Stickball
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been very interested in Native American culture. I think my interest probably started when I was a kid. My uncle Mack Hobbs had a massive collection of more than five thousand arrowheads, tomahawks, and other artifacts.
Mack found many of his artifacts on my brother Phil’s property near the Ouachita River in West Monroe, Louisiana. One year, Mack shot a deer and found half of an eight-inch spearhead while he was tracking it. The next year, he shot another deer in the same area and found the other half. What are the odds? His collection is now on display at Louisiana State University.
During the past few years, I’ve had several opportunities to visit with Native American tribes around the country. I spent time with the Seminoles in Florida and the Cherokees in North Carolina. I’m actually one-sixteenth Cherokee Indian; my great-great grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee.
I’ve also visited the Choctaw in Mississippi. The Choctaw have been in the southeastern United States since the sixteenth century. They fought bloody battles against Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto’s armies in 1540, and they fought against the British in the French and Indian Wars in the mid-eighteenth century.
After the Civil War, our government seized millions of acres of the Choctaw’s ancestral lands. The Choctaw were the first tribe to walk the Trail of Tears to reservations west of the Mississippi River, and nearly 2,500 of them died along the way. Willie’s wife, Korie, actually has two Choctaw chiefs in her lineage.
The Choctaw Indians who are in Mississippi today are a proud and generous people. When I visited with them, they were holding their annual World Series Stickball. The people who organized the event where I appeared told me it was like going to the Super Bowl.
“We used to play stickball as kids,” I said. “I know everything there is to know about stickball.”
Hey, if you think football is a physical sport, you should see the Choctaw tribe play stickball. It’s a man’s sport, Jack!
Hey, we couldn’t afford baseballs, bats, and gloves when I was a kid, so we used a broomstick and a ball of socks. I’ll never forget when my older sister, Judy, made her first batch of cat head biscuits from scratch. They were green and hard. They tasted awful, but they made pretty good baseballs. We played with them until they busted. Judy later became a very good cook, but her first endeavor wasn’t very promising.
When I arrived at World Series Stickball in Philadelphia, Mississippi, I couldn’t believe the scene. There were hundreds of people on both sides. There was a loud cadence of drumbeats from the stands as the game was being played. I noticed about ten ambulances waiting in an end zone of the football field where they were playing. I thought to myself, What in the world is this all about?
Hey, stickball is a contact sport, to say the least. It’s a combination of rugby, football, hockey, and basketball. It’s a lot like lacrosse, but it’s much more violent. Dozens of men carry two long sticks called kaboccas to catch and pass a buckskin ball called a towa. You can’t touch the towa with your hands. The objective of the game is to knock or throw the towa at a twelve-foot-tall wooden pole on the opponent’s side of the field.
Getting to the pole is where it gets dangerous. Players tackle each other and throw opponents to the ground. Their collisions are as violent as in football, but they don’t wear pads or helmets. The only time action stops is when an injured player can’t get off the field. Hey, it’s a man’s sport, Jack!
The Choctaw take stickball very seriously. Their ancestors played the sport hundreds of years ago, and it’s an important part of their heritage. Back then the Choctaw used the game to settle disputes. The poles might have been separated by one mile. Tribe members from ages ten to seventy played in the games. The games would last for days. Instead of going to war, they played stickball. Hey, wouldn’t it be a better world if that’s how we settled our differences today?
I led the Beaver Dam team onto the field for the last game of the night. Beaver Dam is one of the sport’s best teams, and I was wearing one of their red jerseys. I was also wearing a colorful Mohawk headdress that lit up. Hey, when I was a kid, every summer when school ended, one of the first things my brothers and I did was cut our hair into Mohawks. I guess that’s why my momma told her friends, “I’ve got a bunch of Indians running around my house.”
At halftime, I walked to the other side of the field. The opposing team’s fans started booing me and throwing tomatoes and cucumbers at me! I quickly returned to the Beaver Dam side.
Hey, maybe the Choctaw aren’t as gentle as I believed!