The Winner Who Was Sacrificed — Mesoamerica and the Ballgame of Life and Death

While ancient Greece was offering up the body to Zeus — and perhaps far earlier still — the peoples of the New World across the ocean were also pitting their bodies against one another. Yet the Mesoamerican ballgame was fiercer than the Games at Olympia. It was a rite that turned the cosmos, summoned the rain, and, at times, took human life. This game, in which a rubber ball was struck with the hips, ranks among the oldest sports in the world.

The Oldest Rubber Balls in the World

Between 1988 and 1994, at the wetland of El Manatí in the Mexican state of Veracruz, archaeologists made a remarkable discovery. From a place of Olmec ritual and burial, twelve hard rubber balls were unearthed. Radiocarbon dating showed that they had been made around 1600 BCE. They are the oldest rubber artefacts on earth, and the earliest evidence that human beings were processing natural rubber for the sake of a ballgame.

The balls were no mere playthings. Together with jade axes and carved wooden busts, they had been carefully interred as offerings to the gods. Already at this point, one can see that the ballgame carried a religious, ritual meaning.

With the Olmec as the ‘mother culture’, the ballgame was handed down to the Maya, and then to the Aztec. I-shaped stone ballcourts were built across a vast expanse of land, from the Gulf coast of Mexico to the highlands of Guatemala. The hard, heavy rubber ball was returned by the players not with the hands but with the hips, the elbows, and the knees. Even with protective gear, injuries were constant, and the sixteenth-century chronicler Diego Durán recorded that players could even die when the ball struck them in the belly or the bowels.

The Ball Was the Sun, the Court the Cosmos

Why did so dangerous a game endure for so long? The answer is that this ballgame stood as a symbol of the cosmos itself.

The bouncing rubber ball was thought to be the sun crossing the sky. The stone scoring rings, it is said, represented sunrise and sunset. In the Maya sacred book, the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins face the gods of the underworld, Xibalba, in a ballgame. The ballcourt was regarded as a gateway linking this world to the underworld. To play was to re-enact with the body the struggle between the two forces that make the world cohere — day and night, life and death.

The ballgame was also bound up with fertility. Maize was the staple that sustained the peoples of Mesoamerica. The course of the sun and the cycle of maize’s life and death were laid over the ball’s back-and-forth. In the reliefs of El Tajín, it was believed that the sacrifice of a ballplayer secured the rebirth of pulque, the drink of the agave. A human death, it was thought, called forth the fruits of the earth.

Instead of War, They Struck the Ball

The ballgame had another, more practical function: it served as a substitute for war.

The sixteenth-century missionary Torquemada relates an anecdote in which the Aztec king Axayacatl wagered his own annual revenue on a ballgame against the lord of Xochimilco. The Toltec king Topiltzin is said to have faced three enemies at the ballgame, and the victor ruled the vanquished. To settle matters on the ballcourt in place of shedding blood in actual battle — scholars have argued that the game was a device for quelling conflict and resolving disputes.

Intriguingly, there is a negative correlation between the number of ballcourts and the centralisation of the state. The Aztec Empire, which held a powerful central state and had few external enemies, had comparatively few ballcourts. Conversely, Cantona, where diverse peoples coexisted under weak rule, had as many as twenty-four. The weaker the governing power of a place, the more it needed the ballgame as a ‘proxy war’.

But in the Postclassic period, the ballgame took on a darker cast. At the ballcourts of El Tajín and Chichen Itza, scenes of ballplayers being beheaded were carved with vivid immediacy. Those beheaded were, in all likelihood, not the players themselves but captives taken in war. In the Popol Vuh, decapitation is a central theme, and it has even been suggested that a severed head may have been treated as a ball.

Before long the Spanish conquerors and missionaries arrived in the New World and set about forbidding this pagan rite. The ballgame of gods and sacrifice vanished from the main stage of history. The next to organise the human body would not be the gods. In nineteenth-century Britain, seething with the Industrial Revolution, gentlemen would invent a new god called ‘the rules’. The story goes on, into an age in which play is tamed.