The Ball by John Fox

and vowed to hunt Tusker down, cut off his head, and take it back as proof that their days of misery were over. He went off by horse and soon succeeded in his task. But while returning home with the bloody trophy swinging from the pommel of his saddle, Tusker’s lifeless teeth broke the skin of the young man’s leg. By the time he reached Kirkwall the leg had become infected and he was close to death. With a dying effort, the hero staggered to the Mercat Cross in the town center and threw the bloody head to the people. Grieved at the young man’s untimely death, and riled by the sight of the hated Tusker’s head, the people began kicking it angrily through the streets of town.
    This, some say, is why twice a year a crowd of hundreds gathers at the very same town cross to knock each other senseless over a stuffed leather substitute for Tusker’s head, called ba’ in the local dialect. The story may well be apocryphal and revisionist, but it’s as plausible as any other explanation of this unusual rite of excess. Grievances, I would soon come to learn, die slow and hard in Orkney. It’s strangely satisfying to watch all these centuries later as old Tusker still pays the price for his tyranny.
    The Kirkwall Ba’ is a rite that for just two days each year, Christmas and New Year’s Day, cleaves the friendly, picturesque port town of Kirkwall down its middle—quite literally—pitting friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, even family members against each other. Simple to describe, but confounding to understand, the ba’ is a traditional folk football game in which two “teams” of 100-plus men each compete over a homemade ball—also called the ba’—and attempt to claim it for their side, and for posterity.
    The sides, known as the Uppies and the Doonies, represent an ancient, almost tribal, division of the town: the upper inland half and the lower (“doonward,” as they say) portside half. Once the ball is thrown up in the town center to the pack of players, the goal of the Uppies is to move it several blocks up the street and touch it to the wall at Mackinson’s Corner. The Doonies, in turn, must take the ball down-street to the port and submerge it in the bay. There are blessed few restrictions on how the ba’ might reach either fate.
    In all its unruly and primitive glory, this contest of wills, historians agree, is one of the only surviving remnants of the earliest form of football as it was once played across Europe—long before civilization or regulation got hold of it. As loyal Orcadians would argue, it is football as it was meant to be played. To take some measure of the distance the game has traveled, from rolling heads to aerodynamically engineered balls, and from the dirt lanes and open fields of medieval Europe to gleaming stadiums and neighborhood pitches around the globe, I decided to go to Kirkwall and experience the ba’ firsthand.
    W hen I arrived in Kirkwall on the penultimate day of 2009, a thick ice coated the cobblestone streets. Shoppers tiptoed by with caution, while the winds slicing through the narrow alleys pushed the temperature well below freezing. Scotland was suffering its coldest, snowiest winter in years. The news was filled with reports of road closings and deadly accidents, salt shortages and families stranded for days with distant relatives they’d only meant to visit for Christmas dinner.
    In Kirkwall they were still recovering from the recent Christmas Ba’, which had been even more damaging than usual. One ferrylouper had foolishly left his BMW parked on the street, and the pack of 200 or so burly men went right up and over the car, crushing it like an aluminum can. The Uppies and Doonies were still arguing over which side was responsible for the damages.
    Most had moved on and were getting ready for Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year’s celebration—and the culmination of