”How did he do it?”
“Believe it or not, playing croquet. He lost his temper and tripped over a hoop. Not a very honourable scar.”
[…]
You don’t mess with croquet
Americans frequently confuse the hoop game with cricket, regarding both as effete and archaic, but that ignores the former’s dark heart
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 June 2008 13.49 BST
They’ve played cricket at Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia since the 1850s. Today’s game - played in brilliant sunshine on a gently sloping field surrounded by stately oaks - is between the British Officers (who are for the most part Indian and Pakistani) and Montego Bay (who are mostly Jamaicans living in New Jersey).
Our host for the day is octogenarian British Officers Cricket Club president J Alfred Reeves.
Arthur shows us around Haverford’s amazing CC Morris cricket museum. Most astounding is a photo of the first English XI to visit the US in 1859. These salty, arrogant, muttonchop whiskered bastards look like they’ve stepped straight off some hell-bound pirate ship. They look like they’d gouge their own mother’s eyeballs out with a rusty cutlass for thruppence. And they probably did.
The reason the Flashmanesque meaty-thighs-akimbo insouciance of these louche cricketing thugs so startles is that in the US, cricket (once the national sport) is now regarded as symbolic as all that is effete, insipid and limp-upper-lipped about the British. In this respect it has only one rival - croquet. But that might be something to do with the horrible fact that a shockingly large number of Americans think cricket and croquet are the same game.
An American lady cruising past the boundary in an SUV slows to a stop and winds down her window.
“Excuse me, what’s this game they’re playing?”
“It’s cricket.”
“Really? So … is it like a special version?”
“No. Just cricket.”
“Oh? So where’s the hoops?”
The next day I tell this amusing anecdote to the editor who sent me to report on the ancient and flourishing cricket scene in Philadelphia. She stares at me. There’s an awkward pause.
“So cricket isn’t the one you play with hoops?” she says.
Last year the International Cricket Council’s brilliantly named Malcolm Speed gibbered excitedly about Twenty20 coming to the US and kicking baseball’s tired old ass. And well it might, being massively more exciting and more fun to watch. But first there is a huge obstacle to overcome: those Americans who don’t think the game is played with hoops, a ball and a mallet, think it’s played with a bent-over giant playing cards, hedgehogs and live flamingos.
In England, of course, everybody knows that cricket is robustly virile, while croquet is effete, decadent and soft. Thus when John Prescott was caught playing croquet in 2006, he was held up as the living symbol of Labour’s slide into limp-wristed bourgeois corruption.
But everybody is wrong. Croquet players are hard, bordering on barbarous. Mock them and they attack like rabid badgers. That’s what happened in 2003 to former English Cricket Board Chairman Lord MacLaurin when he warned that cricket was in danger of becoming, like croquet , “a summer sport that was”.
He might as well have shoved his head into a sack of ferrets. The Daily Telegraph described croquet as “one of the most self-serving, unsporting games ever played, requiring ruthless meanness and ungenerosity of spirit towards one’s opponents”. The Archdeacon of Oakham was quoted as saying it was “a vicious game”. And the inventor of “combat croquet” American publisher Herbert Swope, was exhumed to repeat his mantra: “The game gives release to all the evil in you. It makes you want to cheat and kill … it’s a good game.”
If push ever comes to shove between cricket and croquet, cricket is dead. One only needs to look at depictions of croquet in popular culture to realise that beneath its fusty, twee exterior lurks a monster bent on destruction.
In Tom and Jerry, in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, in Calvin and Hobbes and in movie after movie - Heathers, Savages, North by Northwest, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Nosferatu (no, really), The Avengers - croquet is the precursor to or the cause of violence, pain, death, horror and suffering.
A brief glance at the real history of croquet serves as confirmation that the sport is an in-heat wolverine in sheep’s clothing - just ask the officers who arrested Dion Athanasius Smallwood in 2001 for beating his girlfriend’s mother over the head with a croquet mallet and then burning her alive in her car. A flash in the pan? Tell that to Elizabeth Hein. Except you can’t. Because she was kicked to death by her husband after she made the mistake of beating him at croquet in Deptford Township, New Jersey in 1883.
The very roots of American croquet are dark, twisted and gnarled. In the 1890s croquet games on the Boston Common were attacked by clergymen as magnets for drunks, gamblers and the licentious. And while it might be an exaggeration to say that the history of America can be seen a non-stop carnival of croquet-related violence, it is certainly true that modern America is experiencing an explosion of mutant croquet monsterism, with the sport bursting out of its neatly pressed club-crested blazer like mild-mannered Dr Bruce Banner shredding his lab coat as he morphs into the incredible Hulk.
As you read this, young Americans are playing eXtreme croquet,
colossal croquet and mondo croquet (sledgehammer and bowling balls).
(The motto of the extreme Lakewood Croquet Club in Seattle is
“mallets plus morons equals mayhem.”)
While cricket and croquet continue their simmering feud in Blighty, North America seems set for a three way all-out sports-war war between newly energised Twenty20 cricket; stagnant, over-long and severely scandal-ridden baseball; and the savagely mutating outsider croquet.
Baseball and croquet have already come to blows - and baseball got its ridiculously trousered ass handed to it in a greasy doggy bag. In Calgary, Canada in 2002 a croquet game was attacked by softball* players who wielded their bats with a confidence that bordered on the arrogant. After a brutal brawl that only ended with the arrival of the police, three of the softballers ended in hospital, one needing surgery for a “life threatening” head injury.
Don’t mess with croquet.
* Please don’t write in saying that softball and baseball aren’t the same sport. They clearly are.