Sporting Aspects
Perfection on the Lawn
By J. P. W. MALLALIEU THEY used to play it on the pure, level lawns of grand country houses. The clack of the balls mingled with the chink of crockery as the butler prepared to serve tea under the trees. They used to play it on somewhat rougher lawns at the rectory, especially during the Church fête where children and dogs added to natural hazards; and we used to play it on our lawn at home which, after tennis, cricket, mashie shots and fighting, was hardly a lawn at all.
From the turn of the century until the First World War, many people played croquet, some seriously, some more casually; and the Official Calendar of the game listed 118 different tournaments in the British Isles for 1914. But since that war croquet for most of us has been a memory or a joke. I remember how in one of P. G. Wodehouse's stories, a golf fiend got himself engaged to a girl in the belief that she was the Women's Champion. After the marriage she admitted that she was the Women's Champion, but of croquet, not golf. Thereat she disappeared and only returned when she had purged her shame by acquiring a handicap of eighteen. Even non- golfers could see something in that joke.
But last week, and for the first time in my life, I saw croquet played by experts. I saw the semi-final of the Open Cham- pionship at the Roehampton Club. I shall never again deride croquet.
First, there was the setting of well-clipped hedges, tall trees and green weedless courts. No doubt on some days there would also be bright colours and a cloudless sky; but though this was a mackintosh day with only a pallid sun and occasional sprinklings of rain, the setting was still warm and peaceful— so peaceful that the sound of a player explaining why he had played the wrong ball seemed slightly out of place and the occasional, well-bred shout from the nearby polo field seemed Positively raucous. -.
Then there were the players. As in billiards, so in croquet one player may have to sit for long periods in idle impotence while his opponent moves about the court making a break. This must sometimes be an exasperating strain, despite all the relaxation afforded by a deck-chair and the setting. The man in play must concentrate even more keenly than a billiards player on every shot, for one false move may not only let his opponent in but let him in to a position from which he can stroll through to victory. Further, like a chess player, he must plan and even in part execute moves three ahead from the one which immediately faces him. That too means strain. Yet the players show little sign of it. They reflect, they consider intently, they judge the angle, and then, playing the shot with seemingly casual grace, they puff gently at a cigarette and walk unburdened to the next position. In them there appears none of that face-tautening, nerve-snapping tension which turns championship tennis or golf or even cricket into such an ordeal for player and spectator alike. Expert croquet players do not strain at their game. They just seep through it purpose- fully. How different from my childhood when the tensions and exasperations of defeat provoked manslaughter with the mallet or at least tears.
How different, too, is the expert game ! We used to bang away straight, or roughly straight, for the nearest hoop. The expert, as like or not, will open the game by playing in the opposite direction so as to keep his ball safely away from the manipulations of his opponent. If he does go near the first hoop at all, he is only laying a snare for his opponent, enticing him into a shot which he may well miss. In this safety play, this manoeuvring for position, the spectator can watch not only the mechanics of a game but the inner workings of a human mind, and when at last a position has been won 'and the player begins to make a break, you can see human art at its most graceful, at its most perfect and at its most fallible. A player can and does build his position, with perfectionist ease, placing the balls in just those positions which make a long break not merely likely but seemingly inevitable. Then, making the easy key shot which would have opened the gate to well-planned success, he misses by an eighth of an inch and the results of all his thought and skill are presented as a gift at the deck-chair of his opponent.
I know of no game at which perfection is so continuously demanded, in which there is such continuous danger that one bad shot will bring defeat. It is small wonder that those who really know the game can sit all afternoon in absorbed, exhilarating silence while players devise and execute their schemes before them. Yet the game seems to be dying.- At these semi-finals of the national Open Championships there were only some thirty spectators, not one of whom was young and not all of whom were still themselves players. Some at least could only watch and dream of long ago.
Maybe people no longer play the game because at first sight it seems slow and dull. Certainly it is harder to understand than the popular sports of today, except for cricket. The opportunities for learning cricket are so great—there is a cricket field in every English village and, even in those towns where no field is handy, you can always play in a back-street when the police are elsewhere. But croquet, to be worth playing, needs a level lawn on which plantains may not grow and such lawns nowadays are only for the very rich or for a few private clubs. So, despite the faint stir of interest when croquet Test Matches are played against Australia or New Zealand, the game seems to be slipping into obscurity.
Yet you never can tell. In the early eighties, the game went into eclipse. The All England Croquet Club founded at Wimbledon in 1869 threw out croquet in favour of tennis and only a few devotees continued to perform their rites in semi- secret. Then one day a young Irish sportsman was told by his doctor to give up violent exercise but to keep in the open air. He took up croquet. The skill and enthusiasm and novel tactics which this young Cyril Corbally brought into the game helped to lift it in the nineties and in the first fourteen years of this century to perhaps the highest peak it- has ever attained.
And now, in another period of the game's decline, another young man, again partly under doctor's orders, has come wholeheartedly into croquet. J. W. Solomon is twenty-one. He has already won the New Zealand championship. Last week I saw him win his semi-final and on the following day he became the Open Champion of England. Maybe, John Solomon may help to do what Cyril Corbally once did. Or maybe the game itself, regardless of particular players, is just too good to die. You never can tell.
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