The Weekly Screed (#925)

Armball: 

The ancient roots of soccer

By David Benjamin

“If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn’t have given us arms”

                                                                           — Mike Ditka

MADISON, Wis. — Ever since I played two-line soccer at recess in grade school, I’ve been puzzled by the anomaly that soccer is the only team sport that doesn’t allow players to use their hands. This struck me as illogical to the point of preposterous until I researched the ancient roots of this immensely popular modern game.

 

Almost no one who follows soccer has dug much deeper into its roots than the first World Cup title game, Uruguay’s 4-2 victory over Argentina in 1930. In fact, the birth of soccer traces back to the reign of Neo-Babylonian emperor Nebukhadnetzar in the 7th century B.C.

Although Nebukhadnetzar’s army is renowned for its defeat of the Assyrians at Nineveh in 612 B.C., its most grueling victory took place several years later, over a ferocious little tribe who occupied a corner of the vast Khayappa region, in a tiny land called Golea.

 

Golean warriors, though small in number, struck fear into the hearts of their enemies because of their unparalleled skill with edged and penetrating weapons —swords, stilettos, sabers and spears, pikes, poniards, petards and battle axes. War against the Goleans turned every battlefield into a gory wasteland strewn with the severed heads of the enemy, their bodies gashed, pierced, punctured and impaled on the bloody shafts of a thousand broken lances.

The human cost of subduing the stubborn and merciless Goleans enraged the Babylonians, who inflicted a terrible punishment. To prevent the Goleans from regrouping and launching an insurrection, which could end in another vast slaughter, the king of Babylon ordered that every Golean male over the age of eight must have both arms cut off at the elbow. All the amputated forearms were then burned as a sacrifice to Irra, the Babylonian god of plagues pestilence, death, war, and destruction. Overnight, once-proud Golea became a nation of armless men and overworked women. Within a year of the Great Amputation, during which Golean men did little more than loll around the house smoking, drinking, chewing qat and criticizing their wives’ cooking, the women of Golea demanded that their armless husbands find something to occupy themselves.

The banished husbands began hanging out in town squares and plazas around Golea, at first just loitering. But then, one armless Golean teenager in the village of Pœxx stumbled over a dead goat’s head, left outside a restaurant. He started kicking the head around with his friends. Pretty soon, a rudimentary game had sprung up. When the goat’s head had disintegrated from all that kicking, the young men hired a girl — who had arms — to steal, kill and decapitate another goat, so the boys could keep playing.

From this humble happenstance, the sport of soccer — according to a handful of Middle Eastern historians — was born. It was not long, of course, before the highly perishable goat head gave way to a “ball” composed of uncooked couscous sewed inside a goatskin. The first goalmouths were archways at opposite ends of the square. These fundaments of soccer — a ball, a a dusty plaza, a makeshift goal and a bunch of players with dormant (or non-existent) arms — have gone unaltered for almost 3,000 years. Indeed, Pele or Ronaldinho would have been completely at home had he suddenly found himself kicking around a goat’s head among the armless Goleans in the town square of Pœxx.

 

Ironically, the game they played came to be called kuuchcka, an unpronounceable word that translates roughly from the defunct Golean tongue to mean “armball.”

Kuuchckamight well have died out in Golea and never had the chance to evolve into modern futbol. This is because eventually the founding generation of armless warriors got too old to play the game. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, one of the rare sources of Golea’s fragmentary history, these veterans of the Babylonian wars refused to change the rules for their sons. They insisted that no one with arms could play. The solution to this dilemma, which today seems somewhat extreme, was that little boys, as young as five or six, voluntarily agreed to the amputation of their arms for the opportunity to play kuuchcka. They did this against the passionate protestations of their mothers and grandmothers, who dreaded the prospect of doing all the work — from housekeeping to heavy labor — in a nation of men who were incapable of even lifting a spoon to feed themselves.

 

It was the next generation of Golean women who almost killed the sport of armball. When their little boys reached the age of playing the Golean version of youth soccer and begged to have their arms hacked off, their mothers rebelled. Historian Garret Huxley refers to this as the Great Refusal — and it came at a terrible price. While armless old men continued to play geriatric, slow-motionkuuchcka, their grandsons — all blessed with long, lean, lovely arms and strong legs — could only sit by watching, complaining and itching for a little competition.

The inevitable result was war. Banned from armball, Golea’s young men took out their frustrations by revolting against their Babylonian oppressors. The war did not go well. After three generations, Golean men, even with arms intact, had forgotten their once-fearsome skills with sword and spear. The Babylonians made short work of Golea’s martial neophytes, in what Dr. Huxley calls the Weekend War. Golean boys and young men not butchered by Babylon were rounded up ruthlessly, castrated and sold into slavery, creating a neutered Golean diaspora that stretched from the Black Sea to the Indus River.

 

Then, a strange thing happened. Exiled Golean eunuchs, in Egypt, Asia Minor and Persia, wherever they were driven, revived their beloved game of kuuchcka.Although they were slaves to their masters, they had been freed from the tyranny of golden-age Goleans (the FIFA of the ancient world) who had banned them from armball unless they cut off both their arms. They not only played kuuchckaat every opportunity, the last of the Goleans spread armball throughout the civilized world and left it as their legacy.

 

The second Babylonian empire did not last long. When the Persians under Cyrus the Great crushed Babylon, Goleans — both the armless and the sexless — disappeared forever from the map of the Middle East. Because Golea was literally erased from the face of the earth, many historians question the claim that it was the ancient source of soccer.

The argument of the skeptics is both simple and compelling. If Goleans really did invent soccer, playing with neither arms nor hands, then where — the historians ask — did goalies come from?