Back to Basics
Around the time I was finishing this book, I spent several days of vacation with my family at a lodge deep in the Ecuadorian rain forest. We were escaping a particularly cold and dreary April up north, the kind that mocks every hope of spring’s return. We were also escaping the worst start to a season the Red Sox had committed since the end of World War II—a season that would end abruptly and tragically. It couldn’t have been a better time to seek refuge and solace amid sun-kissed orchids and frolicking toucans. While I wasn’t consciously fleeing my subject matter, it nevertheless felt good to take a break and get as far away from the 24/7 world of sports news as I possibly could.
I’d been traveling and writing on and off for nearly four years, feeling pangs of guilt at the supreme irony of missing more than a few of my kids’ ball games so I could research and write about the importance of ball games. Over those intervening years, Aidan had grown up fast. The seven-year-old who was happy playing endless games of catch in the backyard with his dad transformed seemingly overnight into a hard-core, highly competitive preteen who’s working on his six-pack and can kill an hour in the driveway practicing his lefty jump shot.
The innocent, all-consuming delight he took in playing ball is thankfully still there. I see it when he’s trying to beat his own record for spinning a basketball on his finger or messing around playing Nerf ball with his friends. But now, that delight competes for attention with drills, zone formations, travel leagues, and intensive summer clinics. With little pressure to perform from either of his parents, he’s more innately competitive than I ever was, taking every loss personally, pushing himself to excel, dreaming as kids do of making it to the big leagues.
As for his odyssey-inspiring query, he hasn’t exactly been waiting around for an answer. In fact, he can’t believe he ever asked “such a dumb question” in the first place.
“Why do we play ball?” he teased me one day when I’d been hunched over my desk way too long. “I’ve got one word for you: F-U-N.”
I never lectured him on my findings and I knew better than to try. There are few things more annoying for a kid Aidan’s age than having his father sit him down to explain the world to him. Instead, I just leaked tales of my adventures whenever I had the chance, hoping they might somehow add up to an answer. Back from Gulf World in Florida, I showed him pictures and told him about playing catch with dolphins, how playing makes them smarter and more able to survive in the wild—and how our distant ancestors might have expanded their own cognitive rosters by throwing fastballs with rocks.
“So you’re saying I should just go play and not bother with school?” he challenged me, flexing his neurons.
Watching the World Cup together, we talked about the Uppies and the Doonies, about the good old days when Tusker’s head was as good as a ball and the beautiful game wasn’t quite so pretty, but anyone who was daring enough could join the scrum and win the trophy of a lifetime. When the Celtics faced the Lakers for the 12th time in the 2010 NBA championships we discussed rivalries, how they define us versus the other guys, and give us a deep tribal sense of belonging. Why it’s okay to hate the other team with every fiber of your being, but you should always be kind and take pity on their fans. They had, after all, simply drawn the short straw by stepping foot on the wrong side of town or being born in the wrong city or country. Poor buggers.
After playing tennis together one day, I showed Aidan Renaissance engravings of men in powdered wigs and pantaloons swinging rackets at homemade balls on a palace court.
“Back then,” I joked, “not everyone got to play tennis. A low-class kid like you would have been lucky to be the king’s ball boy.”
“Not if I had to wear a wig like that I wouldn’t!” he shot back in disgust.
Like this, during the commercial breaks of games or on long car rides to tournaments we talked about how games divide and bring us together, how they ground us in timeless traditions and connect us across generations, how they bring out the best and the worst in us: love and loyalty, violence and deception.
From our father-son trip to basketball’s birthplace, Michael Jordan’s size 13 shoes and Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir’s head scarf will forever be merged seamlessly in his memory. Each impressive in its own right. Each a part of what’s made the game great.
Having stood in that ancient stone stadium at the ruins of Cobá in the Mexican Yucatán, Aidan learned firsthand that it was the ancient Olmec and Maya, not the Greeks, Romans, or Egyptians, who were the first to develop a true, widely played sport with a ball. And having heard me recount the story of the Popol Vuh while he stared at that skull in center court, he knows that those early games once served as potent magic, capable of keeping the sun and the stars and the seasons in motion—ensuring all was right with the world.
And (rolling heads aside), have things really changed so much? Would spring still arrive across America if baseball’s opening day didn’t somehow conjure it? Could we be truly thankful on Thanksgiving without football or know it was New Year’s in Orkney without the Ba’? Is there not, despite the doping and cheating and all the other scandals, some lingering magic in the Olympics and in the World Cup, that grand global rite that calls on the world every four years to stop conflicts, set aside political differences, and gather together around a ball?
Our jungle lodge, with its thatched bamboo huts lit by candlelight and tiki torches, could easily have served as a set for Survivor. The few dim electric bulbs on site were hydro-powered by the Class V river surging just outside our cabin. That meant no computers, no TV, no ESPN. Just the soothing hum and drone of cicadas.
