The Ball (17 page)

In earlier times, before the Onondaga decided to reject gambling and casinos altogether, a game like tonight's would have involved widespread betting. Money, blankets, food, land, sometimes even human services were staked in collective bets intended to inspire players to give it their all. But even with thousands of dollars of bets on the line, winning has never been of much concern to Indian players and spectators. As the lacrosse great and spiritual Faithkeeper of the Onondaga, Oren Lyons Jr., once explained, winning and losing “didn't seem to be so much a point of the game as the celebration, the sense of community, the being together with pride.”

A pregame announcement was made over the PA: “Women and girls attending tomorrow night's game in Tonawanda are kindly asked to respect their nation's ways by staying clear of and not touching the lacrosse box.”

Freeman spotted me and called me down to the box to watch his team warm up. Players were practicing power plays, setting up the pick-and-roll to free up the shooter. Eighty-mile-an-hour shots pounded off the enormously oversized pads of goalie Ross Bucktooth, a nephew of Freeman's, who deflected every attack with one of Alf Jacques's wooden goalie sticks. Freeman introduced me to assistant coach “Meat” Powless.

“How'd he get that name?” I made the mistake of asking.

Freeman leaned over, elbowing his friend and laughing, “Because he was blessed by the Creator!”

He walked me into the locker room and introduced his sons Brett, Drew, Grant, and the other players. Several, I noticed, wore Indian-themed tattoos and mohawks or long braids that trailed out of their helmets. After more than a century fighting stereotypes and caricature—especially in the world of sports, where tomahawk-wielding Indian mascots have been a sore point for years—these young Iroquois were comfortably reclaiming and reinventing symbols of their Indianness as if to say, “Still here, still warriors.”

The game was about to begin so I found my way to a safe seat behind the glass. The rubber ball was placed in the center rink for the face-off. In the 18th century, by contrast, games were often initiated by a young maiden throwing the deerskin ball down the field toward two facing lines of players. Jeremy Thompson, the Redhawks' face-off master who had just finished his first season at Syracuse, won the battle and snapped the ball to a runner who quickly worked the ball into the crease, opening up a shot and scoring the game's first goal.

The action was riveting and chaotic. The hard rubber ball ricocheted off the boards and glass, bouncing high off the cement. With no limit on substitutions, Alf worked one of the two doors to the Redhawks' bench, opening and slamming it as players got sent on and off the rink. Penalties called for illegal checks or the occasional sucker punch or fistfight set up tense power plays.

The Braves hardly lived up to their name that night, giving up nine goals before scoring their first. Every play called by the announcer seemed to involve a Bucktooth: “It's A. J. Bucktooth to Drew Bucktooth who takes a shot. Miss! Scooped up by Wade Bucktooth and fired hard. Goal!” They won 26–3, and in the days and weeks ahead would sweep the series and win the Can-Am League championship, earning them a trip to British Columbia to play against the best indoor Canadian teams in the Presidents' Cup. They went all the way to claim the gold medal for Onondaga, a first in league history.

“They couldn't handle us,” Alf boasted later. “We took care of everybody.”

Lacrosse, slow out of the gate, continues to pick up steam as one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association's annual participation study on team sports, it's one of seven “niche” sports that saw increased participation in 2009 (up 6.2 percent). That's all the more striking when you learn that basketball, baseball, soccer, and football all saw declines in participation in the same year. An early beneficiary of Title IX, women's lacrosse has exploded, with the number of U.S. high school teams growing 127 percent between 2001 and 2009. The surprising departure at the end of the 2009 season of Princeton's fabled winning coach, Bill Tierney, for the University of Denver—the edge of the known lacrosse universe—signaled that the era of eastern dominance and provincialism might finally be on the wane. And yet, even as the sport grows up and broadens its reach, it still can't quite shake its reputation as an affluent white sport, more than ironic given its humble and diverse roots. In 2010, lacrosse in the United States had the highest percentage of participants (48 percent) from families with household incomes more than $100,000.

The recent swirl of international publicity surrounding the Lacrosse World Championships and the Iroquois passport issue served as a needed reminder, or first-time education, to many that this rising sport of lacrosse is an Indian creation, the ancient inheritance of a league of sovereign nations. Cody Jamieson and Sid Smith's triumphant moment on the field in Foxborough had signaled for some commentators the arrival of a “new wave” of Native players who would define not just the past of the sport but its future.

