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HickokSports.com - History - Croquet
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Sports History
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Croquet
Table of Contents
History
Croquet in America
Forms of the Sport
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History
Although croquet is a rather young sport, its ancestry can be traced at least to the 14th century, and there are a couple of stories about how it originated.
One is that lawn bowlers developed an indoor form of their sport to be played during the winter, adding hoops and mallets to make the game more challenging on the much smaller playing area. This indoor version of lawn bowling then moved back outdoors and become known in France as paille-maille ("ball-mallet").
The other is that paille-maille was originally a form of outdoor billiards. However, judging by what scanty documentation there is, billiards seems to have come along about a century later. It's quite possible that the movement went the other way--that paille-maille moved indoors and become billiards.
In any event, the sport existed for several centuries without becoming particularly popular. Scottish golfers seem to have taken it up, possibly as a kind of practice, during the 16th century and, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1604, he brought paille-maille equipment as well as golf clubs to his new court.
Played during the 17th century by Charles II and his courtiers at St. James's Park in London, the name of the game was anglicized to Pall Mall, which also became the name of a nearby street. "Mall" then turned into a generic word for any street used for public strolls. And now, of course, it usually refers to an enclosed area where people stroll from store to store.
During the 1830s, a French doctor developed a new version of the sport as a form of outdoor exercise for his patients. He named it "croquet," from the French word for a crooked stick, and it was widely played at spas in the South of France.
It's likely that English visitors discovered it there and brought it back to their country. Several accounts, however, say that croquet came to England from Ireland in the 1850s, so perhaps the game was first brought from France to Ireland before moving on to England.
The Wimbledon All England Croquet Club, founded in 1868, established the first standardized rules. Croquet was very popular there until lawn tennis was introduced in 1877. Many of the croquet lawns at Wimbledon were then converted to tennis courts and the club was renamed the Wimbledon All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
Tennis soon became much more important than croquet at Wimbledon, so the United All-England Croquet Association (now simply known as the Croquet Association) was founded in 1896 to revive the sport.
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Croquet in America
Routlege's Handbook of Croquet, published in England in 1861, inspired a wave of popularity that swept right across the Atlantic. Croquet equipment was advertised in the New York Clipper in 1862 and two rulebooks were published in 1865. One of them was "Croquet as Played by the Newport Croquet Club," indicating that the sport was already a fixture in Newport's summer colony.
In 1867, a New York newspaper editorialized, "never in the history of outdoor sports in this country had any game achieved so sudden a popularity with both es, but especially with the ladies, as Croquet has."
The National Croquet Association (NCA), founded in 1879, held its first national tournament in 1882. While English lawn croquet was played at scattered locations, an American form of croquet had also evolved into a very different game from the rather sedate English version. It was played on a court of hard-packed dirt, with hard rubber balls, very narrow wickets, and short mallets. The court was enclosed by a wooden barricade to keep the lively balls on the field of play.
In 1899, a new set of rules was standardized for the American version, which was given a new name: Roque, formed by clipping the first and last letters from "croquet." Like billiards and unlike lawn croquet, roque requires skill in making carom shots off the boundary board and in the use of English to change the path of the shot.
During the early part of the century, roque became the dominant form of the sport. A new governing body, the American Roque League, was founded in 1916, while the NCA became dormant for many years.
Lawn croquet made something of a comeback during the 1920s, at least among wealthy people playing on large, well-leveled lawns at estates on Long Island and in Hollywood, the two major hot beds. Croquet was frequently mentioned in Broadway and movie gossip columns because of the names involved. Among its well-known players were Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart of Broadway fame, Hollywood producers Sam Goldwyn, Howard Hawks, and Darryl Zanuck, and composer Richard Rodgers--all of whom, not so incidentally, are now in the Croquet Hall of Fame.
After World War II, croquet achieved a different kind of popularity as a middle-class, backyard game for all ages, often played under rules invented on the spur of the moment. This new popularity led to the reorganization of the NCA and a new standardization of rules--although that standardization didn't necessarily reach into most of those middle-class backyards.
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Forms of the Sport
American lawn croquet uses nine wickets, while British lawn croquet uses only six. Interest in six-wicket croquet was revived during the 1970s. Jack Osborn organized six Eastern clubs into the United States Croquet Association in 1977 and wrote a new rule book for an American version of the sport.
In the meantime, the British six-wicket version, often known as "Association croquet," was evolving into an international sport, played primarily in the British Commonwealth countries: Australia, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Yet another governing body, the American Croquet Association (ACA), was founded in 1987 to promote the international form of the sport. Most ACA members also belong to the USCA, and the USCA sanctions many tournaments played under international rules, as well as those played under American rules.
In order to promote the sport in general, the USCA promulgates rules for four different versions of croquet: Backyard nine-wicket, American six-wicket, international six-wicket, and golf croquet, which uses the nine-wicket layout.
Roque reached its peak of popularity during the 1930s, when courts were built at many of the parks and playgrounds constructed by the National Recreation Association and the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. The American Roque League still operates, but its membership is concentrated in the Midwest.
Croquet, like badminton and horseshoe pitching, has something of a split personality. Millions of people occasionally play golf croquet or the backyard game, under the standard rules or not-so-standard rules, but there are only about 10,000 American players seriously involved with the six-wicket games.
It takes a good deal of experience to reach the top level of play, because croquet requires an unusual combination of physical skills with strategic and tactical planning. In this respect, it resembles billiards more than any other sport. The ability to make shots is only a fraction of the game.
Croquet was on the Olympic program in 1900, but only French players participated. Roque, the American offshoot, was evidently an Olympic sport at St. Louis in 1904, when all the players were from the United States. Some historians have dismissed that as a national championship disguised as an Olympic event, however.
The World Croquet Federation was founded in 1986 as the international governing body. Eleven countries hold full membership in the WCF: Australia, Canada, Egypt, England, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, and the United States. Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, Palestine, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Wales are classified as observer nations. The WCF began staging a world championship tournament in 1989.
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Other Resources
Websites
CroquetWeb - Stephen Meatheringham has put together an amazing directory of croquet information from around the world.
Croquet World Online Magazine, updated weekly, carries articles of general interest, as well as info for serious players
The Oxford croquet site includes several historical articles and links
Read about the history of croquet at Questia, the world's largest online library
U. S. Croquet Association home page contains a lot of information, including rules for all versions of the sport
On This Site
World Champions
Olympic Medalists
Books about Croquet
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Open Directory: Croquet
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This page last updated Thursday, 13-Nov-2008 23:52:28 PST
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