What About Bocce?
An Outtake from The Ball
WHEN I WAS RESEARCHING the murky origins of ball games, I wanted to find a truly primitive game, still being played, that in an earlier form might conceivably have killed our ancestor’s boredom between hunts. So naturally I thought of bocce, a Paleolithic game if ever there was one. For the deprived and uninitiated, bocce is played by two teams of three to six players on a narrow 60-foot-long alley. At the start, a round yellow stone ball called the pallino is thrown toward the other end of the court to start the game. Each team then takes turns rolling larger stone balls down the alley in an attempt to get them as close to the pallino as possible, displacing the competitor’s balls to secure the best position.
An Italian game that became popular in the early days of the Roman Empire, bocce was then spread by Roman soldiers to France, where it is became boules (and the popular contemporary game of pétanque), and to England, where it developed into “bowls,” or lawn bowling. The game in its many manifestations became hugely popular in villages across Europe through the Middle Ages—so popular that, like football, it was repeatedly banned for distracting the peasantry from archery practice.
Armed with this admittedly thin historical background, I decided to explore the game in all of its primitive glory and find out what’s kept it popular for all these centuries. Although I could have just dropped in on one of the regular Saturday matches on the waterfront in Boston’s Italian North End, that seemed far too easy. In my research, I encountered an “extreme bocce” movement that was attempting to bust the game loose from the confines of the traditional alley. I corresponded with a guy in Oregon who organized weekend matches on open mountain trails in the Cascades. And I talked to some hipsters who played an urban version on the streets, skate parks, and empty lots of Brooklyn.
Intrigued as I was by the extreme bocce angle, I decided to follow a more traditional course and cover the World Series of Bocce, held each July in Rome—Rome, New York.
Rome is a gritty, industrial city that straddles the Erie Canal 90 miles west of Albany. The Toccolana Club, located just down the street from an olive oil bottling plant and a steel plate factory, is a dedicated bocce facility with 15 indoor and outdoor courts that has hosted the World Series for more than 30 years. Started by Rome’s mayor back in 1973 as a way to promote the city’s Italian heritage and bring in tourists, the World Series has never quite lived up to its international name. But neither has baseball’s World Series, locals happily point out.
“Hey, we’ve got Canadians here,” said Pete Corigliano, 78, one of the event’s organizers. “Last time I checked that was another country.”
When I arrived at the facility, Pete’s team, Corigliano Insurance, was battling Anger Management in an early round of competition. Even in the shade of corrugated metal shed roofs, players mopped their brows with handkerchiefs, trying to stay cool in the 90-degree heat.
“Good ball, Frankie!” yelled Pete as his teammate, an expert point man, gently curved his ball through a warren until it hugged the pallino.
“Kiss it!” shrieked an elderly lady with a bouffant hairdo from her folding chair.
Pete’s father came from Calabria, Italy, where the family had a bocce court in the backyard. “My father and his friends would play all day in the shade of grapevines, drinking wine, arguing politics,” he said. “It was a social thing. Still is.”
Beer seems to be the choice of bocce players these days. The Toccolana Club goes through 20 to 25 kegs each year, the club owner told me—and a similarly impressive volume of sausage and pepper hoagies.
In search of shade, I made my way to the club’s indoor courts, where Donna Ciotta and her Liquor Express team were on their usual winning streak. Donna and team, her son boasted, are the proud holders of the Guinness World Record for “Most Wins of the World Series of Bocce (Female Team),” having taken home the tournament’s prize money nine times over a 20-year stretch. On the next court over, Barton’s Place Quality Assisted Living was living up to their team motto, emblazoned on their T-shirts: “I Don’t Sweat You!”
To be honest, I’d never taken bocce seriously as a sport. Like croquet and horseshoes, it always seemed like a social activity designed to keep your other hand occupied while drinking beer. That was until I met Dr. Angel Cordano, a pediatrician with an elegantly trimmed beard who has teamed up with his son and grandson. Angel was born in Genoa, Italy, but immigrated to Peru as a young man, playing for years on that country’s national bocce team. He then came to the United States and joined the national federation team. For Angel, bocce, when it’s played well, is a demanding sport.
“If you are not in shape, forget it,” he cautioned, patting his trim stomach. He and his family team practice 12 hours a week on a court behind their home in Naples, Florida. Although he makes the long trek to Rome every year, and enjoys the field of competitors the tournament draws, he’s less than impressed with both the conditions and the quality of play.
“This court is for pasture, not for bocce!” he complained after a carefully placed ball veered suspiciously into the back corner. “Play this side, add five yards; play that side, take away five yards!”
His team having lost position, Angel directed his son to rearrange the field with a well-placed “spock.” He wound up and whipped a fastball down court, blasting his opponent’s well-placed ball away from the pallino.
Angel wistfully recalled the level of professionalism and competition of his Federation days, mocking the casual style of play that passes for bocce here in the wrong Rome.
“There’s no finesse here,” he said, shaking his head and gesturing to the courts around him. “It’s like the difference between checkers and chess.”
But everyone—young and old, family and old friends—seemed to be having a great time. The beer was flowing, clouds of sausage smoke wafted through the air. In the beer line, I ran into Al Cerra, who’s been coming every year for nearly 25 years. Al offered a different philosophy on the game.
“The beauty of bocce is anyone can play. All you have to be able to do is roll a ball. That’s why it’s universally loved.”
He paused and corrected himself: “Actually, my wife hates it. But you can’t please everyone.”
