Category Archive 'Kirkwall'

02 Jan 2008

The Old Ba’ Game

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The Washington Post reports on Christmas Day activities in the Orkneys:

William Thomson’s family had played this sport for centuries, so he understood that he needed to choose between two strategies for the annual Christmas day ba’ game.

The scrawny 17-year-old could fight for the ball in the center of the riotous scrum, where more than 300 men would function as a human juicer, turning his face red, then purple. He would be scratched, punched, kneed and bitten. His ribs might break. He could pass out unconscious.

Or, Thomson could follow convention for players his size and stay near the edge of the scrum, pushing the pile. This would work well unless the ball popped out and the mob changed direction. Cars, gravestones, houses, strollers, hotel lobbies — all had been kicked, shoved or trampled in pursuit of the ball during previous games. Anticipating such a stampede, business and homeowners in town had nailed wooden planks across their doors and windows. “If you’re on the edge of the scrum and it turns on you,” one veteran player said, “then you might as well be dead.”

This, Thomson decided, was his safest option.

He never considered not participating. The men in the Thomson family — like the men in most families here — have played this game since at least the mid-1600s. It is one of the oldest and most physical sports, and it’s almost certainly the most simple. Half of the men in Kirkwall, called Doonies, try to push a small ball into the sea using any means necessary. The other half, called Uppies, work to push the ball to a wall one mile across town. The ba’, which refers to both the game and the ball with which it is played, can last anywhere from four minutes to nine hours in freezing temperatures and hurricane-force winds.

The ba’ is played nowhere else. It has persisted in Kirkwall because its basic tenets are congruent with life on these Orkney Islands in northern Scotland. If you’re tough enough to survive in this old Viking territory, in a frostbitten town of around 6,000 bordered by whitecapped seas, then you don’t worry about relaxing on Christmas and New Year’s Day. You put on steel-toe boots and a rugby shirt and walk downtown to the almost 900-year-old St. Magnus Cathedral, ready for hell.

Complete article

slideshow

Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.


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