Hip Ball
There’s football. There’s handball. And soon there could be hipball if efforts to revive a 3,000 year old ball game called Ullamaliztil in Mexico prove to be successful. The game is played on a narrow pitch and involves teams of seven players knocking a heavy rubber ball around with, surprise surprise, their hips. Ullamaliztil has had to be adapted to the 21st century as the original version, which was played across Central and North America, was quite literally a life and death battle between light and darkness with the winners going on to live to play another day; while the losers faced being sacrificed to the gods. Thankfully in today’s game, sacrifices have been replaced with a knockout tournament which was played in the Mexican city of Teotihuacan. Sounds like a game where all our winners!