The Ball (7 page)

The ba' is thrown up to the pack.

“Push now! Come on, more weight around this side!”

Players rotated in clockwork formation from the front to the back of the pack to push up- or downtown. Two-hundred-and-fifty-pound men leaned in on all sides at 45-degree angles, imposing a crushing pressure on the pack's center.

Then, either the ba'—no longer visible—moved or the weight of the pack shifted, sending the players crashing into the church wall. Spectators gasped and scurried back, some slipping on the ice that coated the grass above. As the men mashed themselves into the wall, one was lifted off his feet by the pressure and squeezed up and over the horde, feet in the air, tumbling out onto the grass. He stood up, wiping blood from his chin, and dove back into the pack, surfing the top of the mob until he sank back in. For 20 minutes, the pack moved no more than a few feet in either direction.

Several ferocious-looking wives circled the edge of the pack like wolves, riling and harassing their husbands, “Come on, Uppie men! Push harder!” It appeared to take all their restraint not to jump in themselves, which they've been known to do on occasion. A newspaper report of the 1866 Christmas Day Ba' describes a moment in the contest when the ba' was heading up-street and “an Amazon who ought to have been home with her mamma caught it and threw it down.” In the 1920s an Uppie player was said to have run the ba' through the front door of his house and handed it off to his wife, who hid it under her petticoat. Once the pack of players had moved on, leaving shattered crockery in their wake, she walked unnoticed right to the goal and won the day. Despite playing a vital supporting role, though, the only time women played a ba' exclusively was toward the end of World War II, when many men were off at war and the women felt empowered to have their own game. The new variation was not well received by the traditional men of Orkney, however, and was soon shut down. One reporter expressed some relief that there were few injuries among the participating ladies and that the “casualties, for the most part, were confined to permanent waves, hats, scarves, shoes, and stockings.”

I was standing about ten feet back from the pack—at a safe distance, I'd thought—fiddling with my camera when I heard, “It's going down!” The pack split open and a human stampede was coming my way. I held my arms to my sides, sucked my weight in, and did my best imitation of a lamppost while 100 or so men thundered past me on either side, knocking me back and forth. A Doonie player had made the break and gained a block before the Uppie pack caught up and tackled him. But just before his face hit the cobblestones he managed to pass the ball off to a spectator, Nigel Thomson, a veteran Doonie sprinter who'd won school medals in the 400 meter. Before anyone knew what had happened, Nigel was dashing toward the port in his winter coat and Russian fur hat with a mob of angry Uppies in hot pursuit.

As I turned and ran with all the other spectators, a Red Cross volunteer caught up to me, my notebook—now sporting a dirty shoeprint—in her hand.

“Mind yerself now,” she cautioned. Nearby a disheveled young woman was hopping about on one foot searching for the shoe that had been ripped off in the frenzy.

I reached the pack several blocks away. The Uppies had caught Nigel and forced the ba' out of Albert Street into a narrow side street, or wynd, as it's known here. The move was a blow to the advancing Doonies, slowing their momentum and cutting them off from their main route to the sea. In the heat of the ba', Graeme had assured me, what appears to the observer as a random move by a mindless mob, is usually quite deliberate and strategic. Knowing every wynd, nook, and cranny between here and their goal, the Uppies would now be mapping the route that would give them the best advantage.

The pack had plugged up the ten-foot-wide wynd like a stopped-up drain. I watched as one player's back was smashed against a pipe. Arms above his head, he winced, pushed, and wriggled to create more space to breathe. Doonies ran around the back to reinforce and push the ba' back toward the main street, while the Uppies did the opposite. The effort, in either case, was useless. With occasional counts of “One, two, three . . . heave!” the pack would surge a few inches in one direction or the other but with little change in position. I spotted Graeme's bald head bobbing up in the thick of the scrum. At his age, and having won his ba' years ago, I'd have thought he might retreat to the perimeter and let younger men take the brunt of it. But there he was at ground zero.

After my last brush with near death, I planned my own escape route down a side alley strung with clotheslines should the pack break suddenly in my direction again.

Watching the gridlock in the alley, it struck me that this game is as much about moving the pack as it is about moving the actual ball, which had been out of sight since Davie first threw it in over an hour earlier. Finally, there was a ruckus and hollering up ahead. A break was on, mercifully not toward me this time. The Doonies were on the move again. They'd forced the ba' back to the corner of Albert Street and a fierce struggle was on in front of the Frozen Food Grocers. I watched fists fly and bodies hurl against the thick wooden barricade bolted into the window frames, the only thing standing between the men and freezers full of 'nips and tatties (turnips and potatoes, the national vegetables of choice). Parents with small children backed away cautiously, anticipating the worst. The pack made a turn toward the water and began to bounce its way along stone walls and shop barricades. But the Uppies managed to force the ba' off the main street once again—this time into a six-foot-wide dead-end alley between the local bank and photo store.

Fewer than half of the players could squeeze into the alley. Several young players ran around the back of the building, shimmied under a low driveway gate, propped a Dumpster against a wall, and scrambled onto a flat roof overlooking the alley.

One Doonie surveyed the scene below and reported out to his mates and supporters, “The Uppies have it wedged under a staircase.”

A more seasoned player, clearly upset with this turn of events, shook his head and scuffed his boot on the ground, “Ach, it'll be in there a good long while now.”

