I remember playing with tops when I was a kid. They were disks of wood or plastic (usually plastic) with two wooden or plastic (usually plastic) dowels sticking out perpendicular to the plane of the disk. The lower dowel was for the top to spin on; the upper dowel was used to spin the whole business.

Sometimes the disks would be multicolored, or have a spiral painted on them so that if you stared at them for too long while they were spinning you would become hypnotized and do whatever the next person coming along told you to do.

"Hey, Patrick, why don't you go jump in a river?"

"Sure, sounds great. Be back in a bit."

Definitely a bummer if it happened to be mid-winter.

Although tops were interesting when I was a kid (except for the jumping in rivers part), when we were offered the chance to visit a top factory in Sasebo, Japan, I'll admit that I wasn't very enthusiastic. We had been hiking all day in the mountains and it had been hot and I was tired and I mostly just wanted to get back to my room and sprawl in a chair for a while. Tops...woo. Go tops.

Our guides told us that Sasebo was known for its tops. There was even a giant one (ten or so feet tall) that sat in the central gallery of the local train station. The place we were going was one of the last places that made the hand-crafted wooden tops.

The "factory" turned out to be a small building tucked into an alley off of Sasebo's famous covered outdoor mall -- a pedestrian street with a roof and a lot of businesses that runs for about a half mile.

A section of concrete in the alley in front of the shop had been cut down to the bare hard-pack to create a depressed circle about five feet in diameter. We found out what that was for when a small Japanese woman came out of the store carrying a basket filled with colorfully-painted tops. The circular depression, it turned out, was an arena to spin the tops in.

She let us each pick a top out of the basket. They were bulbous, heavy things, with iron spikes rammed into the bases to serve as a pivot point to spin on. We were shown how to wrap cord around the upper 2/3 of the tops and how to fling the tops in a peculiar side-handed motion while maintaining a grip on the cord so that the tops would land in the arena and, well, do what they were supposed to do: spin.

Pretty soon we were happily spinning tops. But as we were to learn, there was more. Our host told us, through our interpreters, that these tops were actually used for a sport called top fighting. With a grin, she wound a cord around one of her own tops and then threw it with with impressive force at one of the spinning tops in the arena.

The attacking top missed its target and went caroming off the hard-pack and straight into a picture window nearby. We all flinched, but the top bounced off of that as well. When one owns a store that makes tops for pit fighting, it's considered wise to invest in Plexiglas.

The goal of top fighting is to disable your opponent's top. Knocking it out of the pit is good. Even better, though, is to use the iron spike on the bottom of your top to strike the opponent's top and split it. Much as with other back alley street fighting sports -- such as cock fighting, dog fighting, or that old standby, sheep fighting -- you don't want to get too attached to your fighter. It isn't likely to last long.

For some reason I kept getting an image in my head of a bunch of dangerous-looking men huddled around a top fighting pit in a dark back alley in the middle of the night, smoking foul-smelling cigarettes and placing bets on their favorite tops. Not exactly the way I remembered things from my youth.

Nonetheless, we spent a long while in the steamy Japanese afternoon throwing tops and grinning like school kids. A friend and I even began arguing over the best top flinging form. He argued for a violent overhand motion. I argued for the traditional side-handed style we'd been shown. We decided that when we got back to the States, we'd each start our own top-fighting schools and that they would become great rivals: mine would be the Japanese School and his would be the Oklahoma School (since that's where he was from).

Before we left, everyone in the group bought several tops, determined to get good enough to top fight with the best of 'em.

Tops...woo! Go tops!

In no way does the author sanction sheep fighting for fun or profit. Sheep are only meant to be sheared and, perhaps, made into lamb chops. Giving a sheep a weapon of any sort can't be anything but a bad idea.