coated with a heavy shellac, the baâ is crafted not only to survive the punishing pressure of the pack on game day but to live on as the most cherished trophy of the man fortunate enough to take it home. At that moment, I wished Aidan could be there to hold that ball and feel with his own hands the care and artisanry that went into it. It was a thing of beauty.
George, a stocky, bearded 62-year-old whose day job is on a North Sea oil rig, estimates heâs made close to 50 such balls over a 27-year span. Each baâ takes maybe 40 hours to produce. The stitching alone can take two days. The core is formed from crushed cork that came originally from the packing material in old fruit barrels and today is imported from Portugal.
âAch, the stuffing is merciless work,â he said, looking at his callused hands. âYou leave a wee hole in one of the seams and keep packinâ doon and doon and doon.â
Rumors and accusations still fly that a Doonie baâ maker will slip a bit of seaweed in the ball or an Uppie a bit of brick from the wall to draw it magically back to its source. When asked if heâd ever attempted such sorcery himself, George pleaded the fifth. âWell, now Iâve heard the same stories . . .â
With a look of impatience, as though my fascination with the ball itself might distract me from the gameâs deeper meaning, Davie Johnston, a successful businessman in his late 50s who moved away from Orkney when he was 19 but has returned every year since to play the baâ, leaned in to me and rested his hand solemnly on the ball.
âThis isnât a trophy. This is heritage. This is history. This is tradition. This is what I won and my granddad and his granddad won before me and thatâs what itâs about. It goes back that far and that deep. Itâs hard to understand the depth of feeling we have for it. Itâs huge.â
D espite some recent efforts to trace the murky origins of football to the Chinese kick ball game of cuju or to the Roman game of harpastum , thereâs no evidence that those or any other sports of the ancient world had any direct influence on the development of football as it emerged in medieval Europe. Cuju , a game that may date as early as the fourth century BC , became wildly popular in the royal courts of the Han dynasty and eventually spread to Korea and Japan. The game, which resembled modern football in some ways, was described in a poem of the time:
A round ball and a square wall,
Just like the Yin and the Yang.
Moon-shaped goals are opposite each other,
Each side has six in equal number.
The stuffed ball was eventually replaced by one with an inflated pigâs bladder and goalposts replaced gaps in walls as the target. Although the game played an important role in Chinese daily life and enjoyed an impressive run of more than 1,500 years, it never appears to have spread farther than the royal courts of East Asia. And while itâs quite possible that Roman soldiers brought their game of harpastum with them when they invaded Britain, there are no accounts of Romans mixing it up with their subjects on British pitches. As one British scholar has humbly pointed out, harpastum , which involved assigned positions covering zones of play, was a more sophisticated game than early English football. In fact, it would take until nearly the 19th century for football to gain the level of organization and sophistication that the Roman sportâor cuju , for that matterâhad achieved by the first century AD .
As scant as the historical record is when it comes to games and pastimes, football as itâs played today can be confidently, if circuitously, traced to early medieval villages of Britain and France. One of the earliest mentions of a football-like game is from the ninth-century Historia Brittonum , a mythologized account of the earliest Britons. In the fifth century, according to the author, Vortigern, a Celtic
George, a stocky, bearded 62-year-old whose day job is on a North Sea oil rig, estimates heâs made close to 50 such balls over a 27-year span. Each baâ takes maybe 40 hours to produce. The stitching alone can take two days. The core is formed from crushed cork that came originally from the packing material in old fruit barrels and today is imported from Portugal.
âAch, the stuffing is merciless work,â he said, looking at his callused hands. âYou leave a wee hole in one of the seams and keep packinâ doon and doon and doon.â
Rumors and accusations still fly that a Doonie baâ maker will slip a bit of seaweed in the ball or an Uppie a bit of brick from the wall to draw it magically back to its source. When asked if heâd ever attempted such sorcery himself, George pleaded the fifth. âWell, now Iâve heard the same stories . . .â
With a look of impatience, as though my fascination with the ball itself might distract me from the gameâs deeper meaning, Davie Johnston, a successful businessman in his late 50s who moved away from Orkney when he was 19 but has returned every year since to play the baâ, leaned in to me and rested his hand solemnly on the ball.
âThis isnât a trophy. This is heritage. This is history. This is tradition. This is what I won and my granddad and his granddad won before me and thatâs what itâs about. It goes back that far and that deep. Itâs hard to understand the depth of feeling we have for it. Itâs huge.â
D espite some recent efforts to trace the murky origins of football to the Chinese kick ball game of cuju or to the Roman game of harpastum , thereâs no evidence that those or any other sports of the ancient world had any direct influence on the development of football as it emerged in medieval Europe. Cuju , a game that may date as early as the fourth century BC , became wildly popular in the royal courts of the Han dynasty and eventually spread to Korea and Japan. The game, which resembled modern football in some ways, was described in a poem of the time:
A round ball and a square wall,
Just like the Yin and the Yang.
Moon-shaped goals are opposite each other,
Each side has six in equal number.
The stuffed ball was eventually replaced by one with an inflated pigâs bladder and goalposts replaced gaps in walls as the target. Although the game played an important role in Chinese daily life and enjoyed an impressive run of more than 1,500 years, it never appears to have spread farther than the royal courts of East Asia. And while itâs quite possible that Roman soldiers brought their game of harpastum with them when they invaded Britain, there are no accounts of Romans mixing it up with their subjects on British pitches. As one British scholar has humbly pointed out, harpastum , which involved assigned positions covering zones of play, was a more sophisticated game than early English football. In fact, it would take until nearly the 19th century for football to gain the level of organization and sophistication that the Roman sportâor cuju , for that matterâhad achieved by the first century AD .
As scant as the historical record is when it comes to games and pastimes, football as itâs played today can be confidently, if circuitously, traced to early medieval villages of Britain and France. One of the earliest mentions of a football-like game is from the ninth-century Historia Brittonum , a mythologized account of the earliest Britons. In the fifth century, according to the author, Vortigern, a Celtic
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