What is "tlachtli"

Usage examples of "tlachtli".

I would never become a tlachtli ball player, to hope for the high honor of someday playing in the Revered Speaker's own court a ritual game dedicated to the gods.

Perhaps there I could be healed, and could come home again in bright-eyed triumph as an unbeatable tlachtli goalsman, or a battle hero, or even a knight of one of the three orders.

During their years in Xaltócan's House of Building Strength they had distinguished themselves as tlachtli players and as cub warriors.

One tree produces the óli that we use in its more liquid form for a glue, and in its harder, elastic form for our tlachtli balls.

They wear most lifelike expressions of alert truculence, and all wear helmets that resemble the leather head-protectors of our tlachtli ball players, so the carvings may represent the gods who invented that game.

But it was no secret that Motecuzóma was at least twenty years younger than Nezahualpili, nor that tlachtli is a brutal game best played by the young, strong, and sturdy.

I will not attempt, my lord scribes, to tell of the ball's every bound and bounce and rebound, for I know you are ignorant of the complex rules of tlachtli and could not begin to appreciate the finer points of the game.

I believe I saw, that day of the tlachtli contest, Nezahualpili's last pretense at that decrepitude when he mockingly gave away the first game to Motecuzóma.

His olóltin sac swelled to the size and tautness of a tlachtli ball, and his engorged tepúli bulged to a length and thickness bigger than my forearm.

And the head of a small child rolls just like a tlachtli ball, Záa, did you know that?

But many more days were required for the destruction of that city within a city—the temples, the tlachtli court, the skull rack, the palaces and court buildings.