In the summer of 1981 my family took a cross-country trip from our tiny college town of Eureka, Illinois to spend the summer Claremont, California, where we would live in a loaner house that was part of an affluent retirement community. My father was on sabbatical from his professorship and planned to spend a few months writing. I have many memories of this trip, but the three big ones were: 1) going to Disneyland, where I was able to experience Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and the 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea: Submarine Ride, both of which are now but memories; 2) the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is now a classic but at the time arrived seemingly out of nowhere with almost no promotion (Superman II was supposed to be the biggest movie that year); and 3) afternoons playing roque.
I remember the day my father first described the sport of roque to my mom, my brother Rob, and me over the dinner table. He said that a group of the retirees at the village were all hooked on a game that was sort of like pool, except instead of a table, it was played on a big hard court, and the players used mallets and hoops like croquet, but you hit your ball using a cueball, and also there was also a sort of a curb around the entire court, so that players could make bank shots, like the rails of a billiards table. I was confused but intrigued, and then my dad said that if we were interested, we were allowed to use the roque court when no one else was there—as long as we took part in its cleaning and upkeep.
The next day, Rob and I watched a game and it was fascinating. The court was only a short walk away in a central shared area of the community, surrounded by short palm trees. It was recessed into the ground and dog-eared at each corner, resembling an emerald gem cut. The surface was warm red clay, much like that of a clay tennis court, and it was dusty and got on the soles of the shoes of the elderly gentlemen who carefully and precisely lined up their shots. The mallets were short, compared to croquet mallets, and they had a soft rubber head on one side, for better control and possible spin on the cueball. The wickets were thick metal and were permanently anchored in place by cement below the clay. And boy howdy were the players serious. There was absolutely no talking when someone was taking his turn, and usually none after as well, unless to murmur approval for a good shot or to sympathetically click their tongues for a bad one.
My father had apparently petitioned the locals on Rob’s and my behalf—perhaps he realized we had little to do that summer on a daily basis—because a couple of the aged fellows took us aside and took us through the rules, which were mostly the same as croquet’s except when they weren’t. They showed us the proper way of holding the mallet straight up between the legs and making contact with the cueball. But most importantly, they showed us how to maintain the court. It had to be swept clean of debris (the California foliage produced stray leaves year-round). It had to be lightly sprinkled with water, to prevent cracking in the sun. When it inevitably did crack, there was a reserve of clay powder that was sifted into the fissure by hand and wetted. Finally there was a large metal roller, pushed like a lawn mower, that was used to keep everything level.
If the sport of roque is remembered at all today, it’s as a plot point in Steven King’s 1977 novel The Shining (but not in the Kubrick film adaptation of 1980). In the novel, the haunted Overlook Hotel features a roque court, and towards the start of the book the hotel’s owner, Stuart Ullman, describes the structure to Jack Torrance, the troubled author who has taken on a position as winter caretaker:
“It was Derwent who added the roque court I saw you admiring when you arrived.”
“Roque?”
“A British forebear of our croquet, Mr. Torrance. Croquet is bastardized roque. According to legend, Derwent learned the game from his social secretary and fell completely in love with it. Ours may be the finest roque court in America.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Jack said gravely. A roque court, a topiary full of hedge animals out front, what next? A life-sized Uncle Wiggily game behind the equipment shed?
Late in the novel, after he has been possessed by the malevolent spirit of the hotel, Jack uses a roque mallet to terrorize his wife and child, as well as to mutilate his own face (early King novels, am I right?). It’s remarkable that King went so out of his way to feature a forgotten sport and then get absolutely nothing right about its history. Roque is an American invention, developed in New York and named by Samuel Crosby in 1899; the name was derived by removing the first and last letters of “croquet.” Croquet itself was not a particularly old sport at the time. The earliest description of that game comes from 1856 in London, although it seems likely to have derived from previous vernacular sources. When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, the Queen of Heart’s croquet game, played with flamingo mallets and hedgehog balls, was a reflection of a recent craze for the invention.
Roque was something of an overnight sensation at the turn of the century. The innovations it brought to croquet greatly increased opportunities for skillful play, and the permanent courts, which required a significant investment of resources, made it into a serious sport for serious players. Competitive roque was played by two teams of two players and high-level play included the technique of hitting your ball into your partner’s ball, thus pushing the two balls along in tandem.
