In a Moroccan oasis town on the edge of the Sahara, nomads in turbans and tunics thwack a camel-wool ball across the desert in a traditional pastime: sand hockey.
Similar in many ways to field and ice hockey, but played barefoot and with palm wood sticks, the ancient game is called mokhacha in the local Hassani Arabic dialect.
“We play mokhacha in our spare time,” said one participant, Hamadi Boudani, at the International Nomads Festival in the southern town of M’hamid El Ghizlane.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Our ancestors were nomads and as soon as they pitched their camp somewhere they would first rest and then, to pass the time, they would start a game,” he said. “This game is part of Saharan tradition.”
The players were cheered on by enthusiastic fans as they churned up the sand in what was once a stop on the storied caravan route to Timbuktu.
They were wearing the daraa, an ample tunic favored by nomadic tribes, and a cheche cloth turban to cover their heads and faces from the desert sun.
The two teams, one in white the other in blue, played on May 1, during the annual Nomads Festival, which also celebrates song and dance and other desert traditions.
Each team is made up of at least seven players, the outline of the pitch is crudely traced by hand in the sand, and the referee is simply known as the sheikh.
Sand hockey “is part of our ancestral heritage”, said Rachid Laghouanm, who heads an association that promotes traditional sports and games in M’hamid El Ghizlane.
“It was handed down from father to son, and it is vital that it does not disappear,” he said.
Like other popular or traditional games and sports, “nomad hockey” as it is often called, is fading into oblivion.
“We are trying to create awareness about the game” by organizing competitions and encouraging players to join them, Laghouanem said.
The UK-based Hockey Museum, which says it is “the first and only museum of hockey in the world,” said that sand hockey has been around as long as any form of hockey “has been in existence.”
Forms of sand hockey are also played in Ethiopia, where it is called genna, and in Tunisia under the name oggaf, the museum says on its Web site.
These and the Moroccan version, “date back over hundreds of years and a number of these games are still thriving, almost unchanged, to this day,” it says.
Other experts believe that hockey’s precursor was a stick-and-ball game with origins as far back as ancient Greece and Egypt.
Boudani said he does not know which came first — sand, field or ice hockey — but what is clear to him is that “the nomads had no means of knowing that Westerners had a similar game.”
The Minnesota Timberwolves, with so many promising performances spoiled by late mistakes fresh in their memory bank, sure timed this strong finish well. Jaden McDaniels scored a career playoff-high 30 points and spearheaded Minnesota’s stifling defense on an ailing Luka Doncic, and the Timberwolves beat the Los Angeles Lakers 116-104 to take a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven Western Conference first-round series in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Friday night. “Jaden never looks tired. He looks like he could play 48 minutes,” said teammate Anthony Edwards, who had 29 points, eight rebounds and eight assists. Julius Randle added 22 points for the Wolves, who outscored
Inter’s defense of their Italian Serie A title was hit with a setback on Sunday as they lost 1-0 at home to AS Roma, while Scott McTominay netted a brace as SSC Napoli beat Torino 2-0 to go top of the table. No fixtures were played on Friday or Saturday because of the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome, meaning the full round of Serie A matches took place on Sunday and yesterday. Matias Soule’s first-half strike for Roma knocked Inter off top spot earlier in the day before new Napoli opened up a three-point buffer with victory in Sunday’s
FOCUS: ‘We came out here with a goal in mind ... to keep our foot on their throat and on their neck, and continue to play 48 minutes of basketball,’ Donovan Mitchell said The Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday thrashed the Miami Heat to cruise into the next round of the NBA playoffs as the Golden State Warriors battled past the Houston Rockets 109-106 to move to the brink of a series victory. After pounding Miami 124-87 in game three on Saturday, No.1 Eastern Conference seeds Cleveland once again piled on the misery for their outclassed opponents with a crushing 138-83 victory to complete a 4-0 series win. The 55-point drubbing was the largest series-clinching victory in NBA playoff history and sets up a series against either the Indiana Pacers or Milwaukee Bucks in
Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa yesterday set a women’s only world record of 2 hours, 15 minutes, 50 seconds as she won the London Marathon, while Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe put a star-studded men’s field to the sword. For 28-year-old Assefa it was ample compensation for finishing runner-up in London and the Paris Olympics last year — especially as bitter Dutch rival, the Ethiopia-born Sifan Hassan, finished third. Assefa dropped Kenya’s Joyciline Jepkosgei as the race, played out in blazing sunshine and with thousands lining the route, entered its business end. She came home almost three minutes clear of the Kenyan. Hassan, who beat her in