| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico 
Ball Games are Rooted in Earliest Mexico
 Jane Stokes - NewsCanada.com
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February 18, 2010
| | The Maya used their hips to thrust a ball through a goal-line ring. | |
Mexico attracts millions of beach loving vacationers every year- and yet amigos until you venture inland to sing and dance with this culture of such vigorous expression, or until you walk and wander through a-day-in-the-life of a people with 62 native languages - each one putting their heart and soul into a homeland of colliding Indian and Spanish civilizations-you will be missing out on some of the most moving experiences for your own heart.
Did you know, for example, that ball games were as exhilarating to the earliest people of Mexico as they are to the sports fan of today? Indeed, as early as 1500 B.C., the Olmecs are thought to have invented the ball court, a rectangular surface with a goal at each end. The Olmecs are also recorded as the first nomadic people to settle into communities, farm the land, domesticate animal food sources-and are duly revered as “the mother culture” of Mesoamerica.
The ball game retained its social importance throughout the Maya kingdom supremacy, culminating at around A.D 300. Witness the ball courts unearthed today at sites like Tulum, Coba, Chichen Itza and San Gervasio on Cozumel. Each court, measuring 20 meters or so, is shaped like the letter ‘I’ with sloping sides. Modern anthropologists used pictographs to piece together a game in which two teams of between two and 10 players used mainly their hips to thrust a large and heavy rubber ball through a ring on the opposing goal line.
The game was both a social sport and a religious ritual, possibly played to illustrate the Maya prowess in upholding their beliefs in cosmological forces. Their own folklore depicts that in death, ballgame winners are allowed to return to the world of the living. What is also known about the Mayan ballgame is that it involved human sacrifice. What is unknown, however, is which team was sacrificed: the winners, or the losers.
Mexico planning information is available online at www.visitimexico.com.
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