Culture : Ancient Sport Is on a Roll : A pre-Columbian version of soccer is still going strong. The athletes shoot straight from the hip. Ouch!

On crisp Sunday afternoons, as Americans settle into their recliners, waiting for kickoff time, the men who live here in the hills above the resort of Mazatlan are getting ready for a different kind of ballgame.

Pulling on deer-suede breeches, winding cotton belts around their waists and fastening leather belts about their hips, late 20th-Century peasant farmers transform themselves into tahures , players of the continent’s most ancient sport--a kind of pre-Columbian soccer called ulama .

While soccer may seem like a life and death matter in England and Argentina these days, in pre-Hispanic America, it really was. All the major archeological sites include a ball court similar to a soccer field that served as the American equivalent of the Roman Colosseum. Games were played for the glory of the gods. The losers were sacrificed.

The remnant of those pre-Columbian games is the ulama tournament held every winter in these hills. No one is sacrificed any more, but otherwise, the games are a modern-day reproduction of the ancient sport.

A dozen barefoot players line up as if for tug of war--six on each side of a line dividing a playing field with a surface like a clay tennis court. The court is half as long as a football field and a little over nine feet wide.

Referee Luis Lizarraga rolls what looks like a bowling ball across the center court line to the visiting team from the nearby village of El Chamisal. Soon, the purpose of the leather hip belts becomes clear. A player nicknamed El Nini drops to the ground with a swaying motion, whacking the ball squarely with his hip. Nine pounds of natural rubber flies toward the home team.

The ball bounces once and a player for Los Llanitos leaps toward it. Using his hip--the only part of the body allowed to touch the ball--he spikes it back across the line. The visitors let the ball go, and it bounces twice on their side of the line before going out of bounds to give the home team the first point.

Deciding not to return a volley is often the better part of valor. Because of its weight and bounce, the ball can have the impact of an object traveling 120 m.p.h. if it hits a player’s body at a downward angle. Mazatlan city historian Miguel Valades, an ardent ulama fan, has lost two lawn chairs to out-of-bounds balls. After seeing the twisted chair frames, he winces to imagine the effect on a human hip.

The ball is the most mystical part of ulama . It flies so high and fast that the priests who arrived with the Spanish conquerors were convinced that it was possessed of the devil. On those grounds, they prohibited the game.

Ulama survived here, explains Valades, because it took Mexico City authorities a long time to get control of the distant northwest. As recently as the 1860s, the region’s Yaqui Indians allied with the French invaders to capture the port of Mazatlan. Meanwhile, ulama has even outlived the Yaquis, who were eventually conquered.

“Ulama was the first sport I saw played as a child,” recalls the 75-year-old Valades, who is also honorary president of the Pre-Hispanic Games Society. However, by the time Valades was a young man, tahures were complaining that there were not enough balls and no one remembered how to make them. Without balls, the game began to die out and is no longer played in La Noria, the village where Valades grew up.

“I spent 25 years trekking all over the mountains to rediscover the secret of making the ball,” says Valades. He compiled the recollections of old people who each remembered a little bit about how the ball was made.

After dozens of failures, he discovered that the secret is in combining natural rubber with a natural coagulate and building the ball in layers--like a snowball--at a constant temperature of about 150 degrees.

Now, there are 10 balls in regular use in eight villages that have teams and enough balls in reserve to encourage other villages to revive the sport.

Los Llanitos demonstrates why it is considered the team to beat in this year’s tournament, quickly scoring three points. But El Chamisal rallies, scoring two. In ulama, this is a critical point. If El Chamisal ties, Los Llanitos loses all three points and begins again from zero. The score can be revised this way at all odd-numbered points, explaining why a game that is played to eight points can take two days.

Server Ramon Lizarraga, the old-timer of the Los Llanitos team and father and uncle of its two star players, keeps up the equivalent of infield chatter during the game, encouraging and chiding his teammates while goading the opponents. As he gets ready to strike the ball in a volleyball - style serve--the only time hands are permitted--he reminds the players of what the point means.

“We score this time or we start working from scratch,” he warns.

A strong hit sends the ball over the line to where Chuy is waiting for it. A thin man with a thin mustache, he hits the ball surprisingly hard, well into the middle of the Los Llanitos side of the court.

Miguel, Ramon’s nephew, sends it back, but the ball lands barely across the center-court line. Chuy hits the ball again, this time into the back court. Los Llanitos returns it. Without waiting for the ball to bounce, Chuy jumps into the air and whacks it hard.

On the Los Llanitos side, Rafael tries to stop the ball, but misses. It sails over the goal line without bouncing. El Chamisal, 4; Los Llanitos, 0.

Like many Mexican activities, ulama is a family affair. Of Los Llanitos’ 15 families, only three have surnames other than Lizarraga.

In his day, family patriarch Miguel was a champion tahure . He taught the sport to his sons. Team server Ramon is the only player of that generation who is still active. Today’s stars are Miguel’s grandsons.

Boys begin playing from the time they are 6 or 7. They usually join the village team as teen-agers and play into their 20s. No one recalled any girls who had ever shown an interest in the rough-and-tumble sport.

Not even all the men are allowed to play. Roberto Lizarraga is an enthusiastic spectator, always the first to block and return out-of-bounds balls. “I wanted to learn, but they won’t teach me,” he says. “They say that I don’t have natural talent and I will end up hurting myself.”

Families such as the Lizarragas have kept the sport alive. Versions of the game are played a little farther north, mainly as a curiosity for university students and young professionals. But outside of villages such as this one, where it is still the most important sport, maintaining interest in ulama is difficult.

“The government donates villages equipment for baseball and volleyball, but not for our own native sport,” Valades laments.

As the afternoon chills into early evening, Los Llanitos begins to recover. The team is up to four points now, with a chance of catching El Chamisal at five points.

Ramon serves, an El Chamisal player answers. The volley begins, five times across the center court line. Enrique of the Los Llanitos team leaps to hit the ball and misses. It bounces once, then rolls out of bounds.

No one scores.

The game is far from over, but Valades knows that as evenly matched as the sides appear, neither team will have won before nightfall. Rather than drive down the unpaved mountain road after dark, he suggests leaving early.

Later, he reports that the game was called on account of darkness. The lights on the court were not working, the tahures were getting tired and the El Chamisal team had the horseback-ride return to the village to consider. The two sides decided to reschedule the game.

Bouncing along in his Jeep after leaving Los Llanitos, Valades recalls games he has organized at famous pyramids.

“They always tell us there is a court, but when we get there, it is never suitable,” he says. “After all, these are archeological ruins. They have been abandoned for centuries.”

When he and the players have been able to make the court usable, the results have been spectacular, bringing tears to the eyes of archeologists and generating support for efforts to preserve the game.

“My goal is to assure the survival of the game into the next century,” says Valades. “That is seven years away. We have 92 players now and a great interest among youngsters. I think we are going to make it.”