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Nearly one month later and the debate surrounding the World Golf Croquet Championship reached a crescendo this past week. To start, Mark McInerney hit the Irish Times website with a compelling Q&A driven by a truly slanted interviewer. McInerney seemed to handle it well, but I find it interesting that the piece made their society section and not the sports section. Further, is it legit for a society page reporter to sport such a condescending attitude toward croquet? No way--
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2011/0820/1224302538156.html
The real action started though when Evan Newell had a piece posted on the Croquet Ireland site questioning comments Chris Clarke made during the live event commentary. Sportingly enough, Clarke was asked to post a response. It all made for great croquet talk and the fun pretty much carried over to the secret Thunderdome of croquet debate -- The Nottingham List. Sign up if you dare and you can catch up on the back and forth. My take is simple -- McInerney is world champion and there is nothing worth more than that. I do fear that the croquet establishment's focus on getting the "proper/true result" runs counter to the average fan's desire to root for the underdog or Cinderella. That of course does not apply in this scenario from my perspective as McInerney was nowhere near this category, but the approach to these events seems to targeted toward ensuring that such a scenario has plenty of opportunities to be snuffed out. The goal is not to protect ranked players -- the goal is to create drama.
James Hawkins has a wonderful piece on the front page of Croquet World on his efforts to get a club off the ground in Liverpool (www.liverpoolcroquet.co.uk). Of course, I found it compelling as I found it so parallel to my efforts to get a club built in South Kansas City. Check it out--
http://croquetworld.com/News/liverpool3.asp
The WCF posted an announcement for the Cairo International GC Open to be held October 1-6. More details--
/croquet-network-forum/post/1579716
The USCA announced that the GC Nationals to be held at the end of August in North Carolina has now shifted to December at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage, California--
/croquet-network-forum/post/1577101#post1577101
New Zealand has released a tentative 2011-2012 schedule. I couldn't identify the NZ Open in the list--
http://www.croquet.org.nz/?entityType=HTML&id=245
Going for a world record (the longest game of croquet)--
http://www.ripongazette.co.uk/news/ripon/ripon_s_record_breakers_longest_game_played_by_team_1_3695268