Aidan had been eaten alive by mosquitoes the night before, so I was dispatched by my wife to find some Benadryl to ease his suffering in the nearest village a couple of miles away. I passed up a ride in the lodge owner’s truck and pullied myself across the river on the ingenious wooden gondola that served as the only connection between the forest and the outside world. I walked the dirt path, scanning the canopy on either side for signs of the rare birds the local naturalist had trained me to look for. The pocket of rain forest we were in was world-renowned for its diversity of bird life. A steady stream of quiet, ExOfficio-wearing, binocular-wielding birders arrived regularly in this remote outpost determined to bolster their life lists. I, on the other hand, had never quite gotten beyond the pigeon-sparrow dichotomy that summed up bird life in New York City.
As I walked along, however, I began to hear a cacophony of distant calls and squawks. I approached stealthily, fantasizing ungenerously about spotting some absurdly rare specimen that the birders back at the lodge had traveled thousands of miles to tick off their list.
“Oh yeah,” I’d mention casually halfway through lunch, “I think I spotted one of those long-wattled umbrellabirds today. Actually a few of them.”
But as I got closer to the source of the calls, I realized they were coming not from the trees but from inside a small house on the edge of town. In a spare living room open to the road, at least 15 people were gathered around and screaming at a tiny television set. They were watching a soccer match.
“¿Quién juega?” I inquired in Spanish, thinking it must be LDU or Emelec, Ecuador’s two archrival clubs.
“Los Diablos Rojos y Newcastle!” called out an agitated teenager, using one of a multitude of nicknames for Manchester United.
“Go Reds!” I yelled, pumping my fist inside the door. The teenager and his friends echoed my call back in broken English. The game being scoreless, I continued my way down the road.
Once in town, it became apparent that everyone in this small Ecuadorian village was watching the same regular season Premier League game between teams hailing from industrial towns in the north of England. Even at the drugstore I had to tear the owner away from his radio to get service.
Jarring as it was to have my jungle reverie shattered by refrains of “Take Me Home United Road,” it was a more likely scene to come upon than a pair of mating umbrellabirds. Football is, after all, a national obsession in Ecuador, as it is throughout South America. This tiny country has had oversized success in the game, having qualified for two of the past three World Cups, despite their entire national league bringing in revenues lower than what the top European players take home in their paychecks. LDU, the Liga Deportíva Universitária, has managed to beat more prominent Brazilian and Argentinian teams. And its rival, Emelec, is cresting on a recent infusion of Venezuelan oil money, thanks to Hugo Chávez becoming best buddies with the Ecuadorian president.
As much as Ecuadorians love their national teams, however, they may love their “Diablos Rojos” even more. United is, after all, the most lucrative and popular sports franchise on the planet, worth an estimated $1.8 billion in 2010 according to Forbes magazine. Their international fan base numbers in the tens of millions, and they can count as corporate sponsors a Chilean winemaker, a Turkish airline, a Thai brewery, and the capital city of South Korea.
But Ecuadorians have a more personal reason to love United, and that is Reds’ star winger and native son Antonio Valencia, or “Toño Maravilla,” as he’s known here. Valencia’s roots are in the rain forest, having grown up in an Amazonian town founded by Texaco in the 1960s. As a child, he played barefoot on recently logged fields, the same fields that Chevron, now owner of Texaco, last year paid a record $9 billion in fines for contaminating.
I may have thought I was wandering innocently through the Garden of Eden, but this Eden was, it turns out, squarely within United international territory.
When I arrived back at the lodge for lunch, my fellow tourists were gathered on one end of the table having a heated discussion about marmot distribution in the tropics. My family was on the other end cooking up a scheme to go ziplining for the afternoon. Once there was a break in the conversation, I mentioned stumbling unexpectedly upon the football match.
“Who was winning?!” asked an Aussie birder in his 60s who’d been fighting through brush with his wife since 5:00 AM and looked like it.
“No score yet,” I said.
Hoping to stimulate discussion of something other than birds, I mentioned how funny it was to find such rabid fans of a UK franchise here on the other side of the globe.
“Actually, I know exactly how they feel,” confessed the Aussie. He was born and raised near Birmingham, England, and so, despite having moved to Australia two decades ago, remained an unrepentant, uncurable, diehard supporter of West Bromwich–Albion.
“It’s ridiculous, really, when you think of it. I follow every game and when they lose it sets me off on a depression that can last days.”
His wife nodded and rolled her eyes next to him.
“When I’m back in England I go to every game I can and it’s like my father’s next to me just like when I was a kid. I can hear him yelling and goading the other team. Brings me to tears at times I’m embarrassed to admit.”
“Isn’t it wonderful to have that kind of connection,” suggested a German woman down the table who hadn’t said a word since we arrived.
“Is it?” asked the Aussie, visibly embarrassed by how emotional the topic made him. “I suppose it is, but it’s just as much a burden now, isn’t it?”
His wife nodded again.
“How about you?” I asked a Scottish ecologist from Edinburgh who was honeymooning with his wife.
“Hearts or Hibernian?” asked the Aussie, citing the two big Edinburgh clubs.
“To be honest, I’m more of a migratory bird guy,” admitted the Scotsman.
