Play ball!

The Ball

Discovering the
Object of the Game

by John Fox


Don’t think of big-league ballplayers as “dumb jocks.” Think of them as “smart cavemen.”

It was a smart caveman who first thought, hey, if I whip this rock at the head of that saber-tooth tiger, I won’t have to chase it down and wrestle the sharp-clawed beast. But as hunting gave way to ranching and gathering became Whole Foods, what becomes of the Paleolithic Andy Pettitte inside us all? How about a game of catch?

That’s a supposition of the fun and anecdotal new book “The Ball,” by anthropologically minded journalist John Fox, which uses the evolution of the ball itself to trace mankind’s progress from prehistory through ancient Egypt and gladiatorial Rome to the births of modern sports like tennis and “base-ball.”

Why balls? They’re inherently social and fun. They can be passed (unlike a spear) and they bounce and roll. Even dogs and dolphins love them. So did the Mesopotamians, whose unearthed relics dating back to 2600 BC include jars and terracotta figurines depicting a “bizarre and homoerotic form of polo played from the backs not of horses, but of humans.”

Egyptian art also occasionally depicts ball tossing, and in some tombs, preserved balls have been discovered. Think: hacky sack from 1500 BC, animal hide stuffed with straw, hair or yarn.

In Greece, fourth-century comic playwright Antiphanes offered the first-ever play-by-play commentary on episkyros, a rugby-like game: “He caught the ball and laughed as he passed it to one player . . . all the while there were screams and shouts: ‘Out of bounds!’ ”

Romans were fonder of the gladiatorial spectacles of Circus Maximus, including lion fights and chariot races. But every wealthy Roman had his own sphaeristerium, a ball court, near their bath. Their favorite game was harpastum, a sort of keep-away that would today entertain third-graders in gym class.

The Middle Ages were something of a halftime break for the advancement of ballgames. There were festivals, most notably in Scotland, where, at the traditional brawl-fest Kirkwall Ba’, one half of the village tried to submerge a leather ball in the bay — while the other shoved them back.

The great leap in sophistication — and civility — of ball games occurred in French monasteries in the 12th century. Tennis, the “game of kings,” in fact began as the medieval game of monks and abbots. No net, no racket (they used their hands) and the monasteries’ high cloister walls made the game as much like racquetball or squash as the kind of modern tennis played at the French Open.

Known as jeu de paume, or “the game played with the palm of the hand,” the civilized sport caught on as recreation for monarchs, with France’s Henry IV constructing a majestic court in 1600 at Fountainebleau, where he and seven subsequent kings would compete. Just imagine Marie Antoinette as cheerleader to Louis XVI. (One of Fox’s many interesting side notes is that the scoring term “love” in tennis comes from the French word l’oeuf, meaning egg, which looks like a zero.)

The Gallic tennis balls were leather stuffed with a crushed cork center (for bounce) bound in a crisscross pattern by dog hair (to help keep a spherical shape). The game soon caught on in England, too — Shakespeare mentions tennis at least six times in his plays.

Balls got their bounce in the New World after the Mayans discovered that the sticky, white latex sap of the Castilla elastica plant would stabilize and become formable when boiled with the juice of the sulfonic-acid-rich indigenous vine Ipomoea alba.

Boing! The precursor to basketball was born, especially on the coast of Chiapas, where the remains of ballgame stadiums remain at Paso de la Amada. Like today’s US cities, any major population center had multiple ball courts, more than 1,5000 in total. One popular Mayan game was ulama, a game where players passed the ball with their shoulders and hips.

We may know more about Mayan games than the origins of our national sport, baseball. The claim of its invention by Abner Doubleday in upstate Cooperstown has been widely debunked as a marketing scheme. What’s indisputable, though, is New York City’s place as the home of baseball in the mid-1800s. Among the interesting facts Fox uncovers: Early games were pretty dull, because until 1864 you could get someone out by catching the ball after one bouce.

The “fly rule” made it mandatory to record an out by catching it on the fly, thus giving incentive for hitters to swing for a long ball, thus producing diving catches by fielders, and thus leading to the pinnacle of human evolution — the highlight reel.

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