Word: wickets
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Allan Cleland's nose grazes the grass as he stoops to draw an imaginary line between his ball and the wicket in the final round of the Sonoma-Cutrer Vineyards' version of the World Croquet Championship on May 19. Ireland's Simon Williams, who the day before had been doing a fingertip push-up to calculate a similar shot, anticipates that Cleland will attempt a triple peel and, incidentally, not stain his immaculate summer whites. Australia's Cleland, like 23 of the other best players from Ireland, England, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and the U.S., has come to what some...
...grownup version is a maze of complicated tactics, arcane terminology and bizarre rules played against a ticking stopwatch. A good player must have the wrists of Jack Nicklaus, the concentration of Bobby Fischer and the eye of Minnesota Fats. Ricocheting at precisely the right spot off the steel wicket is one way to get the grapefruit-size ball through the narrow hoop, anchored an unforgiving 9 in. into the ground with a clearance of one-sixteenth of an inch. A bewildering array of possible shots -- the simple roquet (a straightforward hit), the croquet (a split shot) and others, like...
Under American rules, a player also has to worry about "deadness," a state almost as final in croquet as it is in life. A player whose ball has hit another ball is considered "dead" on that ball. He cannot hit it again unless he passes through a wicket. This can leave a player cooling his heels on the sidelines for a half an hour while his opponent hits through. Darryl Zanuck, one of old Hollywood's croquet fanatics, who included Harpo Marx, Samuel Goldwyn and Louis Jourdan, described the predicament: "When you're three-ball dead, you're just...
Last Saturday on Soldiers Field, the Crimson again was at bat for about an hour. But that's all the time it needed to overtake MIT's score of 59 runs for 10 wickets taken. In fact, Harvard scored its 60 runs without loss of a wicket...
American rules, Ms. Kayden explained, are akin to the rules of backyard croquet. When one ball is hit by another, it is "dead" and can't be hit again until the attacker goes through a wicket. Under international rules, balls are always open to attack...