ALMOST 30 YEARS AGO, Kelvin Mac-Kenzie, editor of Britain’s best-selling tabloid newspaper, turned the manager of the England football team into a root vegetable when his side failed to qualify for the World Cup. “That’s yer allotment,” ran the front-page headline in The Sun above a photograph of Graham Taylor’s head morphed into a turnip. It echoed a headline after a defeat the previous year that said: “Swedes 2, Turnips 1.” Taylor never forgave Mac-Kenzie for the mockery.
Displeasing the sun on the field of play in Mesoamerica 3,500 years earlier was rather more risky business. The rules of the Mayan ball game, a religious devotion as much as a sport, are unknown: it seems to
