ANCIENT MAYAN SPORTS AND GAMES
The Ancient Mayans were famous for a particularly scary ball game which was called Pok-A-Tok .
The Mayans were great sportsmen and built huge ball courts to play their games. The Great Ballcourt of Chichén Itzá is 545 feet long and 225 feet wide overall and is totally open to the sky.
Legends say that the the winning captain would offer his head to the losing captain who then decapitates him. While this may seem a strange reward the Mayans believed this to be the ultimate honour. The winning captain gets a direct ticket to heaven instead of going through the 13 steps that the Mayan's believed they had to go through in order to reach heaven...
The field is approximately the size of a football field is bordered by two imposing walls 26 feet tall. Seven fighters on each team tried to get a small rubber ball to go through a small stone hoop 23 feet above the ground without using their hands or feet to touch the ball. Virtually all descriptions of the native Mexican ballgames stress that hands were not allowed to touch the ball, yet several Mayan sculptures and vases show players with their hands on the ball. These Mayan games happened before the Olympics by about 500 years!
The games played in the ball court were sometimes played to the death.
Almost every Mayan city had a ballcourt to play the ball game Pok-A-Tok. Pok-A-Tok games were often played as parts of religous ceremonies.
Serious injury could be inflicted on a player with the hard ball the weight of a average computer which was mainly struck with the elbows, knees or hips, but was not to be hit with the hands, feet or calves. Players were known to throw themselves on the ground to hit the ball properly. The full impact of the ball was in this case absorbed by the body. Participants wore equipment for protection, including chin pieces and half masks for cheeks, hard leather gloves, quilted cotton elbowpads, knee pads, belts and a leather apron.