Consider the ball.
More to the point, consider the innovator, whoever he was, who first saw the potential of the ball as an object of delight.
It goes without saying that the human urge to toss things to each other--to "play catch"--dates to antiquity, to prehistory. But before the ball, what must people have tossed? Cubes? Pyramids? Dodecahedrons? For how many millennia must cavefraus have run about, wringing their hands, imploring their offspring to be careful with their reckless horseplay lest they put out an eye--how many millennia before a forward thinker (we're guessing Egyptian) stumbled upon the solution: the sphere!
Now, now could children of all ages heedlessly indulge their flingophilia! Now could little Johnny--or Hatshepsut, as the case may be--hurl and pitch and sling to their hearts' contents their suddenly harmless projectiles. No longer would a pickup game of "Back n' Fro" (as we like to imagine it would have been called) lead to family tragedy! Little boys could finally experience their full childhood's allotment of a quarter-score years before they had to give up the simple joys of ballplay for the adult responsibilities of family, tribe, and caste.
Consider the ball, dear Sloppists. And give thanks!
O.K., this is, as they say, a "True Fact". While spheres WERE used probably as far back as the cavepeople (or, as the Creationists would have it, Murray Greenglass of Mesopotamia), as weapons, etc., (in the form of rocks, say. A sphere fits into a Sling, quite well). The first uses of such as a BALL-TYPE object of play was PROBABLY the games played with the heads of dead enemies (see: the histories of Polo, Basketball, etc.)
ReplyDelete