This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
If you are a sports fan, the next time you drive down 11th Street in Rock Island, pause for a moment at the stop sign where 9th Street intersects, and pay homage. That intersection was once a prairie ball field where the Indians from nearby Saukenuk held their version of "play ball."Transported back to that field two hundred years ago, you and I would find a few familiar things: there was a ball field, divided in half by a line. There was a hide covered ball. There were thousands of spectators lining the sides of the field, shouting approval and disapproval. And there were dances, horse races, and other pre-game activities. There may even have been a venison vendor working the crowd. Aside from the lack of a blimp overhead, we'd be right at home.
But we might find the Sauk ball game itself a bit hard to follow. Two teams faced each other across the line, some three to five hundred men on each side. A number of the players were on foot, others on horseback. Each player was armed with a long pole tipped by a small net. The object of the game was to get the ball across the line somehow into opposition territory. With a thousand or so players, referees must have had an occasional difficulty.
It might be time for some sports impresario to bring Sauk ball back. Modern sports has divided the world into a dozen or so players and hundreds of thousands of couch potatoes glued to television set. With Sauk ball, we could all be in the game.
Sauk ball would solve another of modern sports fans great dilemmas: how to flip channels Sunday afternoons in order to watch basketball, hockey, and football on CBS, NBC, and ABC at the same time. Sauk ball was a combination of soccer, lacrosse, polo, football, and hockey rolled into one. No need to choose a channel.
I'm convinced it would work, once we solve two minor technicalities: arranging some sort of government subsidy to pay the salaries for a team of five hundred players and finding enough shoes and other items of sportswear for each player to endorse.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
