Croquet

Croquet is, of course, a sport known around the world as an excellent excuse to drink in public. And it serves this purpose well: the combination of jealousy, violence, rage, and color-coded balls often lead to alcoholism.

This is, however, only the tip of the proverbial ice sculpture: croquet is a fine, noble sport enjoyed for thousands of years by poofters, punters, and the occasional berk. The goal of this game is to reach the home staff before all comers, which explains the use of mallets – one must be ready at all times to defend one's position against interlopers, other players, and pedestrians with too much curiosity and a failing of respect for the painted ball.

This game, like many others, originates in deeper, darker areas of history (quite like basketball's iniquitous origins in the middle ages as a form of torture); namely, it comes from the lotus fields of the deep orient. The mallets were used, traditionally, to crush the lotus's delicate blossoms into a fine, shapeless, soulless pulp – the pulper (for the pulper was so called) would use a living child as pestle, scattering the blossoms along the child's back and pounding the mallet about wildly until the blossoms were no more. The juice, liberally mixed with the resulting bodily fluids, was then squirreled away in a large plastic box, in which a variety of balls, color-coded for easy identification, were rolled. Archaeologists believe the red balls were filled with mercury, and the black balls represented peace.

Like all familiar, daily rituals, these permutations took on a significance far outweighing their soporific roots. Descendants of the lotus blossom trade believed the mallets could be used to ward off spirits, and indeed, the haunting of the Savoy was ended by the judicious use of a blue croquet mallet, a red ball, and three wickets, sharpened into vicious tines.

The Vikings used croquet mallets to settle duels amongst children, in place of legal trials. Blankets were spread over the ground, and the combatants had to stay within the clothy confines. Each participant was given three mallets and three balls – for hurling – hence the traditional six of each sets one might find in a local croquetery. The child with the least shattered mallets and hurled balls when an opponent gave up was declared the winner.

The Romans, infatuated with the barbarians, adopted this game as well, giving it a place of high honors in the coliseum. It's said that Spartacus won the loyalty of a century of Danish slaves because of his coliseum-won prowess at the hammer and hurl – as croquet was then called, as it was the style at the time.

The sport as we know it has been attributed to many sources: one such claims Tate and Hamilton, pressed by society into a duel, spread their picnic blankets in a park and had at each other with mallets blazing. Then, of course, one tripped over a wicket, and shot his opponent in the face. Thus, so the story goes, was the game born.

This is, of course, mere fancy. Some anthropologists and popular culture critics claim it is precisely this surfeit of apocryphal stories about the game that make it so popular with the foolish, fond, and moon-pated. However, the real origin is much more mundane.

Napoleon decreed it so to keep his forces in order before the battle of Waterloo.