Recommended Reading
MY TASTES IN SPORTSWRITING skew, predictably, toward the anthropological and sociological. I like books that purport to be about sports but are actually about something else, something bigger than the game. Of course, I love everything Roger Angell has ever written for The New Yorker and genuflect to Frank Deford, John Feinstein, Michael Lewis, and the other giants of the genre. But rather than retread such hallowed ground, I thought I’d offer up some titles that readers might be less likely to stumble upon. To me, each of these books exposes something deeply fascinating, or deeply disturbing, about the sports we play (or once played) and the power they wield over us.
Games of the North American Indians by Stewart Culin
This 846-page, 1,000-illustration tome, published in 1907, captured a vast array of American Indian sports and games before they were silenced by conquest and assimilation. Culin got hooked on games after curating an exhibition on the world’s diversions at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. Inspired, he spent the years from 1900 to 1905 traveling from one Indian reservation to the next, meticulously documenting the fast-vanishing games and sporting traditions of American Indians. In this time-traveling book (now available in part via Google Books), you can read about chunkey, a game played by the Creek and other southeastern tribes that involved throwing spears at a rolling stone disc, as well as shinny, double ball, foot-cast ball, and hot ball. And, of course, lacrosse— one of the few survivors.
Levels of the Game by John McPhee
Speaking of lacrosse, no author has written about that sport as lovingly and precisely as honorary “Lax Bro” John McPhee. But this is a guy who has written with equal insight and eloquence about basketball, nuclear science, the geology of the American West, and . . . tennis. Levels of the Game opens with the ball tossed for the serve and ends with the scoring of the winning point. In between, he probes and prods the backgrounds and psyches of opponents Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner—black vs. white, liberal Democrat vs. conservative Republican, disenfranchised vs. enfranchised—as they battle it out at the 1968 U.S. Open semifinals. “Physical equipment being about equal,” he writes, “the role of psychology becomes paramount, and each will play out his game within the fabric of his nature and his background.”
Amen: Grassroots Football by Jessica Hilltout
If, after reading my book, you have any lingering doubt that the ball is central to the human experience, I urge you to view this collection of photographs. On the eve of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Hilltout traveled 15,000 kilometers across Africa, exchanging new soccer balls for homemade balls made of rags, plastic bags tied with twine, clay, and whatever else was lying around. One photo shows a ball from old rags stitched by some mother’s loving hands—complete with hexagonal and pentagonal patterns. The caption reads, “Am I kicked, beaten, used, crushed and trampled? Or am I strong, resilient, determined, unbeaten, proud? I am both. I am proof that with so little we can do so much. I am proof that simple pleasures are enduring. I am a ball. I am an African ball.”
Among the Thugs by Bill Buford
On the other extreme—actually, on the extreme of the other extreme—I felt bruised and beaten when I finished Buford’s gutsy, from-the-trenches account of England’s soccer hooliganism in the 1980s. To me, at least, this is as much a book about soccer as any other written, though balls barely factor in and most of the action takes place in the dark alleys of England’s working-class cities rather than on its stadium pitches. Buford’s account of the lager-soaked Red soldiers of the Inter-City Jibbers is as riveting as it is hard to read. His confessions to the allure of mob violence are stunning. My favorite chapter is his description of tensions rising on the terraces of Cambridge’s Abbey Stadium as the mob waits for a goal, hopes for catharsis, but gets only another scoreless draw: “Five shots. . . . And again, each time, the sheer physical sensation: I could feel everyone round me tightening up, like a spring, triggered for release. Except there was no release. There was no goal.”
Paper Lion by George Plimpton
I once had the unlikely honor of shooting late-night pool with George Plimpton at his Upper East Side apartment. He was the consummate gentleman and not only let me win but refreshed my gin and tonic halfway through the game. I’d long been a devoted fan of his journalistic stints (or stunts, more like it) with various professional sports teams, my favorite being Paper Lion. Here, Plimpton recounts his experience in 1963 as a wannabe, third-string quarterback (number zero) with the Detroit Lions. As with his other ethnographic sporting forays—tennis with Pancho Gonzalez, sparring with Archie Moore, a month on the PGA Tour—he was way, way out of his league. But that was the point. With his unique, self-effacing wit, he broke through that soon-to-be-impenetrable barrier between hapless amateur and seasoned pro, spectator and player, and captured a sort-of-insider view of America’s national game.
Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan by G. Whitney Azoy
Admittedly, this is a totally obscure, academic read that will attract only the bravest of readers. But you’ve got to love a book that explores the cultural meaning of a sport involving bareback horsemen scoring goals with headless, disemboweled, sand-filled goat carcasses! Aside from being a fascinating analysis of the political importance of this bizarre sport, Azoy’s account of his time among the herding tribes of Afghanistan in the 1970s inadvertently describes the cultural backdrop of the current conditions there as well as anything I’ve read. As one Afghan friend told Azoy back then, “If you want to know what we’re really like, go to a buzkashi game.”
Play Their Hearts Out by George Dohrmann
This is one of the absolute best, absolute saddest sports books I’ve ever read. Dohrmann, a Sports Illustrated investigative reporter, made a deal with Amateur Athletic Union coach Joe Keller. The author would get full access to Keller’s star middle-school players, which included Demetrius Walker, a kid glowingly described by the basketball press as “14 going on LeBron.” Dohrmann, in return, promised not to publish anything until the boys were in college. The result is a disturbing but incredibly poignant exposé of everything that’s wrong with the big-time youth sports machine. As extreme as this story is, shades of this same wrongness unfold on local fields and courts every week. Read this book and help stop the madness.
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