The Ball (11 page)

The Open is the most prestigious
jeu de paume
tournament held in France. Any player who is a French national or resident can enter and compete. But as I perused the draw that was thumb-tacked to an antique corkboard, it became clear that what seemed like reasonable enough criteria for a national tournament were sadly far too narrow to field a proper competition. Only a dozen or so players had signed up to compete. A tidy elderly gentleman who joined me at the board assured me that there were, in fact, more than a dozen
jeu de paume
players in all of France. “It is
his
fault,” he suggested with a laugh, pointing toward a player lounging casually on a nearby leather couch.

Marc Seigneur, a marginally fit 41-year-old with thinning blond hair, has been the reigning French champion for the past decade or so. The son of a French father and English mother, Seigneur is ranked in the top 20 players in the world and is the club pro at Leamington Spa, one of England's most exclusive tennis clubs, which, in 2008, opened its doors to women for the first time in 162 years. Minutes before his first-round match Seigneur looked strangely relaxed, if not downright bored, sprawled in a plush leather chair awaiting his first game. I introduced myself and asked which of his competitors he expected would give him a run for his money. He looked up at the ceiling, then at the floor, running through the players in his head, and then stated matter-of-factly, “No one should really give me any trouble, actually.”

“But who might be the toughest?” I pressed on.

“Really, there is no one here in France, I'm afraid,” he sighed nonchalantly.

Seigneur excused himself and headed onto the court, where he handily dispatched the first of several noncompetitors. If there was any buzz around the otherwise somnambulant affair, it involved Mathieu Sarlangue, a skinny, shy 16-year-old with a mop of black hair and a vicious forehand. Sarlangue's family came from the Basque region, well known for birthing talented ballplayers of all kinds, and his father had been
jeu de paume
national champion during the 1970s. Sarlangue is the rare exception in France: a young man trying to break into a middle-aged man's sport that, by design, rewards age, experience, and mental acuity over speed, endurance, and gumption.

“None of my friends play,” he lamented, before stepping onto the court to face Seigneur in the championship match. “It's too hard to learn quickly and takes a lot of work to be good. They just play football instead.” But Sarlangue seemed wise beyond his years as, one by one, he sliced a path through his elders to face Seigneur in the final match.

I eagerly found a spot on a wooden pew with a dozen or so other spectators in the
dedans
, the netted gallery at the court's service end. A pro from another club sat nearby sewing a bagful of balls, not wasting a moment to keep up his quota.

“May I have one?” I joked, reaching out my hand.

He shook his head and shuffled further down the pew with his stash.

As the championship game began, I cheered Mathieu on, hoping he would get up in Seigneur's
grill
and take him right to the
tambour
. I was not alone, judging from the exclamations of my fellow spectators. This medieval sport of kings desperately needed a young knight from the land of its birth to lead it safely through another century.

But it was not to be—not today. Seigneur barely broke a sweat, toying with his young opponent as he dropped balls into impossible crevices and repeatedly pounded balls into the
dedans
where we sat, ringing the bell that hung from the netting like it was Sunday.

As the match moved toward its inevitable conclusion, some visiting squash players on their way to play stopped by briefly to watch. They tapped my shoulder to inquire what this peculiar game with the sloping roofs and crooked racket was called.

“Tennis,” I answered. “This is
real
tennis.”

Chapter Four

Sudden Death in the New World

He was decapitated, Yax Xim Cabnel Ahau . . .

He played the ballgame of death

It had come to pass at the Black Hole . . .

Eighth-century Mayan hieroglyphic inscription

“D
éjamelo!
” shouted Chuy Páez. “Leave it for me!” The nine-pound black rubber ball arced high into the late-afternoon Mexican sky. Chuy's teammates scattered, fanning out diagonally to defend their end zone. With a running leap, Chuy threw 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 center line.

“Your turn, old man!” Chuy taunted as Fito Lizárraga, a spry 56-year-old, prepared to return the ball. Bracing himself on the ground with one hand, Fito pivoted his hip to strike the ball low and sent it skidding back through the dirt. Fito's teammates closed in fast behind him as players from both teams took turns flinging themselves to the ground and the ball ricocheted between hips like an oversized pinball. Then, with a dive worthy of Derek Jeter, Chuy knocked the ball past Fito and his teammates, sending it crashing into the chain-link fence at the end of the court.

On the sidelines, the 30 or so spectators of Los Llanitos erupted in cheers—a point scored in another Sunday afternoon pickup game of
ulama
, the oldest sport in the Americas.

O
n Christopher Columbus's second voyage to the New World in 1493, his crew brought along an air-filled ball to toss around and divert themselves in the downtime when they weren't busy enslaving local populations in their frenzied and fruitless search for gold. It's likely this was a
pelota de viento
(“wind ball”), a leather ball with an inflated bladder that was derived from the Roman
follis
. The Spanish and Italians of the era used it to play
pallone
, a handball game still played in varying forms in the Italian countryside. The game took place in a massive arena three times the size of a
paume
hall, and divided in half by a 15-foot-high net. Players wore a spiked wooden cylinder, called a
bracciale
, over their forearms, which they used to strike the ball back and forth in an attempt to score points. Back home, the conquistadors would also have been familiar with
pelota de vasca
, a game played in a court with a stuffed ball and either a glove or paddle that evolved into modern jai alai, notorious today for its rampant gambling.

Back in Europe, tennis had already spread beyond monastery walls and was fast becoming the most popular sport on the continent, the choice game of royals and merchants. Rackets were just beginning to replace the palm of the hand and nets were being strung across open courts. Not expecting to find tennis courts—or much of anything civilized—among the natives of the New World, however, Columbus's crew naturally left their rackets and beard-stuffed balls at home and made do with their inflated
pelota
.