How big did roque get? It was a sport in the 1904 Olympics, replacing croquet, which was an event in 1900. The United States won all the medals, largely because roque wasn’t played outside of the country. In his 1954 novel Sweet Thursday, a sequel to Cannery Row, John Steinbeck spends a chapter describing how the town of Pacific Grove, California became torn apart by a rivalry between retiree players and fans of two opposing roque teams:
Once, during its history, Pacific Grove was in trouble, deep trouble. You see, when the town was founded many old people moved to the retreat, people you’d think didn’t have anything to retreat from. These old people became grumpy after a while and got to interfering in everything and causing trouble, until a philanthropist named Deems presented the town with two roque courts.
Roque is a complicated kind of croquet, with narrow wickets and short-handled mallets. You play off the sidelines, like billiards. Very complicated, it is. They say it develops character.
In the novel, Deems, the benefactor who paid for the courts regretted the rift they were causing and had them bulldozed in the dead of night right before a big tournament.
While I was researching the history of roque for this essay, I discovered that in its basic form it did not use a cueball, and that the version I had been taught was called “two-ball” roque. There was also, apparently, a version called “royal” roque, but what that entailed I can only imagine. In any case, roque’s popularity faded quickly after World War II. The American Roque League last published official rules in 1959 and the National Two Ball Roque Association las published its rules in 1961. In 2004 the American Roque and Croquet Association suspended its national roque tournaments.
A 2011 article in Croquet World Online Magazine details the construction of a contemporary court in Stuart, Florida. Its builder, Chris Bullock, remembered the game from having played it at Cape Cod in the 1950’s. The article say that Mr. Bullock and his friends play a new variant, “golf” roque, designed to be faster-playing. This article, now more than a decade old, is the most recent mention of play I could find, and I wonder if Bullock’s court sparked new interest or if it was the last of the dodos.
Whether or not there’s anyone left playing the game today, roque left a lasting impression in my mind, mostly for the memory of one ill-fated evening. It was late in my family’s stay in Claremont and Rob and I were a bit squirrelly with the realization that we were heading home soon after two and a half months. And we were going to miss roque. Generally we played in the late mornings because those were the only times that the courts were free. But that evening Rob and I decided we wanted to play late.
It had been raining that day, which of course is rare in southern California, and the court was a bit tacky, but we were determined to go through the upkeep routine, because that was in its own way as fun as playing. There was a sizable crack and I thought we should really fill that in as much as we could so we heaped on a few handfuls of the clay dust, but it wasn’t really settling in place, so we pulled out the hose and soaked the pile through. The court around the crack was already saturated and excess water from our repair attempt was puddling.
Now we had a sticky mound of clay that was noticeably higher than the rest of the court. So we did what seemed obvious—we pulled out the roller and set to work, running it back and forth as if we were making a pie crust. The mound was not getting smaller, so we took running starts; and then disaster struck: a layer of the court peeled off entirely, stuck to the roller, leaving a gash about two feet long, six inches wide, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick. The tacky clay had crumbled unevenly and the exposed surface was pockmarked and cratered.
We were horrified. We had been entrusted with the use and care of these men’s most prized possession, their passion in life, and we had ruined it. I was absolutely losing it while Rob was trying to figure out how we might fix things. The answer seemed to be more clay, and more rolling, but now nothing stuck at all. Any powder we put down just added the smear stuck to the roller, which would not scrape off. Darkness was falling, and we were supposed to return to the house. Eventually, we simply gave up. We replaced the roller and the hose and walked back in shame. We didn’t tell our parents, but we knew that the next day there would be a reckoning. I didn’t sleep well that night.
Late the next morning, Rob and I walked slowly out the back door and onto the path that lead to the scene of our crime. I played through scenarios in my head, mostly involving us having to somehow pay for the damage with a lien on any future wages, which were more than a decade off. I also imagined the sad retirees returning home to their wives and trying to hold back the tears. But instead, what greeted us was nothing of the sort. There were four old guys, lost deep in play at a forgotten sport. The court was immaculate. Nothing was ever said.
