The night game is illuminated by the ball itself. It is a pickup game in a parking lot that re-enacts a pre-Hispanic myth of man’s creation, while threatening to charbroil a few toes.
In a way it resembles field hockey, with the players racing up and down, swatting the ball with sticks toward two narrow goals. Except for one important detail: The ball is on fire, foot-long flames trailing it through the air.
The ancient game of fireball survives in this beautiful market town in central Mexico that was the historic capital of the Purepucha empire, a civilization that rivaled the Aztecs when the Spanish first set foot in the New World.
Besides pickup games by local youths, other contests are arranged for tourists. That’s the case with the monthly Saturday night faceoff among the staff at the Hacienda Mariposas, a nature-conscious hotel that sprawls across several acres on the town’s southern edge.
The cooks, maids and receptionists don the traditional white cotton garb of the Purepucha and assemble in the parking lot after dark. There, amid giggles, squeals and war cries, they bat around the ball for fun, tips and a sense that they are keeping alive a tradition that held deep religious meaning for their ancestors.
“It’s to save the game,” said Alberto “Beto” Garcia, a cook best-known to the guests as the guy who comes out of the kitchen in a hairnet to check whether they are enjoying the breakfast buffet.
Garcia was explaining the fireball rules to a dozen guests in late November as they waited for the contest to begin after perhaps the strangest delay of game: A guest had left his car in the parking lot, and staff feared it might blow up if the ball rolled underneath. The owner had to be summoned back from downtown to move it.
Rene Ocana, the hotel owner and a retired attorney from California, said the game fits in with his efforts to promote the local culture of Michoacan state. He says that’s why he doesn’t put televisions in the rooms, so the guests get out and learn about such marvels.
Ocana encourages guests to play the fireball game, even inviting a 9-year-old from a Chicago-rooted family to be his teammate. He says the staff doesn’t worry about going up in flames, because their embroidered cotton pants are hard to ignite.
“It’s not dangerous. It just looks like it,” he said with a laugh.
Neither did the players’ tennis shoes ignite, thankfully, nor the vines that covered one wall of the makeshift field. But some guests were scoping out escape routes as the players scuffled for the flaming ball just beneath the spectators’ dangling feet.
The ball, about the size of a volleyball, is made of bound rags or sometimes roots or plant fronds. It is then doused in diesel fuel, which keeps it burning, although the two balls used in the game we watched disintegrated spectacularly after about 20 minutes each.
The game is just one form of the tlachtli ball games that abounded in Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest.
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An Internet check suggested that the Purepucha game can have different forms: The Mexican Federation of Autochthonic Sports and Games lists “Purepucha light ball” as one of 59 known pre-Hispanic sports. When Montreal was host of the 4th World Festival of Traditional Games and Sports in 2004, it listed “pelota purepucha [balls on fire thrown with the feet]” as one of the events.
In pre-Columbian times, the game was not just for fun.
In the book “Michoacan and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico,” published in 2000, author Bernardino Verastique dedicates a passage to the Purepucha creation myth, which he describes as “the myth of the cosmic ballplayers.” In the myth, the primordial sun, Cupantzieeri, plays a sacred ball game against a powerful adversary, the night sky. Cupantzieeri loses but eventually is redeemed by his son Sira-tataperi, who rejuvenates the solar cycle and gives birth to modern humankind.
“The ancient sun was a huge celestial orb batted about the heavens by the dark, unpredictable powers of the cosmos,” Verastique writes, describing the Purepucha religious worldview at the time of the conquest.
“Today in Michoacan, vestiges of this ancient struggle can still be seen at dusk, when boys gather to bat around a fiery ball of maguey roots,” Verastique writes. “The scurrying tongues and shadows of fire evoke an uneasiness in us as the fireball slowly disintegrates into the black field of night.”
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