It seemed like an easy enough way to spend a Sunday afternoon. How was I to know that by the time it was over I would encounter jaws and go on to be peeled, stymied, cannoned and then left for dead? And that wasn`t even the worst of it. I ran the risk of being called an ”Aunt Emma.”
Aunt Emma is the moniker for conservative players who waste talent through dull or unispired play of croquet.
Yes, croquet. Stop snickering.
Real croquet, as played by the rules of the United States Croquet Association, is a brutal game that requires the skill of a golf putter, the concentration of a chess champion and the wardrobe of a tennis pro.
No colored clothes or croquet wimps allowed on the field here.
It`s a ”serious” sport. So says Jim Dushek, a 36-year-old Park Ridge construction engineering manager who`s so serious about the game that his car license plates read ”CROQUET.” Last year he bought half an acre of land in nearby Des Plaines to put in his own croquet field.
Before that he rolled out an outdoor carpet and set up an indoor croquet court in one of his projects–a parking garage under construction near O`Hare. ”It was great for about two years,” says Dushek. ”But then the project was completed and we had to take down the court because the owners wanted a parking garage, not a croquet court.”
Dushek became hooked on croquet about seven years ago when he was working on a project in Springfield.
NIGHT GAMES
”One of the engineers, Nels Gustafson, is Swedish,” says Dushek. ”I guess his family used to play. He had a croquet set and he kept asking the rest of us to play. We all laughed at him at first. But one day he set it up and we started playing with partners. It was so much fun that we started betting a dollar a ball. Even when it got dark we were out there with flashlights. Before that I had only played backyard croquet. I had no idea of the strategy involved in real croquet. It`s a whole different game.”
The object in both backyard and USCA croquet is the same–to get more of your balls through a specified course of wickets than your opponents. But there the similarities end. Besides smaller, sturdier wickets–with only 1/8- inch clearance–USCA croquet has a strict set of complicated rules about how you can move those balls around the course.
And to confuse you even more, croquet has developed its own jargon.
Just as in snooker, croquet balls are played off other balls–that`s called roquet–allowing you to take extra shots to keep a run or break going. Roquets are not to be confused with cannon shots, which dislodge several balls on one stroke. Once you hit another ball, you are dead on hitting that color ball again, until you are cleared by passing through a wicket or the jaws–the entrance to the hoop.
Of course, you can be peeled–put through the proper hoop by another player–or stymied–blocked by another`s ball, in which case you most probably are wired. Well, you get the idea.
So much for a leisurely Sunday afternoon.
These people are bloodthirsty.
Dushek had left for a week`s business trip to England, determined to find a croquet field to keep in form. But several of his croquet cronies were busy this afternoon whacking balls on the Des Plaines court–even through a drizzle. Dushek`s wife, Madelon, and player Ken Barker stood on the sidelines explaining some of the finer points of the game between sips from Coors beer cans and bites of submarine sandwiches.
Barker started playing last year when he wandered over to see what Dushek was building on the lot two doors from Barker`s house. Now he even travels with the group to Downstate Bourbonnais (the Midwest`s other big croquet stronghold) and to tournaments around the country.
But on most weekends, and sometimes even on week nights, Barker, the Dusheks, Chip and Debbie Seliger of Chicago and Bill Moody of St. Charles can be found on the Des Plaines croquet court. The group has become a member of the USCA–officially calling itself the Chicago Croquet Club. But the gatherings are casual and picnic-like.
The beers, the sandwiches and the fact that Moody has just whacked a ball way out of bounds (to the cheers of onlookers) have eliminated any ideas of croquet being a sissy sport.
After all, wasn`t the most fun in backyard croquet provided by the thrill of smashing your opponent`s ball off into the bushes–or, better yet, hitting the dog next door?
But there was something wrong here. Moody had intentionally knocked his own ball out of bounds.
”That`s so no one else can play off his ball,” said Barker, who went on to explain the strategy involved in the two-, three-, or even four-ball breaks, and the ”brutal nature of the game.”
Actually, croquet has always had a reputation.
Originating in France in the 14th Century and introduced into England from Ireland in the 1850s, croquet came to the United States not long after that. It seems that early English croquet consisted of four couples. As soon as one couple finished their shots, they usually had about 45 minutes until their next turn, which gave them plenty of time to disappear into the bushes. BANNED IN BOSTON
By 1898 the sport was banned in Boston for its ”insidious wickedness”
and connection to drinking, gambling and philandering.
Croquet didn`t become popular again until the 1920s, when Harpo Marx and Darryl F. Zanuck led a Hollywood croquet contingent that had a rabid rivalry with New York`s Algonquin Round Table literary set, including writers Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott. Marx was such a croquet fanatic that he converted a spare bedroom into an air-conditioned storeroom for his equipment and used a neighbor`s flat garage roof as a practice field.
New Yorker Jack Osborne, the president of the USCA, is credited with croquet`s recent surge. The 57-year-old Osborne is said to have popularized the sport by opening it up to anyone.
Anyone includes Archie Burchfield, a tobacco farmer from Stamping Ground, Ky., whose pickup truck was stopped at the gates of the Palm Beach Polo and Country Club in Florida, the site of the 1982 USCA tournament.
”The guards thought he was a gardener and they didn`t want to let him in,” says Madelon Dushek, who was full of croquet folklore. ”Someone had to go out and get him.”
Burchfield, who played a bastardized form of croquet known as roque, made the finals of that tournament, but getting beat made him ”mad” enough to go home and practice. The next year he returned in the prerequisite white clothes and took home the championship. No one called him an Aunt Emma after that. — For more information:
The Chicago Croquet Club, Park Ridge: Jim Dushek, 692-6788. The club is open to the public.
Bon Vivant Country Club, Bourbonnais. Merlin Karlock, 815-935-0400/0200. Three croquet courts, court time, equipment and instruction available to the public at no charge upon request. The site of the 1986 USCA regionals July 24-27 —