Wondering about what that future might hold, I sought out Jeremy Thompson, as shining an example of that new wave as you can find. After a few challenging years, which included struggles with alcohol, he had just been named Most Valued Player of the Presidents' Cup tournament and had finished his first season as All-America, second team, with the Orange. He and his three brothers—all rising lacrosse stars—had just graced the cover of
Inside Lacrosse
magazine armed with Alf Jacques originals and wearing moccasins and the bad-ass-don't-fuck-with-me grimaces that lacrosse magazines love to feature. “The New Familiar Face of Lacrosse,” the headline reads.

When I mentioned it, Jeremy seemed somewhat embarrassed by all that attention focused on him. “Uh, no, haven't read that yet.”

He also sounded conflicted about having achieved his dream of playing for the Orange. I asked him to compare the experience of playing in the box for the Redhawks with being on the field for Syracuse.

“On the nation, you know, I'm playing with my brothers. I know they're most likely thinking the same thing I'm thinking. We're there to play together, be with each other. Now at Syracuse, I don't feel that way. I feel I'm in two different worlds.”

Until Jeremy was 12 or so he was in fact deep in another world, attending a Mohawk language immersion school on the Akwesasne reservation in upstate New York. The family's decision to move back to Onondaga and enroll him and his brothers in public school was, he lamented, the worst thing for him at that time.

“I feel like I was just starting to learn where I came from, who I was, and then I got plunged into this other society. I've been trying to find my way ever since.”

Jeremy's enthusiasm picked up while talking about an Iroquois cultural program he and a friend had just started in Onondaga for 12- to 14-year-olds. The kids learn about Iroquois language, crafts, and traditions, and elders and clan mothers come in to speak and share stories.

“Going through what I went through,” he said, “I just want to help make it easier and better for the young ones coming up now. If they learn who they are first and get grounded, then they can go out and handle American culture.”

When Jeremy's lost his way in the past, he said, the medicine games have always brought him back to who he is and reminded him why he plays. “When we play our medicine games, you know, the ball is made out of the skin of the deer, stuffed with tobacco that grows from our Mother Earth. By playing, we're giving thanks for the life in that ball and in the stick and all around.”

Chapter Six

Home, with Joy

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

Donald Hall

T
he year was 1859. About the time the Indian game of lacrosse was getting polished up and “civilized” in Montreal, another game played with ball and stick was spreading like wildfire along the eastern seaboard. On the eve of the Civil War, extra ferries were needed to shuttle 24,000 spectators from Manhattan to New Jersey to watch an eagerly anticipated match at Hoboken's now-famous Elysian Fields. Commentators heralded it as “the favorite game of the country village and the country town, as well as the larger commercial cities.” From its early epicenter in New York and Philadelphia the game had swept westward, “with the advance of civilization,” as one sports weekly put it. In a short time, it had picked up players and fans in 22 states. In antebellum Savannah, New Orleans, and other southern towns, a dozen active clubs had cropped up and were signing on new members monthly. One enthusiastic promoter went so far as to suggest that the sport had “every prospect of becoming [America's] national game.”

The game was cricket. And within a decade it would be little more than an also-ran, a quaint—and for too many, unwelcome—reminder of the nation's colonial past.

America, it turned out, needed its own game—not some Old World hand-me-down. We needed baseball, just as we needed the telegraph and the automobile and the electric lightbulb. And so we got it, invented it, brought it to life fully formed like Athena from Zeus's forehead onto a cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York. Or so the story goes.

Before America had a president or a Constitution, it had baseball. In the winter of 1778 at Valley Forge, the cold, jaundiced, undernourished troops played baseball for exercise and to boost their spirits. Even General George Washington was known to take to the field. According to a French visitor at camp, “he sometimes throws and catches a ball for hours with his aides-de-camp.” By 1791, baseball was a common enough occurrence in the small towns and villages of New England for it to be a public nuisance, contributing to broken windows and other damage. That year, the word “base-ball” made its first U.S. appearance in a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, bylaw prohibiting its play within 80 yards of the town's new meetinghouse windows.

