The Ball (33 page)

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What About Bocce?
An Outtake from
The Ball

W
HEN
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

M
Y 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.

Notes

Prologue: Warm-Up

8
According to a 2004 study:
Juster et al., “Major Changes Have Taken Place in How Children and Teens Spend Their Time.”

1: Play Ball

13
“It is already known to me”:
James,
The Principles of Psychology
, p. 675.

14
“of limited immediate function”:
“Taking Play Seriously,”
New York Times
, Feb. 17, 2008.

14
“purposeless activity, for its own sake”:
Cited in Allen Guttmann,
From Ritual to Record
, p. 3.

14
“not serious”:
Huizinga,
Homo Ludens
, p. 13.

14
“an occasion of pure waste”:
Roger Caillois,
Man, Play and Games
, p. 5.

14
In his schema:
Stuart Brown,
Play
, pp. 17–18.

15
“have not waited for man”:
Huizinga,
Homo Ludens
, p. 1.

15
According to Marc Bekoff:
Marc Bekoff, “Social Play and Social Morality,” p. 838.

16
Studies of young mammals:
“Taking Play Seriously,”
New York Times
, Feb. 17, 2008.

16
One of the most dramatic:
Ibid.

17
“a central paradox”:
“The Play's the Thing,” From book review in
The Atlantic
, May 2010.

21
In one study:
Cited in “The Serious Need for Play,”
Scientific American Mind
, Feb.-March 2009.

21
In another study:
Brown,
Play
, p. 33.

21
A recent study conducted:
“How Sports May Focus the Brain,”
New York Times
, March 23, 2011.

22
Neuroscientist Sergio Pellis:
“Taking Play Seriously.”

23
EQ is defined:
Lori Marino, “Convergence of Complex Cognitive Abilities in Cetaceans and Primates,” p. 59.

27
Vanessa Woods, a researcher:
From phone interview conducted Jan. 20, 2009.

28
“In a dangerous world”:
Diane Ackerman,
Deep Play
, p. 4.

30
In the 1960s:
Richard Lee, “What Do Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scant Resources.”

30
“keep bankers' hours”:
Marshall Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
, p. 34.

31
“A ball, similar to the one”:
W. E. Harney, “Sport and Play Amidst the Aborigines of the Northern Territory.”
Mankind
4 (9): 377–379. Cited in Blanchard.

31
the Copper Inuit:
Blanchard,
The Anthropology of Sport
, p. 150.

32
Buzkashi
achieved brief fame:
Azoy,
Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan
.

36
“[His] comrades are roused up”:
Cooper, “Buddies in Babylonia,” p. 78.

37
The ancient Greeks played it:
Neils et al.,
Coming of Age in Ancient Greece
.

37
“Give the word”:
Percy Gardner,
Catalogue of the Greek Vases in the Ashmolean Museum
.

38
The actual balls used:
Wolfgang Decker,
Sports and Games of Ancient Egypt
, pp. 111–116.

41
Every city had its stadiums:
Guttmann,
Sports: The First Five Millennia
, p. 19.

41
“Nausicaa hurled the ball”:
Harris,
Sport in Greece and Rome
, p. 81.

42
“He caught the ball and laughed”:
Stephen J. Miller,
Arete
, p. 116.

2: From Skirmish to Scrum

50
“a soft and musical inflection”:
Muir quote cited on Orkneyjar.com: The Heritage of the Orkney Islands.

50
“Hundreds of years ago the people of Kirkwall”:
John D. Robertson,
The Kirkwall Ba'
, p. 215.

55
The origin of the Uppie and Doonie division:
Ibid., p. 6.

59
“A round ball and a square wall”:
Guttmann,
Sports: The First Five Millennia
, p. 40.

60
As one British scholar has humbly pointed out:
Morris Marples,
A History of Football
, p. 4.

60
One of the earliest mentions of a football-like game:
Francis Peabody Magoun,
History of Football
, p. 1.

61
“drove balls far over the fields”:
Ibid, p. 4.

61
“After dinner all the youth of the city”:
Marples,
A History of Football
, p. 18.

63
“seven balls of the largest size”:
Robertson,
The Kirkwall Ba'
, p. 286.

64
“We'll surely hae guid tatties”:
Ibid., p. 160.

67
the only time women played a ba':
Ibid., pp. 115–122.

73
“died by misadventure”:
Magoun,
History of Football
, p. 4.

74
“Neyther maye there be anye looker”:
Teresa McLean,
The English at Play in the Middle Ages
, p. 8.

74
“Whereas our Lord the King”:
Magoun,
History of Football
, p. 5.

75
“dangerous and pernicious [game]”:
Cited in William J. Baker,
Sports in the Western World
, p. 54.

76
“In the face of moral preachments”:
Ibid., p. 55.

3: Advantage, King

80
“And those standing at the one end”:
Heiner Gillmeister,
Tennis: A Cultural History
, p. 1.

81
“On Easter Day, after dinner”:
Robert Henderson,
Ball, Bat and Bishop
, p. 50.

83
“the French are born with rackets”:
Baker,
Sports in the Western World
, p. 67.

83
In 1596, there were 250
jeu de paume
courts:
Guttmann,
Sports: The First Five Millennia
, p. 63.

85
Your typical lawn tennis ball:
Feldman,
When Do Fish Sleep?
, p. 36.

86
They used dog hair instead:
Gillmeister,
Tennis: A Cultural History
, p. 77.

86
“and not containing sand, ground chalk”:
Baker,
Sports in the Western World
, p. 66.

88
Looking at the near-finished product:
Yves Carlier,
Jeu des Rois, Roi des jeux
, p. 37.

91
In fact, he loved tennis so much:
Julian Marshall,
The Annals of Tennis
, p. 18.

93
“Let us leave the nets to fishermen”:
Baker,
Sports in the Western World
, p. 86.

98
“played all day with them at ball”:
Malcolm Whitman,
Tennis Origins and Mysteries
, p. 26.

99
“13th June 1494”:
Gillmeister,
Tennis: A Cultural History
, p. 21–22.

103
“Some members of the clergy”:
Ibid., p. 32.

103
“priests and all others in sacred orders”:
Henderson,
Ball, Bat and Bishop
, p. 54.

104
The Book of the Courtier
:
Baker,
Sports in the Western World
, p. 60.

104
“Water which stands without any movement”:
Roman Krznaric,
The First Beautiful Game
, p. 38.

105
Henry II built his courts at the Louvre:
Baker,
Sports in the Western World
, p. 65.

107
Molière's troupe of comedians:
Carlier,
Jeu des Rois, Rois des Jeux
.

4: Sudden Death in the New World

112
“He was decapitated”:
Elizabeth Newsome,
Trees of Life and Death
, p. 84.

113
pallone
, a handball game:
Anthony Fischer,
The Game of Pallone
.

114
“I don't understand how when the balls hit the ground”:
Mártir d'Anglería,
Décadas del Nuevo Mundo
.

114
“Jumping and bouncing are its qualities”:
Duran,
Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar
, p. 316.

114
For 3,500 years or so:
Laura F. Nadal, “Rubber and Rubber Balls in Mesoamerica,” p. 24.

116
“Rubber is the gum of a tree”:
Toribio de Benavente, cited in Tarkanian and Hosler.

116
“The balls are made from the juice”:
Mártir d'Anglería, cited in Tarkanian and Hosler.

117
In the 1940s Paul Stanley:
Tarkanian and Hosler, “An Ancient Tradition Continued.”

118
At El Manatí:
Nadal, “Rubber and Rubber Balls in Mesoamerica,” p. 27.

126
One match on record from 1930:
Ted Leyenaar, “The Modern Ballgames of Sinaloa.”

126
“I do not know how to describe it”:
Bernal Díaz del Castillo,
The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico
, p. 269.

127
“The playing of the ball
game began”:
Bernardino de Sahagún,
Primeros Memoriales
, p. 200.

127
“The man who sent the ball”:
Duran,
Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar
, p. 315.

129
“On a lucky day, at midnight”:
Antonio de Herrera Tordesillas,
Historia General de los Hechos
.

131
Though it was first recorded:
Dennis Tedlock,
The Popol Vuh
.

132
“Life is both taken and renewed”:
Mary Ellen Miller, “The Maya Ballgame.”

134
According to a 17th-century account:
Ralph L. Beals,
The Acaxee
.

138
In what almost seemed a sadistic homage:
“Mexico Cartel Stitches Rival's Face on Soccer Ball,” Associated Press, January 9, 2010.

5: The Creator's Game

144
As early as 1374:
Baker,
Sports in the Western World
, p. 46.

144
“There is a poor sick man”:
Cited in Stewart Culin,
Games of the North American Indians
, p. 589.

145
“They have a third play with a ball”:
Ibid.

146
In this way, the Iroquois confederacy:
Donald Fisher,
Lacrosse
, p. 14.

147
In 1763, a group of Ojibwe:
Ibid.

155
In 1878, a group of Mohawk and Onondagan Indians:
Ibid., p. 58.

156
“the fact that they may beat the pale-face”:
George W. Beers,
Lacrosse: The National Game of Canada
, p. 55.

159
“a fighting band of Redskins”:
Fisher,
Lacrosse: A History of the Game
, p. 172.

161
“In his dream, the boy saw”:
Thomas Vennum,
American Indian Lacrosse
, p. 30.

162
Traditionally, the outcomes of games:
Ibid., p. 36.

163
“Sometimes, also, one of these Jugglers”:
Cited in Culin, p. 589.

168
“On one side of the green the Senecas”:
Vennum,
American Indian Lacrosse
, p. 104.

169
“didn't seem to be so much a point of the game”:
Ibid., p. 110.

171
In 2010, lacrosse in the United States:
Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association,
U.S. Trends in Team Sports
, 2010 edition.

6: Home, with Joy

175
“every prospect of becoming [America's] national game”:
George B. Kirsch,
The Creation of American Team Sports
, pp. 21–23.

175
“he sometimes throws and catches a ball”:
David Block,
Baseball Before We Knew It
, p. 237.

177
“This is not a museum, it's a church”:
Bernard Henri-Lévy, “In the Footsteps of Tocqueville,”
The Atlantic Magazine
, May 2005.

178
Baseball Reliquary:
Dorothy Seymour Mills,
Chasing Baseball
, pp. 48–50.

178
“Well—it's our game”:
Walt Whitman, from Horace Traubel,
Walt Whitman in Camden
.

179
A letter sent to the Hall of Fame:
Block,
Baseball Before We Knew It
, p. 101; and SABR Protoball Chronology, Up to 1850.

179
Romanian Oina Federation:
SABR Protoball Chronology, Up to 1850.

180
Danish researcher Per Maigard:
Donald Dewey, “The Danish Professor and Baseball.”

182
“To shote, to bowle”:
Block,
Baseball Before We Knew It
, p. 230.

184
“In the winter, in a large room”:
Ibid., p. 140.

185
working trap-ball into the saucy mix:
Richard Thomas Dutton,
Women Beware Women and Other Plays
, cited in SABR Protoball Chronology, Up to 1850.