CROQUET NEWS:  The Backyard Games

27 August 2006
by John Stilgoe in The Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Tenez! The French word meaning something like "take this" gave its name to tennis. Lawn tennis haphazardly boosted croquet. Badminton evolved in between the two. For about 100 years, all three meant the finest of lawn games.

French monks in the 12th century played an informal game in which they swatted a ball back and forth across a rope strung in cloister gardens. Some diehard tennis enthusiasts, who are likely to be following the 2006 US Open being held in Queens, N.Y., this fortnight, say the game originated in ancient Egypt. They cite vague rumors placing the first games in the Nile River city of Tinnis and the closeness of the word racquet to the Arabic word for hands or the palms of the hands, rahat. Almost certainly wrong, the claims mistake the origin of the word palm. The root of the English word palm means field or flat ground, and 1,000 years ago identified the flat inside surface of the hand. Palm leaves take their name from their visual similarity to the palm of the hand. About rahat, however, linguists continue to debate. The word and early tennis might have entered Europe with Crusaders returning from the Holy Land.

By the 13th century, tennis fascinated the French nobility. France had 1,800 tennis courts, most of them indoor, long corridor-like places. By 1500, the game had crossed to England, where royalty played feverishly, again in indoor courts, the best known being Hampton Court. By then, players used a net and wood-frame racquets strung with cat-gut, although they used a soft ball made of Portuguese cork. But over the centuries, interest in tennis gradually waned as aristocrats learned newer games.

Croquet caused tennis to boom in the 1870s, but only by coincidental accident.

No one knows the origin of croquet. It might descend from a 13th-century French game called pall - mall, which is perhaps an ancestor of modern golf. Aristocrats played pall - mall over long distances, with some courses being 1,000 yards in length. While similar to croquet, the game involved knocking balls through wickets set up in no regular design, but played through in absolute order. Every pall - mall game proved different, since players first arranged the wickets in whatever order seemed most fun or challenging. Players went pell-mell from one end of the course to the other, or half way, or diagonally, or in widening circles. Maybe they exhausted themselves.

Scholars think billiards evolved as a winter, diminutive, indoor offshoot of pall - mall in France around 1480. Golf probably evolved from pall - mall, too, with rougher courses but a regular order of holes. All anyone knows about croquet is that it arrived in England from Ireland in 1851 and took the nation by storm.

Even its name remains mysterious. Croquet might be a corruption of crockett, an old English word from a French root designating a crooked or hooked stick, perhaps one like a shepherd's crook. But the word explains nothing of the Irish origin of the game.

Croquet blossomed because Victorians decided that women might play it privately around men, and might even play it with men. As perhaps the first mixed-sex sport, it evidenced both restrictions and experiments. English men and women tended to play it behind houses, on private property, not in public parks. But even in private surroundings, teenagers pushed all sorts of social boundaries.

Girls and women routinely cheated. Long skirts masked the subtle kick that directed an opponent's ball away from a wicket or stick. Advice books counseled male players to ignore such behavior. Just playing a lawn game with women should delight them, and judging female morality according to sporting codes meant philosophical disaster.

Flirtation drove croquet rules. Knocking an opponent's ball into the shrubbery meant a chance to follow the opponent into the undergrowth to help him or her find the ball. Young Victorians loved the game.

While the Civil War impeded the popularity of croquet in the United States, many families finally found a use for back lawns. They smoothed the ground and mowed grass short, then enjoyed a simple, slow-paced game filled with accidental blunders.

But croquet lawns paradoxically rescued tennis from near oblivion.

Charles Goodyear perfected rubber balls in the late 1850s, and soon Europeans and Americans had begun hitting bouncy balls over nets bisecting the smooth lawns created for croquet. Again the Civil War slowed the development of what many people soon called lawn tennis, but the privacy of the game enticed many women to play with men while shielded by backyard fences and shrubbery.

Badminton followed, as a sort of lawn tennis light. Some families thought it consumed less space, and as lawn tennis developed into a serious sport, families realized that badminton required no fences to keep shuttlecocks from slamming into neighboring yards.

Nowadays, the New England tennis elite plays on clay courts installed by the Boston Tennis Court Construction Co., a longtime Hanover firm that uses laser-equipped, miniature, earth-moving machines to produce state-of-the-art surfaces.

Ultra-modern clay gives a unique bounce to tennis balls, even as it harks back to an era before lawn tennis, but it soothes feet that might be harmed playing atop asphalt or other hard surfaces. A clay tennis court makes any thoughtful observer muse on the varying speed of games over centuries.

Croquet, lawn tennis, and badminton became known as lawn or grass games, not the field sports Americans play in woods and marshes but not the flat-ground sports played on public turf, either.

Lawn games prospered through the 20th century as informal, slow-paced, mixed-sex, and liable to interruption.

On long summer days, the games encourage children to exercise, and on summer evenings they let adults blunder a bit and laugh. No one need muse much on historic origins. The games are American now and played according to rules that vary a bit from backyard to backyard.