Free The Ball by John Fox

of the pack shifted, sending the players crashing into the church wall. Spectators gasped and scurried back, some slipping on the ice that coated the grass above. As the men mashed themselves into the wall, one was lifted off his feet by the pressure and squeezed up and over the horde, feet in the air, tumbling out onto the grass. He stood up, wiping blood from his chin, and dove back into the pack, surfing the top of the mob until he sank back in. For 20 minutes, the pack moved no more than a few feet in either direction.
    Several ferocious-looking wives circled the edge of the pack like wolves, riling and harassing their husbands, “Come on, Uppie men! Push harder!” It appeared to take all their restraint not to jump in themselves, which they’ve been known to do on occasion. A newspaper report of the 1866 Christmas Day Ba’ describes a moment in the contest when the ba’ was heading up-street and “an Amazon who ought to have been home with her mamma caught it and threw it down.” In the 1920s an Uppie player was said to have run the ba’ through the front door of his house and handed it off to his wife, who hid it under her petticoat. Once the pack of players had moved on, leaving shattered crockery in their wake, she walked unnoticed right to the goal and won the day. Despite playing a vital supporting role, though, the only time women played a ba’ exclusively was toward the end of World War II, when many men were off at war and the women felt empowered to have their own game. The new variation was not well received by the traditional men of Orkney, however, and was soon shut down. One reporter expressed some relief that there were few injuries among the participating ladies and that the “casualties, for the most part, were confined to permanent waves, hats, scarves, shoes, and stockings.”
    I was standing about ten feet back from the pack—at a safe distance, I’d thought—fiddling with my camera when I heard, “It’s going down!” The pack split open and a human stampede was coming my way. I held my arms to my sides, sucked my weight in, and did my best imitation of a lamppost while 100 or so men thundered past me on either side, knocking me back and forth. A Doonie player had made the break and gained a block before the Uppie pack caught up and tackled him. But just before his face hit the cobblestones he managed to pass the ball off to a spectator, Nigel Thomson, a veteran Doonie sprinter who’d won school medals in the 400 meter. Before anyone knew what had happened, Nigel was dashing toward the port in his winter coat and Russian fur hat with a mob of angry Uppies in hot pursuit.
    As I turned and ran with all the other spectators, a Red Cross volunteer caught up to me, my notebook—now sporting a dirty shoeprint—in her hand.
    â€œMind yerself now,” she cautioned. Nearby a disheveled young woman was hopping about on one foot searching for the shoe that had been ripped off in the frenzy.
    I reached the pack several blocks away. The Uppies had caught Nigel and forced the ba’ out of Albert Street into a narrow side street, or wynd, as it’s known here. The move was a blow to the advancing Doonies, slowing their momentum and cutting them off from their main route to the sea. In the heat of the ba’, Graeme had assured me, what appears to the observer as a random move by a mindless mob, is usually quite deliberate and strategic. Knowing every wynd, nook, and cranny between here and their goal, the Uppies would now be mapping the route that would give them the best advantage.
    The pack had plugged up the ten-foot-wide wynd like a stopped-up drain. I watched as one player’s back was smashed against a pipe. Arms above his head, he winced, pushed, and wriggled to create more space to breathe. Doonies ran around the back to reinforce and push the ba’ back toward the main street, while the Uppies did the opposite.