I suggested that having the patience to wait for birds to return from multiyear migrations made him highly qualified to be a Scotland supporter come World Cup time.
From there the conversation went down the familiar paths it goes down whenever Americans and Europeans get to talking about sports. None of them could possibly understand how we Americans could be so enamored of the helmet-to-helmet combat that we call football, even though we don’t use our feet . . . blah, blah and so on.
“You’re just jealous because we’ve figured out how to keep the blood on the field,” I shot back, noting that at their worst the Maya and Aztecs had nothing on the Chelsea Headhunters, the vicious hooligan firm linked to the West London football club.
Then there was the usual ribbing about baseball being just a duller knockoff of cricket.
“Cricket? Oh, you mean Flemish hockey?” I teased back, drawing mostly quizzical looks.
As the banter continued, I noticed that a young man had pulled up a stool nearby and was following the conversation intently. He stood out from both tourists and other Ecuadorians with his jet black hair, small stature, and seriously ripped upper body. He was a young Huaorani Indian named Dogaka Berua who had traveled for days by dugout canoe and bus from his home deep in the Amazon to visit Tom, the lodge owner, an old friend of his family.
The Huaorani traditionally live as hunter-gatherers in the rain forest, many wearing no clothes to speak of and hunting wild peccaries with blowguns and poisonous arrows, fishing with spears and nets, and gathering tubers. Their first encounter with the outside world, in 1956, didn’t go well for anyone. Five evangelical missionaries landed on a river beach near one of their villages to initiate contact and were speared to death. Since then, most of their groups have had regular contact with the outside world and now live in permanent settlements, where oil companies and illegal loggers continue to encroach on their lands.
Earlier that day, I’d missed out on seeing Dogaka scale the smooth trunk of a 40-foot tree using just his arms and feet to shimmy up, something he’d normally do to get a good blowgun shot at a monkey.
Seeing he was absorbed in our sports conversation, I seized the chance to ask him what games the Huaorani played. I knew several Amazonian tribes had once played games with rubber balls. The Otomac, for instance, played a game where the men used their shoulders and the women used wooden bats to knock a rubber ball back and forth in a court. According to an 18th-century missionary, the women struck the ball so hard at the men that their poor spouses’ backs were being repeatedly injured, “which these hens celebrate with laughter.” The Chiquito of eastern Bolivia played a Ba’-like game with one half of the village pitted against the other as they knocked a small rubber ball back and forth using only their heads. Each point was awarded a corn cob and the winning side earned the right to get drunk on chicha, an alcoholic beverage, while the other side watched.
Dogaka said that as far as he knew the Huaorani had no such games, though they did sometimes make rough balls from tapped rubber and kick them around. Other favorite games, he said, were arrow-shooting contests and rolling a termite mound down a hill while racing it to the bottom.
“But none of them compares to football!” he declared, smiling through missing teeth.
Soccer had been introduced to Huaorani communities years ago and had become instantly popular. In 2001, controversy was stirred up when one recently contacted group of Huaorani granted an Italian oil company rights to build an oil well and pipeline through their lands in exchange for a trifle of goods, including 50 kg of rice, 50 kg of sugar, two blocks of fat, a sack of salt, 15 plates and cups, $200 worth of medicine—and two soccer balls. A local environmental group decried the raw deal as “an insult to the collective rights of this indigenous nationality,” which it surely was, not to mention exploitative and sleazy.
But without belittling the deal’s impact on both people and environment, it was also profoundly telling that two soccer balls, of all things, were the only nonessential commodities the Indians requested. And who could blame them? If I’d been making do with termite mounds and was suddenly turned on to the wonders of the modern ball, I’d dig deep to get my hands on a couple.
Probing further, I asked Dogaka what it was about football that he and other Huaorani loved so much. He paused, self-conscious of suddenly being the focus of attention. Then he earnestly explained, dodging and moving his feet in a dribble motion, how it feels to kick the ball as hard as you can across an open field, and to run fast and stay balanced while nestling the ball safely between your feet. How it’s just as fun to juggle the ball, bounce it off your head or kick it back and forth with a friend. We all listened, riveted, as though hearing of this thing called soccer for the very first time. And in a way, that’s how it felt.
“It’s kind of like a monkey hunt,” he concluded with a flourish, eliciting laughter from the group.
“Come on, Dogaka, a soccer ball is way more forgiving on the chase than a monkey,” I argued.
He ceded the point.
Aidan sat at the other end of the table, taking it all in, wondering no doubt if we’d all lost our minds listening to an Amazonian tribesman wax on about the finer points of a game he played every weekend back home.
Then he broke the silence, “We should have brought a ball with us.”
I was about to suggest we go throw some rocks when Dogaka stepped in to rescue the moment.
“Want to learn how to climb a tree?” he asked.
Aidan leapt up and ran off with him, the rest of us in close pursuit, all heading into the forest to find a good climbing tree. There wasn’t any point to it, no monkeys to hunt or fruit to pick up top. A waste of good energy really, and kind of dangerous too. It would do just fine. It would be fun.