As though on cue, an icy drizzle began. Umbrellas came out and hoods went up as spectators and players alike settled in for a long “hold,” as they refer to periods when the ba's movement gets shut down. Several Red Cross medics came running down the street. One of the players in the alley had passed out from lack of oxygen. A few men heaved against the gate blocking the entrance to the roof until the latch gave way. The medics rushed in and were waiting for the man to be handed over the roof when a red-haired lad ran over.

“It's okay, he's woken up!”

It was now 3:15 and, being just 50 miles of latitude south of Greenland, the midwinter darkness was already settling in. As the Christmas lights flickered on and the drizzle gave way to a lashing hail, the madness of it all came over me. I was standing outside a miserable gray alley with hundreds of other people, soaked to the bone and shivering, watching grown men risk life and limb to get a ball out from under a staircase. It was irrational, utterly pointless, and absolutely thrilling.

D
id the ball first evolve from stone projectiles used by early man in the hunt? Or was it a symbolic stand-in for their prey—the object rather than the weapon of pursuit? Back in Europe's Paleolithic days—long before Maes Howe and Skara Brae were built—hunters from competing bands followed and tracked the same herds across plains and forests without reference to boundaries or territories. The band that was fastest and strongest and smartest won the day. And the hunter who led the way and outsmarted both prey and challengers was hailed as a hero. As depicted in the dramatic cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, magic was conjured and rituals were conducted—whatever it took to tilt the balance in favor of the home team.

The rise of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago may have shifted the nature of the pursuit—from a good hunt to a bountiful harvest—but it didn't change the nature of the battle. Whichever tribe or village secured and could defend the best land and most reliable water supply would have the best chance of surviving the long, cold European winter. For agricultural peoples, magic and ritual focused on attracting and capturing the sun and the rains. As populations grew and prime land became scarcer, boundaries were drawn and defended and competition grew fiercer and more violent.

It's hardly a stretch to suggest that the metaphors that still resonate most in describing football, and other competitive sports—the team “on the hunt” for the championship, “hungrier” than their opponents, “battling” and “claiming territory”—are more than mere metaphors. They're collective memories of when games also served as fertility rites and when the ball symbolized the hunter's prey or the farmer's sun—when the stakes of winning or losing were, quite literally, life or death.

The Kirkwall Ba' is a holdover from the earliest forms of football in so many respects—the near absence of rules, lack of boundaries, and large, moblike teams, to name just a few. But one element that stands out as being truly premodern is the goal of the game itself. Whereas the object of modern football, and most other ball games that have survived, is to drive the ball into enemy territory to penetrate the defended goal, the object of the ba' is quite the opposite: to capture the ball and take it home.

It's tempting to see in the ba' a survival of the primitive magic of the hunt and the rituals of early farmers directed at claiming the prize—and the sustenance it offered—to ensure survival. The association of early football and the French
la soule
with Shrovetide fertility rites, and the ba's association with the winter solstice, supports this deep, primal connection. Over time, competition became less about survival and more about capturing territory and amassing political power. The focus of ball games shifted from capturing the prize to simply attacking and defeating the enemy—an elaborate means to an end rather than the end itself. And the “goal” became to overrun the enemy's defenses, to score against and dominate them.

However accurate a picture this may be, there's little question that the physical violence of the ba'—and the tenuous restraint of violence found in its modern variations—is fundamental to the game and its origins.

Some of the very earliest records of football are accounts of fatal accidents that occurred in the heat of the game. In 1280, a friendly Sunday afternoon game of what appears to be football in the Northumberland region of England turned deadly when one player running toward the ball impaled himself on the (supposedly sheathed) knife of his opponent and, as the witness described it, “died by misadventure.” In 1321, apparently before players figured out that knives and football didn't mix, another identical “death by sheathed knife during football match” was reported that led to the acquittal of the perpetrator, a church canon, by Pope John XXII.

And just as violence and murder found their way into otherwise innocent matches, football seems to have brought occasional inspiration to otherwise mundane acts of homicide. In the same year as the church canon's knife incident, two brothers were convicted for murdering the servant of a monastery and then playing football with the victim's head!

Like the Kirkwall Ba', medieval folk football in Britain was a consistently rowdy and violent affair played mostly by commoners in the open fields of country villages or in narrow city lanes. As with the Uppies and Doonies, everyone was invited to join the mayhem—young and old, men and women, even clergy. As an observer of the time noted, “Neyther maye there be anye looker on at this game, but all must be actours.” Is it possible that the violent hooliganism that's plagued modern football in recent decades reflects a submerged desire on the part of frustrated supporters to reclaim their historic right to join the scrum? That the poor skull crackers just want their go at the ball?

M
ass games played on Shrove Tuesday or other holidays—fueled by mead and beer—would wreak havoc and leave a path of destruction in their wake. By 1314, when the word “football” first appears unequivocally by name in the historical record, its reputation for inciting violence was already widespread. That first mention, in fact, is from a “Proclamation Issued for the Preservation of the Peace” on behalf of Edward II banning the game within the limits of London:

Whereas our Lord the King is going towards the parts of Scotland, in his war against the enemies, and has especially commanded us strictly to keep his peace. . . . And whereas there is a great uproar in the City, through certain tumults arising from great footballs in the fields of the public, from which many evils perchance do arise—which may God forbid—we do command and do forbid, on the King's behalf, upon pain of imprisonment, that such game shall be practiced henceforth within the city.