But on the island of Hispaniola, in what is now Haiti, they found the natives—whom they regarded as savages—playing with a far superior ball. The Spaniards watched in awe as this magical ball bounced high above their heads, ricocheting and springing off the ground as if it were alive. “I don't understand how when the balls hit the ground they are sent into the air with such incredible bounce,” wrote Pedro Mártir d'Angleria, the royal historian to the Spanish court of Charles V, a century later. The Dominican friar, Fray Diego Durán, was equally entranced. “Jumping and bouncing are its qualities, upward and downward, to and fro. It can exhaust the pursuer running after it before he can catch up with it.” Columbus himself was so impressed with the properties of the ball that he took one back with him when he returned to Seville.

It was the Europeans' first encounter with the material we know as rubber, and the sports world would never be the same again.

For 3,500 years or so, the people of Mexico and the northern reaches of Central America—a cultural region known as Mesoamerica—have been coming together to play a variety of competitive games with balls made of indigenous, natural rubber. There are 2,000 known plant species that produce latex containing rubber particles, and most can be found in the hot, humid, low-altitude tropical regions of the world. In Mexico and Central America, the most common variety of rubber plant is
Castilla elastica
, which is indigenous to the coastal lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific.

In its natural state, the latex produced by rubber plants is a white, sticky liquid that gets deformed when heated and hard and brittle when cold. Chemically, the latex is made of polymer chains that move independently of each other, easily losing shape. Not the best material to work or play with. To turn latex into usable rubber, the polymer chains need to be linked up so the rubber, once formed, can retain its strength, shape, and elasticity.

The West wouldn't discover the industrial process of vulcanization that connected these polymer chains and made rubber commercially viable until 1839, when Charles Goodyear, after having been imprisoned for debt and nearly suffocated by toxic gases in his lab, finally made his breakthrough discovery that the addition of sulfur at high heat cured the rubber and made it durable and lasting. But by 1500
BC
, the ancient inhabitants of coastal Mexico had not only determined how to extract and naturally cure and stabilize rubber but figured out that they could shape it into spheres and have a whole lot of fun playing with it—more than three millennia before Goodyear's name ever appeared on a tire.

For decades, archaeologists and historians were mystified as to how ancient Mesoamerican cultures managed to turn raw latex into serviceable rubber without access to sulfur and the high temperatures produced by industrial heat sources. So they turned to the 16th-century Spanish chroniclers, who had obsessively documented the strange and exotic culture of the Aztecs, even as they systematically dismantled and destroyed as much of it as they could. Fray Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, one of the first 12 Franciscans to arrive in the New World in the early 16th century, provided a clue in an early description of the ball and the process the Aztecs used to fabricate it:

Rubber is the gum of a tree that grows in the hot lands, when [this tree is] punctured it gives white drops, and they run into each other, this is quickly coagulated and turns black, almost soft like a fish; and of this they make the balls that the Indians play with, and these balls bounce higher than the wind balls used in Spain, they are about the same size and darker; the balls of this land are very heavy, they run and jump so much that it is if they have quicksilver within.

But it was an account by Mártir d'Angleria that led researchers to the discovery of the missing ingredient in ancient rubber production:

The balls are made from the juice of a certain vine that climbs the trees like the hops climb the fences; this juice when boiled becomes hardened and turned into a mass and is able to be shaped into the desired form . . .

In the 1940s, Paul Stanley, a botanist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, identified the vine as
Ipomoea alba
, a kind of night-blooming morning glory commonly known as moon vine or moonflower. Recent studies show that when latex from
Castilla elastica
is boiled with the juice of moon vine, sulfonic acids that occur naturally in the vine increase the plasticity and elasticity of the rubber and produce a degree of vulcanization—enough for the ancient Mesoamericans to make sandals for ruling elites, tips for drumsticks, armor to protect against obsidian arrows, and extraordinary bouncing balls.

Rubber balls and the Mesoamerican game that put them into play got their debut with the Olmec, one of the earliest civilizations in the Americas that emerged along the tropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The Olmec, whose name translates as “Rubber People,” not only invented the process for making rubber and devised a game to capitalize on its wondrous properties. They also built cities with monumental, psychedelically colorful pyramids; carved mysterious colossal 15-ton heads depicting semidivine rulers; developed the earliest writing system in the New World; and may have been the first to invent a sophisticated calendar that introduced the concept of zero to the world of mathematics. No slackers, this bunch.

Discoveries by archaeologists give a surprisingly complete picture of the ancient ball game as it was played by the Olmec as far back as 1500
BC
. At El Manatí, a waterlogged bog on the coast of Veracruz, archaeologists dredged from the ancient muck a dozen rubber balls that had been ceremonially deposited there alongside statues of deities and other ritual offerings.

Found nearby was a belt made of exotic greenstone that a ballplayer may have worn around his waist and used to strike the ball. Farther west, in Michoacán, a group of eight clay figurines found in a tomb show a scene of five men playing ball while three women sit and lie around as if watching the game. And to the south, on the coast of Chiapas, the remains of the Americas' first ball game stadium were uncovered at a place called Paso de la Amada.

To date, more than 1,500 ancient ball courts like the one in Chiapas have been found in archaeological sites from Flagstaff, Arizona, in the north to central Honduras in the south, though only a fraction have been studied or excavated. Hundreds more lie buried beneath city streets and sprawling highways or await discovery in remote jungles.

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.