Have a Ball! 2017 Forever Stamps — Textured Sports Issue, Pane of 16

Issue facts

First Day City: Hartford, WI
Type of Stamp: First Class
Printed by: Ashton Potter Ltd.
Method: Offset
Issued: June 14, 2017

The set

Mike Ryan designed a pane of 16 built from eight designs, finished with a special coating that gives each stamp an actual texture under the fingers. Greg Breeding was art director.

Ball games are very old

People have been playing them for thousands of years. One of the earliest documented is ōllamaliztli, played by the Maya and the Aztecs, and it functioned much the way a big game does now — as a social occasion as much as a contest.

Mesoamericans living in rainforest made solid rubber balls from the Castilla elastica tree. The ball weighed around nine pounds and players struck it with the hip, trying to put it through a stone hoop mounted twenty feet up. Bruising was routine.

Archaeologists have found ball courts from Nicaragua to Arizona, so the game traveled widely. The original rules are lost, but its imprint on Central American culture is not, and some communities still play a modified version.

The parallel to a modern American sporting event is hard to miss — the betting, the parties, the shared celebration. Sport has never been only the game.

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