The law conjures a kind of Currier and Ives nostalgia for the joys of youth and for “the old ball game,” as the refrain from the ritual seventh-inning song goes (“Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” written in 1908 by a vaudeville star who had never actually been out to a ball game). The image is one we all know: a merry band of marauding youth playing a pickup game on a small-town green on a lazy summer afternoon. A deep, arcing fly ball connects with a small window. The sound of shattered glass scatters the boys over hedges and fields, nervous laughter trailing behind them.

Baseball was off to a great start.

L
et's be clear up front. Exploring baseball's roots is more like joining a mass pilgrimage than it is setting off on a solitary journey into uncharted terrain. No other sport is as concerned, or as obsessed, with its founding. Tennis fans seem content knowing its roots are sufficiently old and aristocratic (and for the French, French). That one Scottish clan or another had something to do with golf's founding somewhere near the holy links of St. Andrews satisfies most golf enthusiasts. Soccer's only real historical debate in recent years has been whether, being the global game and all, FIFA should give an official nod to the fact that the Chinese emperor may have kicked a ball before English peasants thought of it. (In 2004, when FIFA president Sepp Blatter called China the “cradle of the earliest forms of football,” he set off a flurry of debate across Europe.) Yet over the past century, the subject of baseball's origins has earned the attention of commissions, public hearings, press conferences, editorials, books, conferences, and more. The Society for the Advancement of Baseball Research (SABR), a 7,000-member organization formed to advance the research, preservation, and dissemination of baseball history, even has a separate “origins committee,” currently chaired by MIT political scientist Lawrence McCray.

To join the baseball pilgrimage I could have visited the Lourdes of sports shrines—Cooperstown, New York, birthplace of James Fenimore Cooper and a certain Civil War hero named Abner Doubleday, baseball's mythological founder. Here, a young Doubleday supposedly interrupted a group of kids playing marbles in Elihu Phinney's pasture on a summer's afternoon, drew out a diamond-shaped field in the dirt with a stick, and proceeded to educate them on the rules of his new game. The town's Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum today draws 350,000 devotees a year from around the world to view a collection of 130,000 baseball cards, 33,000 bats, balls, and other equipment, and 12,000 hours of recorded film clips. As French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy described the place after his own visit:

This is not a museum, it's a church. These are not rooms, they're chapels. The visitors themselves aren't really visitors but devotees, meditative and fervent. I hear one of them asking, in a low voice, if it's true that the greatest champions are buried here—beneath our feet, as if we were at Westminster Abbey, or in the Imperial Crypt beneath the Kapuziner Church in Vienna. And every effort is made to sanctify Cooperstown itself, this cradle of the national religion, this new Nazareth, this simple little town.

I could have gone to the far less well known but no less sacred Baseball Reliquary, a traveling museum based in Monrovia, California, and assorted nearby storage units that houses such memorabilia as a piece of skin from Doubleday's thigh, one of Babe Ruth's half-eaten hot dogs, and the jock strap of Eddie Gaedel, the three-foot, seven-inch player who in 1951, wearing the number “1/8th,” got to base on a walk in his one and only time at bat for the St. Louis Browns. The Reliquary even has its own alternative hall of fame, the Shrine of the Eternals, celebrating such unsung heroes as Dock Ellis Jr., the curler-wearing Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who in 1970 threw a no-hitter while tripping on LSD.

Even before Ken Burns captured the notion so eloquently in his 18-hour Emmy Award–winning documentary series, it was widely understood—a cultural given, in fact—that, as the historian Jacques Barzun declared, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Walt Whitman, who as early as 1846 wrote lovingly of observing youngsters playing a game of “base” in “the outer parts” of Brooklyn, later in life reflected on the emerging national sentiment toward the game:

Well—it's our game; that's the chief fact in connection with it; America's game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions; fits into them as significantly as our Constitution's laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.

