Some of America’s biggest sports, baseball, football, and golf, find their origins in relatively -safe’ histories. Baseball, for example, dates back hundreds of years and was a game enjoyed by middle-class clerics and immigrants. Golf has a similarly inoffensive history, and football, though full of its own set of regulated violence, has likewise never been known to have a dubious history. But not all of America’, and the history of sport in the world extends far beyond our contemporary understanding of the lines between civil and savage.
Take, for example, the modern game of basketball. Opposing teams play on a court with 10-foot high baskets on both ends. You get the ball in the opposing team’s basket, or hoop, you get points. The strategy in the game lies with how good you are at scoring, as well as being versatile on the defensive end and preventing the opposing team from scoring. There are some rules to follow, and by the end of the game, the team with the most points wins. The losing team- gets beheaded?
Not anymore, but if a similar game were played during the high period of Mayan civilization, losing the game meant certain death. Because the Mayan civilization came and went, leaving behind little record of itself save its enigmatic architecture, anthropologists and archeologists have only recently been able to build loose connections between the games the Mayans played and the games we played, but the rules were somewhat the same.
They played on courts roughly the size of football fields. At the opposing ends of the field were walls with small stone hoops over 20 feet up on the walls. Get the ball in the hoop and score. Some people say you had to score without hands or feet, other records show that using your hands was permissible, but by the end of the event, there was a winner and a loser. Like gladiator matches, some people might have been condemned to – play,’ but certainly the stakes were much higher than they are now.
