Why We Play

Summer Solstice, June 21, 2010

The ball game holds a profound place in the human heart, alongside art, storytelling and music. All four of these timeless activities exhibit an inherent physical, mental, and emotional component that speaks directly to the creator as well as the spectator, who is often also a participant. In other words, a communication, a conversation is required for the activity to truly thrive: without an active audience, art cannot be appreciated, music cannot be listened to, a story cannot be told, a sport cannot be played.

There is a deep, ancient yearning to share our dreams and desires, to give of our inner essence, to express the spirit and passion that drive us. It is a yearning we need to express in all of its dimensions: the physical, the emotional, the mental and the spiritual.

And it is why, I believe, these four pillars of humanity have fascinated us so profoundly throughout time and history, and across cultures, faiths and languages. From the earliest ball games of the Olmec, and later of the Maya, to today’s ultramodern sports competitions, we continue to watch, spellbound. And whatever the rules, whatever the ultimate prize or sacrifice, it’s the spirit of the game that speaks to us.

Perhaps, in this sense, sport is an ancient expression of our relationship to ourselves and to each other. It’s about honor, dignity and sportsmanship. It’s about excellence and prowess, about mental acuity and physical agility. It’s about beauty, symmetry and harmony. At its core, sport unifies the mind, body, heart and soul in a single cohesive movement.

But these archetypal values are being slowly buried in the sands of wealth, power and fame.

On June 11, 2010, the first match of the 2010 World Cup was played at the Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa, between South Africa and Mexico. Over the next month, 32 teams will compete in stadiums across 9 cities in the country for the final glory. Millions of dollars will have been signed in advertising deals and player contracts. Many million more views will have been cited in global audience statistics by television ratings companies.

There is little connection between the soccer being played on the natural grass turf of the Port Elizabeth stadium in Nelson Mandela Bay in South Africa and the ballgames of the Maya. Google and FIFA have teamed up to launch a bevy of online features to help fans follow every detail about the matches, Facebook is offering us live feeds from the news networks, financial institutions are publishing reports about the economics of the games, and ESPN’s Page 2 is running its own version of the World Cup—in beer. Et cetera ad nauseum.

But precious few media outlets are paying any attention to the original spirit of the game. Soccer, as so many other sports, has gone commercial. It’s about money, fame, influence. It’s about competition and victory. It’s about who’s hot right now.

For the Maya, the ball game was a living interpretation of their creation myth, as recounted in the Popol Vuh. While playing ball, the Twin Maize Gods in the Third Creation disturbed the lords of Xibalba, the Maya underworld. The lords summoned the Maize Gods to Xibalba to answer for their misbehavior through a series of trials, and killed them when the gods failed. They were then buried in the Ballcourt of Xibalba, the head of the older twin hung in a tree near the court to warn anyone to think twice about invoking the wrath of the Xibalban lords.

But the daughter of one of the lords ignored the warning, spoke to the skull, and was magically impregnated by it. She then escaped Xibalba and gave birth to a set of twins, called the Hero Twins—Hun-Ahau (Hunahpu) and Yax-Balam (Xbalanque). Summoned, like their father, to Xibalba, they also underwent a long series of confrontations with the lords of the underworld, played out through ballgames. But this time, they won and resurrected the Maize Gods, who then destroyed the Third Creation and made way for the Fourth Creation. The date was August 11, 3114 B.C.—the start of the current cycle of the Long Count which so many think is going to end in global apocalypse on December 21, 2012. (Sorry to disappoint but the Maya are not planning for any apocalypses… but maybe a few more ball games.)

Yet the Maya were not the first to play ball. As early as 1700 BC, the peoples of Mesoamerica were playing ball games deeply rooted in sacred symbolism and rituals. In Teotihuacán, a mysterious site whose culture also preceded the Maya, are mural paintings depicting a ball game played with sticks or bats, although there are no surviving ballcourts. And one of the ceremonial titles of Maya kings was “ballplayer.”

Millennia later, we are still kicking the ball around. Granted, it’s not the same—apart from the ball, the players and the spectators, the World Cup could not be farther apart from the Mayan ball games.

But the spirit is still there, passionate as ever. Peel away the national flags painted on sweaty bodies running through the streets, turn down the volume on the slick TV ads, unplug the twenty-four-sevenness of the Web, and you’ll feel the electrifying current of the human soul running beneath it all. We may not truly feel it through the heavy veil of commercial distractions and the insistent beat of manufactured entertainment, but it’s there. And the passion of our soul, at its core, is what drives us as a human race.