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IN THE QUIRKS A SPORT OF LIFE & DEATH


By GlenMikkelsen, CVE In the 21st Century, many of our facilities are built


around and are reliant upon team sports - they are a crit- ical foundation of our business. The teams are the pride of our communities and economic drivers of our venues. Considering how vital they are, do you know what is the oldest known team sport in the world? A sport - day’s soccer (football), to its nations? It turns out, the Me- soamerican ball game known broadly today as Ulama, is recognized as the planet’s oldest known team sport. It was believed to have been played from Arizo- na all the way south to Paraguay (Mesoamerica includes a cultural area     northern


Costa Rica),


and it was played almost 1,000 years before the      Greek Olympic Games. The Mayans called the sport Pok a Tok. The Aztecs called it Tlacht- li, while presently it is most commonly known as Ulama. It was a game not for the weak. It was connected to war, reli- gion, and sport, and con- testants could lose their lives, both during, and after, the game. The game was most popular with the Olmec, Aztec, and


Mayan civilizations, but it was played across the region. Using radiocarbon dating, the court in Paso de la Amada,           Around 1,300 ball courts have been discovered. The Az- tecs called the courts tlachtli or tlachco. Typically, they were in the shape of a capital I - with two perpendicular end zones


18 Facility Manager Magazine


at each end of the court. The largest concentration of ball courts is found in the Mayan area of the Yucatan Peninsula,  city of Cantona has 24 courts, and El Tajin has at least 11 courts.


The typical sized court


 comparison, a basketball      courts did vary in size. To illustrate, the Ceremonial Court in Tikal was small-       the Great Ballcourt in the Mayan city of Chichen  – nearly as big as an NFL  Generally, each side of the court was bordered by parallel stone walls. These walls might be perpendic-  or they might slope up-    Surrounding the court were locations for judges, spectators, plus the nobles and elite of society.


In comparison to the


advertisements ringing today’s courts of play, the ball court’s walls were of- ten plastered and brightly painted. Rather than beer ads, these courts had art of


jaguars, serpents, and raptors, plus representations of human  The precise game rules were lost after the Spanish colo-


 but by deciphering art, sculptures, and glyphs, historians have tried to decipher the game’s rules. It is believed teams of two  a line etched across the court. The ball was not allowed to touch the ground. Players were not able to use their hands,


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