Imagine the Green Bay Packers showing up for the Super Bowl clad in deerskin diapers with wide leathers belts cinched tight around their hips and buttocks. On their hands are what look like oversized brass knuckles made of leather or stone.
The game starts and bouncing toward the Packer end zone is no football. It's a solid rubber ball weighing eight pounds. Instead of picking it up and running, the players punch at it with their reinforced knuckles or give it a hula-style bump with their leather-clad hips, all in an effort to propel the thing back toward the New England Patriots' goal line.
Welcome to Super Bowl 1997, if the Aztecs were still the sports authority in North America. For then-Patriots Coach Bill Parcels, it's just as well they aren't. As leader of the losing team, chances are he would have been decapitated afterward as a sacrifice to the Wisconsin cheese god.
The Aztecs played what is thought by many historians to be the world's oldest game employing a rubber ball. They called it ulama, but the game predates even the Aztecs -- or most of the civilized world, for that matter.
According to Douglas E. Bradley, curator of the Snite Museum's Pre-Colombian collection and other collections, historians refer to the ancient ball game of middle or mezoCentral America as the "ritual ball game" for two reasons: No single name for it has endured, and the game was deeply ingrained in the worship rites of several Indian cultures.
Last fall Bradley oversaw the reinstallation of the Reverend Edmund P. Joyce Collection of Ritual Ball Game Sculpture in the Snite Museum's lower level. Begun in 1980 and dedicated in 1987 to honor Father Joyce, the retired ND executive vice president who oversaw athletics for decades, the collection has grown to include more than 50 objects.
Most are statuettes of ball players. But there are also pieces of stonework some experts, Bradley included, believe to be ancient game wear. Some of the objects date to as long ago as 1600 B.C. There's even a dried-out ritual game ball believed to be about 2,000 years old.
Like most other objects in the museum, the ball game objects are stored in glass cases. However, visitors can now get a better look at many of them using a computer kiosk installed last year with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (the foundation also funded the reinstallation and the production of a catalogue).
Touch-screen controls allow visitors to call up various objects in the collection and rotate them on screen to see sides not visible in the cases. The kiosk also offers virtual reality walks through ruins of several ballcourts. Plus, you can view short movies showing how several versions of the game are still played today in Mexico.
Rules vary in modern ritual ball vary, but they're fairly simple: Try to hit the ball past the line guarded by your opponents (or opponent, since the game can be also be played one-on-one). In some versions of the game, as in tennis, you also can score by hitting a shot that your opponent can't hit back before the ball bounces a second time. The score for each side goes up and down until one side takes a commanding lead and is declared the winner.
Some versions of the game use J-shaped sticks like those found in field hockey. But more often the ball is propelled by striking it with any of several body parts -- fists, forearms, hips, buttocks. All hitting surfaces are covered for protection and to improve hitting power. The "buttocks belt," wrapped tightly around hips and posterior, seems to have been an especially popular uniform accessory.
Protective padding is a must because the solid rubber balls have traditionally weighed five to eight pounds and could be propelled at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, Bradley says.
Among the stone apparel in the Snite collection are several U-shaped yokes designed to fit around the hip. A yoke would have given a player extra power for bumping a ball hula-style down the court. Or maybe not. Bradley says experts disagree on whether stone objects were actually worn in games or merely part of ceremonial costumes. Competing wearing a yoke definitely would have taken strength and agility. The ones in the Notre Dame collection weigh 35 to 55 pounds.
The ritual ball game was being played at least as far back as the Olmec civilization, which dominated mezo America from 1600 to 300 B.C. No one is sure what became of the Olmec, who were the first to depict the game in their art, but the game carried on by several subsequent cultures such as the Aztec and Classic Veracruz.
Bradley says the Veracruz people combined the ball game with often bloody religious ceremonies. When they captured an enemy leader, for instance, they would often torture him for months or even years. When he was sufficiently weakened, they might install him on a ball team facing a stronger team. After the predictable defeat, the enemy leader would be decapitated by the leader of the winning team as a sacrifice to the gods.
Like other cultures of the period, the Classic Veracruz believed in feeding the gods human blood or lives, the assumption being that the gods would reciprocate by granting improved human or plant fertility or more favorable maize-growing weather.
Bradley says the ritual ball game was instrumental in introducing rubber to Europe. The conquistador Cortez brought Aztec prisoners and their game balls back with him on his voyages to Spain. The balls amazed Europeans, who, lacking rubber trees, had never seem a rubber anything before. In the kicked ball games the Europeans were playing at the time, they used non-bouncing leather balls stuffed with hair.
Although Europeans were already familiar with contests involving more than one player per side, Bradley adds, it wasn't until they watched the Indians play ritual ball that they learned the concept of teamwork.