Professor Bernard Neal offers his homeland something it has come to think of as beyond its reach — a British champion at Wimbledon.
Neal has won his title on the hallowed grass of the All England Club 37 times. This year, at the age of 81, he hopes to do it again.
This week the champion is only a distinguished face in the crowd as the aristos of tennis grunt and whack their way to silverware.
But later this year it will be Neal’s turn when he prepares to defend his title as Wimbledon’s leading croquet player.
The stars of croquet — the game for which the All England Club was originally founded — do not conform to the self-denying model of total sportspeople.
”Nobody bothers about diets,” says Neal. ”Nobody bothers about physical training.” He does practise, however.
Far from a leisurely afternoon on the lawn with tea and sandwiches, the professor’s matches are serious, hour-long affairs.
Croquet singles involves two players, six hoops, a peg and four balls — coloured blue, black, red and yellow. Players are assigned two balls each. The aim is to knock each of them through the hoops, once in each direction, then hit the peg.
The unique feature of croquet is that if you hit another player’s ball, you get to put the two balls in contact with each other and strike them together.
Despite its vague similarity to snooker, Neal is pessimistic about croquet’s chances of ever becoming a television sport, less because Britain’s Croquet Association has only 1 600 members than because the tactics are incomprehensible to the casual viewer.
Nor have the world’s croquet powers — Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa — ever had the muscle to get it considered for an Olympic event.
But there is nothing easy or phoney about real croquet, he insists.
”Association croquet is played on a lawn 31m by 25m,” says Neal. ”The clearance between the ball and the hoop is one-sixteenth of an inch. That is obviously a tough and skilful game.
”What bedevils croquet is manufacturers who sell garden-party croquet sets with extremely wide hoops.
”It’d be rather unfair if somebody said ‘I play tennis’ and then you went to their garden and saw a net sagging in the middle, 60cm high, and them playing with rubber balls and wooden bats.” —