Other nations and cultures have long delighted at making their own claims to baseball's genesis. A letter sent to the Hall of Fame in 1975 by a Polish researcher, for example, reads, “For your information and records, I am pleased to inform you that after much research I have discovered that baseball was introduced to America by the Poles who arrived in Jamestown in 1609.” He cited an obscure but since verified account of Zbigniew Stefanski, one of many Polish settlers brought over to the Jamestown colony to help with glassmaking and working with pitch and tar. The workers had taken with them a popular game called
pilka palantowa
, or “bat ball,” to fill their few hours of recreation:

Soon after the new year, I, Sadowski, Mata, Mientus, Stoika, and Zrenic initiated a ball game played with bat. . . . Most often we played this game on Sundays. We rolled rags to make the balls. . . . Our games attracted the savages who sat around the field, delighted with this Polish sport.

Not to be outdone, in 1990 the former president of the Romanian Oina Federation suggested that baseball was inspired by his country's national game, which involves pitching a ball stuffed with horsehair to a batter who must run a circuit of nine bases across a rectangular field. Oina is said to date to the early 14th century when it was first played by Transylvanian shepherds. The federation president has made the unverified claim that Romanian immigrants serving with Doubleday in the Civil War clued him into the secrets of that great eastern European pastime before he scratched his rules into New York soil.

Then there is the tantalizing account of the fascist Italian demographer Corrado Gini, who in 1937 encountered Berber tribesmen playing a game remarkably like baseball in a desert village in Libya. The tribesmen called the game
ta kurt om el mahag
, which translates as “the ball of the pilgrim mother.” As described by IBM engineer-turned-baseball-historian David Block, the pitcher stood just a few feet from the batter and tossed the ball in a gentle arc. The batter could then be retired by having the ball caught on a fly or by being hit by the thrown ball while running between two bases. Gini suggested that the game was left behind by migrating blond Europeans who visited the region during the Stone Age. That he was the author of
The Scientific Basis of Fascism
surely didn't influence his interpretation at all.

When Gini first proposed his outlandish theory at a conference in Copenhagen in 1938, Danish researcher Per Maigard was in the audience. Maigard, who was conducting his own research on bat and ball games, came to his own conclusion a few years later that—surprise, surprise—the Scandinavian game of longball had influenced the development of baseball, cricket, and every other game worth playing. The mysterious Berbers, Maigard declared, must have picked up the game from Germanic Vandals who had brought it with them when they invaded North Africa in the fifth century
AD.

S
o who threw the first pitch? Polish glassblowers, Berber tribesmen, Transylvanian shepherds, Egyptian pharaohs, and marauding Vikings have all had their backers. As, of course, has Abner Doubleday. The answer, it turns out, is none of the above.

If we're content with locating the origins of the game with the first time bat-struck ball, then we should accept that we'll never find that first box score, unless it's exposed someday in the dark recesses of a Paleolithic cave. Going back to my rock-throwing theory for ball game origins, it wouldn't have overly taxed our early hominid neurons to figure out that the club they used to brain small mammals might also launch a projectile farther than they could throw it. Stripped of baseball's esoteric rules and historical context, the fundamental act of hitting a ball with a bat is, as George Vecsey has pointed out, a “rather basic human pleasure, easily improvised by a couple of bored sentries or monks or schoolgirls with access to a thin stick and something round. The rules sort of fall into place.” The amateur historians of the Society for American Baseball Research have in fact exhaustively documented this basic pleasure, recording nearly 300 references to bat-and-ball games before the year 1800.

Medieval bat-and-ball game, Flanders, 1301, from the
Calendar of the Ghistelles Hours
.

Among these references is an image dating to 1301 from a French medieval manuscript, the
Calendar of the Ghistelles Hours
, which clearly shows one young man hitting a line drive to another player who appears ready to snag it for the out. Another, from a 1555 poem by an English vicar condoning youthful recreation (at a time when many games were being banned), seems to indicate that base running was already a feature of some games:

To shote, to bowle, or caste the barre

To play tenise, or tosse the ball,

Or to rene base, like men of war,

Shal hurt thy study nought at al.

But the first mention by name of the sport that Ruth and Mantle and Mays built is from a popular English children's book,
A Little Pretty Pocket-Book
, published in London in 1744. A woodcut image entitled “Base-Ball” shows three boys Aidan's age wearing tricornered hats arranged on a field marked with three high posts for bases. One player looks ready to pitch a ball. The “batter” stands out for having no bat, preparing instead to strike the ball with the flat of his hand. A short child's verse below the image reads: