Mexico. A ball game, it involves wearing a heavy stone belt, perhaps during the preparatory stages of the game, a belt weighing about 50 kg. The ball is made of natural rubber. These objects impressed the Spanish conquistadors with their incredible ability to bounce everywhere. The rules of the game prohibit the use of legs, arms, or head to hit the ball: only the belt, tied to the hips, may be used (or, more likely, a lighter version, where the stone version was perhaps used for an initial ceremony). In 1528, the Spanish brought two Aztec players to Europe and they were depicted in a drawing by a German painter. The two teams consist of two to seven players, and mistakes are counted, as in tennis. Mistakes include touching the ball with a prohibited part of the body. Much more than recreational sports, for the Aztecs, these games represented the cosmic struggle between good and evil, between life and death. For centuries, both men and women could play, although with the arrival of the Spanish, the sport was played exclusively by men. The great cathedral built by the Spanish in what is now Mexico City stands on the site of the Aztec stadium. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that even today, several sports in Latin America are much more than “just a sport.”
