Jul. 22nd, 2009 04:50 pm
Rogue mallet
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muckefuckToday was the staff association summer picnic. I started if off playing frisbee and ended refereeing (if that indeed is the correct term) a croquet match. It was, as I suspect most such matches are, civilised and a tad dull--in other words the polar opposite of the games I remember from my childhood. Although I did my best to explain and encourage antisocial activity, the only croquet (i.e. whacking about someone else's ball) occurred at the very end between the last two players involved, and very much for form's sake.
In my day, we would never have allowed ourselves to win as gracefully as today's champion. Instead, we took full advantage of a loophole in the conditions for winning: You're not out of the game until you've hit the stake at the end. Whoever might be well in the lead would carefully avoid this while guiding the ball through the last two wickets. If ever it looked like someone else might be close to completing the course, you could always race back to strike the post and win. Otherwise, you had license to bounce from player to player leaving havoc in your wake.
We called it "going rogue". It might not have been as enticing a proposition if not for the fact that we were ignorant of another important rule, namely that you only get credit for striking the same ball once per turn. (That is, if you hit another's ball and decide to take the two strokes, you can't immediately use one of them to strike the ball again and be left with three.) Or if we'd handled out-of-bounds in a similar to association football. Instead, we had a family rule of "play it where it lands" which only failed to apply to balls knocked onto the pavement (which inevitably meant a roll to the bottom of the hill we lived on).
In my day, we would never have allowed ourselves to win as gracefully as today's champion. Instead, we took full advantage of a loophole in the conditions for winning: You're not out of the game until you've hit the stake at the end. Whoever might be well in the lead would carefully avoid this while guiding the ball through the last two wickets. If ever it looked like someone else might be close to completing the course, you could always race back to strike the post and win. Otherwise, you had license to bounce from player to player leaving havoc in your wake.
We called it "going rogue". It might not have been as enticing a proposition if not for the fact that we were ignorant of another important rule, namely that you only get credit for striking the same ball once per turn. (That is, if you hit another's ball and decide to take the two strokes, you can't immediately use one of them to strike the ball again and be left with three.) Or if we'd handled out-of-bounds in a similar to association football. Instead, we had a family rule of "play it where it lands" which only failed to apply to balls knocked onto the pavement (which inevitably meant a roll to the bottom of the hill we lived on).
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Croquette is only really fun