Finding the World’s First Sport in Mexico City
At Mexico City’s Anthropology Museum, the object that received the most interest was a small rubber ball
Earlier this month, I visited Mexico City for a friend’s wedding. I had never been before, and between wedding duties and taco taste-testing, we had limited time for sightseeing. So, I asked my sister, an artist, to recommend the one museum we had to see. She told us to go to the Anthropology Museum. And one afternoon, we did.
Bear with me. I promise we’ll get to sports soon.
Through artifacts, the museum told the history of Mexico from the earliest days: rooms filled with pottery, then with figurines, then with intricate carvings retelling myths of creation and the Aztec gods. There were massive sculptures of jaguars and serpents, sections of temples, outdoor recreations of a traditional Aztec home. Remember the massive Aztec “calendar” that some said predicted the end of the world in 2012? That was in there too. My sister was right. The museum was amazing.
But the biggest crowd in the museum, and the section where docents were fielding the most questions, was not any of the dazzling art. It was near a simple sphere, right next to beautiful carvings of figurines. It was in a section labeled “Religion and Rituals.” It was a ball, made of solid rubber, used for what scholars have now dubbed “the Mesoamerican Ball Game.”
It’s maybe the first sport in human history. And that might have been the oldest ball on the planet.
Archaeologists have unearthed courts from as early as 1650 BC, predating the Ancient Greeks by about 400 years and their Olympics by 900 years. The game evolved over time and gained popularity throughout the Americas, and in total, scholars have identified 1,500 existing ballcourts throughout Mesoamerica. At the famed pyramids of Chichén Itzá, the ballcourt is 316 feet long and 98 feet wide. It’s believed that players used hit the ball with their hips, and eventually developed carved goals to score in—a combination of basketball and racquetball. According to some accounts, spectators would gamble on the champion. Oh, and speaking of champions…some believe that if you won the ball game, you were given the honor of sacrificing yourself to the gods. Needless to say, there were no Tom Brady-style dynasties in the Ball Game.
“In the Late Preclassic,” the museum’s placard read, “religion was institutionalized and became the integrating nucleus of society.” It describes a world of priests and ceremonies and, “these huge plazas destined for the congregation of the faithful.” The final paragraph talks about how, concurrently, the Ball Game developed—and courts became centerpieces of cities, places where the faithful could congregate.
People stood and took pictures. They asked docents questions. Can you explain the rules? Does anyone still play it today? Wouldn’t that big rubber ball have hurt?
Nowhere, in the entire museum, received more attention.
It doesn’t get much more simple than a plain rubber ball, but while looking at the equipment, reading the rules, and observing the carvings of players, it was hard not to notice the similarities between a civilization from millennia ago to today. It was hard not to feel connected, like this ancient civilization was alive. It’s one thing to see a clay pot. It’s another to see a ball, and a game, and carvings of favorite players like early action figures or trading cards. To learn about stadiums being at the center of a society. To see that connection made clear—that at the same time religion developed, sport was there right beside it. You could imagine the thud the ball made when it bounced on stone, the grunts of the players, the cheers of the crowd.
The museum is in the center of a large park known as Chapultepec. We walked outside at around 6 PM, closing time. On the fields outside, boys played soccer. As we walked home, we passed tennis courts, kids and seniors working on their backhands. There was a billboard for an upcoming NBA game between the Miami Heat and the Washington Wizards that will be played there this weekend. All these centuries later, society is still centered around our silly little ball games.
And to think, all of that started with a little rubber ball, there in Mexico, more than 3,000 years ago.
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