I think way back at the start of the tour, when we were in the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, I took a shot of the rules of the ball game, but that was so long ago and we've learnt a lot more about it, and its importance to the Mayan since then.
There are over a thousand Pok-A-Tok pitches scattered across Mesoamerica, the largest of which is at Chichén Itzá and measuring 168mx70m it's apparently bigger than a football pitch.
The game was occasionally played for the enjoyment of the players and the spectators – especially the rulers who always had a special seat built for them. However most of the time the games became a religious spectacle filled with ritual importance, because it was a sport played to please the gods. The games were sometimes played in a style that re-created the battles from Maya myths and legends and so these games would often be “rigged” so that the team playing the winners of the battle would also be the winners of the Pok-A-Tok game. The team deemed to lose would sometimes be made up of captives or prisoners who would be killed as a sacrifice at the end of the game.
The sport also played a political role and was frequently used as a way of solving disputes between rivals and sometimes offered an alternative to battle between warring towns.
Sacrificing a team for losing a ball game might seem a bit extreme, but killing the losing team was a regular occurrence and wasn’t just limited to teams of prisoners or captives. Human sacrifice was an important part of the Maya way of life because they believed it pleased their gods, so in many games there would be a sacrificial killing from the losing team; sometimes this was just the captain, but if you were really unlucky, the whole team might be sacrificed.
And occasionally, just to mix it up a bit, some or all of the winning team might be sacrificed.
The
rules varied depending on where in Mesoamerica you were and in what era the
game was being played, but there were a few concrete rules that never really
changed:
-
two teams each with two to five players on each.
-
players must keep the ball in the air without using their hands or their feet,
which meant using hips, knees, thighs,
upper arms and elbows to keep the ball in the air.
-
the ball must not touch the ground.
The balls were made from solid rubber (unlike balls used for sports like tennis
or football today which have a rubber outer surface but are filled with air)
which meant they were very heavy and very hard. The balls would vary in size, but the larger
ones (approximately the size of a football) were only a little lighter than the
weight of a bowling ball! These balls
could cause serious injury and sometimes even death if not handled correctly
during the game and players would sometimes
wear padding, called Yokes, to protect their limbs from injury.
Some
games were based merely on keeping the ball in the air, with the team that
drops the ball first losing. Other games
were won on points, with points gained by getting the ball past the opposing team
and into the empty space at the back of the pitch behind them.
Later,
stone rings were added onto the pitch; these were raised high above the ground and the aim was to get the ball
through the ring. This was considered
such a challenge that if a player got the ball through one of the rings, it
resulted in an instant win.
It
was such a difficult sport that one game could often stretch out for days on
end.
I haven't researched to see if it is considered remotely accurate, but I found this video on YouTube which seems to show how the game might have been played.