Nautilus

Why Sports Die

Sports are a human universal, found in every known culture. We can hardly imagine England without cricket or the United States without baseball, basketball, and football. Japan without sumo wrestlers is no longer Japan.

Cultural change is another human universal. Over the millennia, cultures have emerged, flourished, declined, and disappeared. This cultural ebb and flow raises a question. What happens to a culture’s sports if that culture disappears? The answer is deceptively simple. When the culture disappears, its sports vanish.

Play Ball!: Modern-day lacrosse is based on a much older game, traditional stickball, played by Native Americans. Here, a painting by George Carlin depicts stickball players of old. Smithsonian American Art Museum

So it was with the Minoan culture of ancient Crete. In a damaged, hard-to-interpret fresco found in the Palace of Knossos in the town of Heraklion, girls (painted white) boldly grip the horns of a huge bull or wait to catch the boy (painted red) who is in flight over the bull’s elongated back. It is possible that the painted figures represent acrobats performing for the amusement of the court, but it is more likely that their sport was part of an intiatory ordeal or a fertility ritual. We cannot be sure because the palace is a ruin and the sport vanished millennia ago.

And so it was with the vanished Aztec culture of pre-conquistador Mexico. In areas adjacent to their temples, young men engaged in a ball game, known as , that concluded with the bloody sacrifice of one of the players upon the temple’s altar. Whether the sacrificed player was a winner or a loser we shall never know. The temples are in ruins and the game has vanished, condemned as

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus3 min read
Humpback Whales Caught Humping
Two photographers in Maui, out on a boat, spotted a pair of humpback whales in January 2022. They cut the engine and drifted, as the whales approached their boat and began to circle, just 15 feet or so below the surface. Dipping their cameras a foot
Nautilus5 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Scientists and Artists as Storytelling Teams
This article is part of series of Nautilus interviews with artists, you can read the rest here. Zoe Keller is an artist on a mission to capture the beauty of biodiversity before it’s too late. Working in both graphite and digital media, she meticulou
Nautilus7 min read
The Unseen Deep-Sea Legacy of Whaling
First come the sleeper sharks and the rattails and the hagfish, scruffily named scavengers of the sea, along with amphipods and crabs who pluck delicately at bits of flesh. Tiny worms, mollusks, and crustaceans arrive in their hordes of tens of thous

Related Books & Audiobooks