"Awfully Good Show"

The playing field of London's Roe-hampton Club had been groomed to billiard-table smoothness for the 76th annual croquet (in England, rhymes with pokey) championship of the world. Four enterprising foreigners--two Irishmen, an Australian and a South African--had managed to get entered among the 41 starters. But they went down quietly, and after that it was an All-England affair. The finalists, tall, willowy 45-year-old defending Champion H. O. Hicks (five-time winner since 1932) and stout 60-year-old Geoffry Reckitt, put on what most spectators decided was an "awfully good show."

In the first game Hicks set a fast pace. Using an unorthodox side stroke, something like a golfer's putting stroke, he played around the course without a miss, posted a perfect 26. Reckitt, sticking to the conventional between -the -knees swing, flubbed early, got a meager eight, and Hicks won the game: plus-18, i.e., the difference in scores.

After losing the second, minus-17, when Reckitt himself shot a perfect game, Defender Hicks played the rubber game with a grim seriousness usually frowned on in the garden variety of croquet. Kneeling, crouching, lining up every stray blade of grass for possible deflections, he got his second perfect game of the day. The spectators were sitting on the edge of their campstools when Reckitt made a strong finishing bid, but only a few shots from the final peg, he missed a difficult carom and the deciding game went to Hicks, plus-five.

For Britons, whose athletes had been losing to foreigners all summer in golf, cricket, tennis, boxing and soccer (TIME, July 17), Englishman Hicks's title was some consolation. But no one got very excited about it: only 100 diehard croquet fans had turned out to watch.

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