Why Sports Die
Sports are a human universal, found in every known culture. We can hardly imagine England without cricket or the United States without baseball, basketball, and football. Japan without sumo wrestlers is no longer Japan.
Cultural change is another human universal. Over the millennia, cultures have emerged, flourished, declined, and disappeared. This cultural ebb and flow raises a question. What happens to a culture’s sports if that culture disappears? The answer is deceptively simple. When the culture disappears, its sports vanish.
So it was with the Minoan culture of ancient Crete. In a damaged, hard-to-interpret fresco found in the Palace of Knossos in the town of Heraklion, girls (painted white) boldly grip the horns of a huge bull or wait to catch the boy (painted red) who is in flight over the bull’s elongated back. It is possible that the painted figures represent acrobats performing for the amusement of the court, but it is more likely that their sport was part of an intiatory ordeal or a fertility ritual. We cannot be sure because the palace is a ruin and the sport vanished millennia ago.
And so it was with the vanished Aztec culture of pre-conquistador Mexico. In areas adjacent to their temples, young men engaged in a ball game, known as , that concluded with the bloody sacrifice of one of the players upon the temple’s altar. Whether the sacrificed player was a winner or a loser we shall never know. The temples are in ruins and the game has vanished, condemned as
