understood by the participants. This is why in a match each team brings a veedor, an elder who is meant to settle disputes over the rules.Dr. Aguilar, though, is less concerned with the details of the rules of the game, but with its social implications, both in Sinaloa today, and in Mesoamerica generally over the course of ulama’’s history. While Dr Brady is, by training, an anthropologist, and so directs the team’’s efforts to compile an ethnography of the present-day game, Dr Aguilar is an art historian. While this may seem an unorthodox pairing, it has allowed them to make some novel insights.For example, until their recent work, it was believed in academia that ulama was only played by men. However, in their detailed questioning of current players, they found that women play the game today, albeit as an exception, because female players are often stigmatized as being too macho. One of their informants is 94 years old and remembers female players from his youth, so the researchers are fairly certain that women have played throughout the 20th century. And Dr Aguilar’’s analysis of clay figurines, he says, indicates that women played routinely in pre-Columbian times, indeed as far back as 1200BC. This leads Dr Aguilar to speculate that women stopped playing only because of Spanish intervention, and resumed 100-200 years ago.Another concern of Dr Aguilar’’s is the balls used to play the game. He says synthetic rubber cannot be used, as there is a p tradition of using natural rubber. Because natural rubber is now scarce in Mexico, and the process of making a ball takes about 30 hours, the supply of balls is constraining the spread of the game. Indeed, to understand the process better, Dr Brady tried to make several balls together with his students. The process involved smearing hot latex on his hands and arms, allowing it to dry, and then peeling the strips off and wrapping them around the core of the ball until it reaches the requisite size and weight. The traditional process, says Dr Brady, is necessary to give the ball sufficient bounce.First-hand experience has caused Dr Brady to revise his understanding of the significance of tributes paid in the 16th century to the Aztec empire, when ulama balls were used as a de facto currency. Dr Brady thinks that the growing of rubber in the Aztec empire was probably much more extensive than had previously been thought, as was the production of balls, which may have served as the store of value for an entire economic system.Both Dr Brady and Dr Aguilar have tried to play ulama themselves, but Dr Aguilar says that, although some of his graduate students persevered for longer, the bruises he sustained from the heavy ball caused him quickly to abandon playing the game. The same, it seems, cannot be said of the inhabitants of Sinaloa.
