Sports Feature Balls, Goats, Explosives

Aug. 30, 2002 — -- Baseball, football and basketball use balls. Hockey uses a puck. But if you're going to play buzkashi, you need a headless goat.

This detail might trip up your average beer-chugging American armchair sports fan.

But why stop at Afghan buzkashi and its goat carcass? Thai fish fighting requires vicious fish. And in Colombia, tejo involves explosives.

Welcome to the weird, wild world of sports — where you can find hulking Scots tossing what resemble telephone poles, and Argentines on horseback tossing a stand-in for live ducks.

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Before you laugh, though, understand it's not just a foreign thing: Americans have their own heritage of competitive lumberjack wood-chopping, wife-carrying competitions, flagpole sitting and "pulling the goose."

Across cultures and "throughout human history, there's always been sports and people have always come out with ways to entertain themselves," says David Levinson, a cultural anthropologist and co-editor of the globe-spanning Encyclopedia of World Sport.

"On a local level, some of these sports still exist," Levinson says. "You don't see them on television. You don't see them on the sports page."

The X-Squared Games

On the other hand, some pretty odd sports are on TV.

The hammer throw and curling, a shuffleboard-type ice game played with stones and brooms, are both Olympic events.

Wood-chopping, pole-scaling and other lumberjack competitions are part of ESPN's Great Outdoor Games. The sports channel (owned by Disney, parent company of ABCNEWS.com) also carries the World's Strongest Man competitions, which feature boulder lifting, car pulling and truck-tire flipping.

In the 1980s, dwarf-tossing made the airwaves, and Mr. T rose to prominence by winning the televised America's Toughest Bouncer competition — which involved running an obstacle course around barstools and bar rails, tossing a 120-pound stuntman and breaking down a door.

Not Ready for Prime Time?

Perhaps not ready for prime time yet, though, are sports such as Ba', a traditional game in Kirkwall, Scotland. A ball is tossed into a surging crowd of Uppies and Doonies — men representing families originally from opposite sides of town — who push and shove at the mob and try to smuggle the ball to designated landmarks in opposition territory.

Scottish Highland Games, played by people of Scottish heritage throughout the world, include tests of strength like tossing stones, hammers and cabers — wooden logs that resemble telephone poles.

In the Colombian game of tejo, participants tossing stones try to set off blasting caps placed on a hard surface atop a mound of earth or sand.

"I've seen that game played at the side of the road in the country and at beer joints," says Joe Arbena, a Clemson University professor who specializes in Latin American and sports history. "My guess is that this developed in some mining camp or something … and somebody gets this idea of throwing rocks at blasting caps.

"That's the only game that I know that involves explosives," he says.

Explosives may be unnecessary in Southeast Asia's competitive kite flying — because the kites are already armed. Fliers of "male" kites with sharp edges try to shred and crash "female" kites, which opponents try to keep aloft in a designated zone over a period of time, Levinson says.

Odd to Us, Not Them

In the Thai sport of fish fighting, Levinson says, "They raise fish to fight, just like cock fighting … and throw them into a tank."

Strange? Maybe to Americans. But probably not to Thais.

"In their cultural context [traditional games] make perfect sense," Levinson says. "You can look at them and understand. Thailand has a lot of water. … Fishing's a big activity."

In the same vein, there is a World Elephant Polo Association based in Nepal, where elephants are relatively common in some parts of the country. Likewise, locals race water buffaloes in Thailand and camels in Saudi Arabia. In Turkey, they have camel fighting, according to Levinson, though he does not know the rules.

Grabbing the Goat

In some games, animals are not ridden or matched against each other, but carried and tossed.

The object in the traditional northern Afghan game of buzkashi is to pick up a headless goat or calf carcass while on horseback and break free from your opponents to win a round.

It's not easy, those who've played it say. The carcass is heavy, and players must reach down to the ground for it while remaining on their horse, risking serious injury as their head brushes other horses' bodies and opponents' stirrups. Because the carcass has four legs, several players might be grabbing it simultaneously.

"I've been at the center of these things on horseback," says G. Whitney Azoy, author of Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan. "It's like being stuck in a hydraulic [machine] and not being able to get out, or like being stuck in a washing machine. It's a tremendous sense of power — these tremendous horses and these extremely large and powerful guys."

Competitors don't find the sport cruel. They feel the animal has been put to death humanely, having been beheaded and de-hoofed prior to the event. In contrast, Azoy adds, buzkashi players who traveled to Spain during the filming of The Horseman — a 1971 Hollywood film featuring buzkashi — were appalled by bullfighting, seeing it as torture of a live animal.

Nevertheless, the idea of using a dead goat was an obstacle to Cold War-era U.S. officials in the 1980s, when they toyed with bringing buzkashi to America as a sign of solidarity with Afghanistan, then fighting the Soviet Union, Azoy says.

Check the related story box to the left to find more about buzkashi and Afghan politics.

Tossing the Duck; Pulling the Goose

At least one other traditional sport moved beyond the animal-as-ball idea — the Argentine game pato. "Pato" means "duck" in Spanish, and the name recalls its origin among Argentine horsemen.

"They would maybe loosely bury the duck in the ground with its head sticking out and neck sticking out, and then they would ride by on a horse and grab it and loosely toss it around," Arbena says.

The game was suppressed by the government, but revived last century using a ball with handles in place of the duck, and there now even is an Argentine Pato Federation. In modern pato, players on horseback grab the handles and try to put the ball through hoops at opposite ends of what resembles a polo field.

For those who think grabbing waterfowl is too unsporting for America, consider "pulling the goose" — played, and then banned, in the 17th century, when New York City was a Dutch colony.

The book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 describes the game as "a rough country sport [in which] a live bird, its neck smeared with oil or soap, was tied by a rope between two poles. Contestants on horseback then rode at full gallop toward the tethered goose and tried to yank off its head."

Carrying the Wife

Pulling the goose is not the only American sport where a living thing, in a sense, stood in for a ball. At the annual North American Wife Carrying Championships in Maine, which is coming up on Oct. 12, men carry their wives or other women over an obstacle course in pursuit of the ultimate lure — the woman's weight in beer, among several prizes.

"We really do it all in fun," says Susan Duplessis, spokeswoman for the Sunday River Ski Resort, where the event is held annually. "We wouldn't be offended if a woman wanted to carry a man.

"We don't get too many people saying it is politically incorrect," she adds, "but if they do we just tell them to lighten up."

Lightening up, or at least the issue of weight, is on the minds of competitors, who must determine their beerlibrium: If the wife is too light, the beer and cash payout will be less. Too heavy, and the partly uphill obstacle course becomes unmanageable.

"To run 300 yards with somebody on your back is a tough thing to do," says John Suitor, 35, of Middleburg, Va., who entered on a lark and won the first championship in July 2000. A family friend, Gail Guy of Burlington, Vt., stood in for his wife, who'd just had a baby.

When the beer was balanced on a scale against Guy, about 130 pounds worth, the winners walked away with six cases, which Suitor donated to his brother's wedding that summer.

Suitor and Guy, like the 2001 winners, used the "Estonian carry" — in which the woman holds on upside down against the man's back — and proceeded on to the world championships in Finland. They didn't win in Europe, but when they got back, they took some ribbing from friends and co-workers.

"It was one of those things where you … get your 15 minutes of fame," says Suitor, now a dean at a prep school in Virginia. "Plenty of people were making light of my accomplishments."