While other ancient civilizations were playing with balls made of stitched-up cloth or cow bladders, the people of Mesoamerica (present-day Mexico and Central America) were playing a game of life and death using balls made from a processed rubber. By adding the juice of the morning glory vine to latex (raw liquid rubber) harvested from the native rubber tree {Castilla elastica), they created balls that had great bounce.
As early as 1600 B.C.E., the Mesoamericans used this method to make resilient rubber balls that defied the natural brittleness of solid latex. Their amalgamation could be shaped into any conceivable form, but would harden within minutes, making it impossible to reshape the object afterward. They used this process for a variety of artifacts and produced balls of different sizes, the biggest being larger than a volleyball and weighing up to eight pounds (3.6 kg). These were then used in ritual ball games that had great political and religious significance.
While modern followers of sports refer to matches as "a matter of life and death," this was actually the case for the contestants on Central America's fields and ball courts. For the Mesoamericans, the games epitomized their worldview of life as a struggle between good and evil. Winners were showered with riches, whereas the leader of the "evil" losers was sacrificed in the belief that this was the only way to keep the sun shining and the crops growing. The Mesoamericans' rubber ball was therefore a potentially life-changing device long before Charles Goodyear's heat- and sulfur-treated gum of 1839 added a new facet to leisure activities.
