Getting a Read on The Ball

Submitted by shynds on Mon, 05/28/2012 - 12:00am

For someone who grew up playing games with balls of every kind, John Fox's new book felt as good in my hands as a right-out-of-the box baseball.

The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game chronicles Fox's exuberant quest to answer the question "why do we play ball?" His explorations cover the history of games both ancient and modern. The ancient includes the Mesoamerican game of ulama which Fox has studied exhaustively in the jungles of Honduras. It's a bloodsport involving a very heavy rubber ball and extremely high stakes. It is played today by fewer than 200 people.

The most modern sport Fox tackles is the all-American sport of basketball whose origins can be specifically traced to a gymnasium in Springfield, Massachusetts in the winter of 1891.

Fox travels extensively as he examines both the origins and current incarnations of games like tennis, lacrosse, American football and a thing played in the Orkney Islands known as the Kirkwall Ba'. An ancient form of football pitting the residents of one side of town against the other, the ba' resembles a much-larger, more violent, high-stakes version of what we played in my old neighborhood that we simply called Kill The Man With The Ball. Fox's highly entertaining description of this traditional game puts you right in the middle of the scrum. (Care for a look?)

If playing with balls is supposed to fun, then reading about playing with balls should be (almost) just as fun. John Fox has delivered a book that will have readers recalling the days when all you ever needed was a patch of ground (or pavement) and some kind of ball.