The women, dressed in white, mallets in hand, move so slowly and languidly that with the addition of billowing skirts and a tree or two they could be figures in the 1865 Winslow Homer painting Croquet Players.

Yes, the Vineyard has formal croquet competition, and you can skip all the stereotypes about rich snobs with last names for first names. The scene is timeless. The players are pleasant, modest, agreeable, and other good things. And, oh, can they compete.

Working their way around two fenced-in, six-wicket courts adjacent to the Edgartown School and the Martha’s Vineyard Boys and Girls Club, they’re enjoying the Edgartown Croquet Club’s annual doubles tournament on a lazy September Sunday. The conversation is as good as the play. Sitting in the shade of a large table umbrella and listening to the croquet tales of tournament director Jack Schott, I feel like a history buff getting an exclusive lesson from David McCullough.

“This is a Waterford-style tournament, where everybody plays everybody else,” says Schott, a former psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who verged into behavioral finance and is now a portfolio manager and director for Steinberg Global Asset Management in Boston and Boca Raton, Florida. With soft facial features, Schott, who summers at East Chop, looks far younger than his sixty-five years. “At the end, the player with the most points teams with number four against two and three.”

The nine women and one man who come from all over the Island to compete – all between the ages of forty and seventy-nine, with blonde or gray hair, and euphonious names like Norm Mulroney and Cecily Greenaway – occasionally stop play and say things like, “Is yellow dead on red?” and, “Are you clean?” Competitive croquet is simple to learn but sophisticated in vocabulary and tactics. A standard reference book, Winning Croquet, published by Simon and Schuster, runs fully 224 pages. This is not your childhood game on Uncle Leo’s lawn. The Edgartown players keep hitting through wickets, only to proceed backward, the better to give partners the chance to bounce shots off them and earn the two extra turns that accrue when one ball strikes another.

“Mallets weigh three to four pounds, and you take a few hundred swings and walk several miles a day,” Schott says. “Croquet is like golf with its hand-eye coordination. Don’t grip the club too tightly! It’s like billiards on the lawn: you can run an entire game using what we call a four-ball break with your own ball, a ball at the wicket, a ball at the next wicket, and a ball in the middle. And it’s like chess or bridge, because you strategize while evaluating opponents’ skills and knowledge. A good player can recount an entire game.”

Called away on a rules interpretation, Schott walks quickly onto the court using small steps and short hand movements and handles the query with a minimum of fuss. When he returns, I wonder about the proliferation of female players.

“Men and women, children over eight, and the elderly can play at the same level,” Schott says. “Women are enthusiastic players who enjoy such a social game. We have three tournaments every summer – they are held around cocktails or dinner parties at someone’s house. Our teams are about two-thirds women, and we played a home-and-home series – a home match at each club – with The Country Club of Brookline, whose team is mostly male. We won both times by wide margins.”

Nonetheless, the world’s best players – such as  Jacques Fournier, who got what may have been the first-ever croquet scholarship, at the University of Virginia – are men. “Strength is one factor, and a proclivity for sports is another,” Schott says. “There’s also a genetic factor: a man’s natural aggressiveness makes him want to play games more. The balance could change with more girls and women playing sports.”

At noon, players break for a lunch of sandwiches, raw vegetables, ginger ale or Diet Coke, and a mixture of nuts, raisins, and M&M’s. “Great breeze,” someone says. “Make sure you get plenty of fluids,” Schott says.

“I was at the Meadowood resort in Napa Valley,” says Cecily Greenaway, a psychotherapist and reference librarian in Vineyard Haven. “When I saw gorgeous courts and people playing in pristine white, I was hooked. Then I moved to the Vineyard and heard about the free clinics Jack gives on the Edgartown courts [Tuesdays at 4 p.m., Saturdays at 9 a.m.]. I suggested to my son Tim Rapuano, who had an injury to his knees and had almost given up on finding a sport, that he’d like it. As it happened, he found his true sport in croquet, where many players are former tennis enthusiasts with bad knees.
“Tim’s a quality-control specialist at the Wyeth labs in New Jersey and the kind of focused, single-minded, and systematic person who’s perfect for the game. He bought a mallet and won the Osborn Cup matches in Central Park. Now he’s encouraging me to play.” So persuasively that she enrolled at the US Croquet Association School in West Palm Beach.

“It’s the best deal going when you think of all the fun and all the play,” adds Geri Macaulay, who plays from her homes in Vineyard Haven, Newport, and Vero Beach, Florida.

“Jack’s an excellent player and teacher,” adds Sally Nicholas, a Chappaquiddick resident who enjoys bridge when she isn’t wielding a mallet. “He, Jim Turner, and Pete McChesney bring us to the clinics. They’ll have better players on one court and instruct beginners on the other for the whole two hours.”
The talk segues naturally to . . . prisons? “I was Albert DeSalvo’s psychiatrist,” Schott says, referring to the suspected Boston Strangler, who was jailed on a rape conviction and killed by a fellow inmate. “He rubbed everyone the wrong way at the prison, but he told entertaining stories.”

On that note, play resumes. With the afternoon stretching before us, I ask Schott to talk about croquet history. It is believed that the game started in thirteenth- or fourteenth-century France, possibly by shepherds using their crooks (hence the French name, which means “little hook”). Croquet eventually became a favored pastime of wealthy people giving lawn parties, and the word pell-mell arose from helter-skelter games at Great Britain’s Pall Mall estate. With their passion to codify things, the English wrote the first rule book, sponsored the first tournament in the 1860s, and spread it around British commonwealth countries. The Wimbledon tennis tournament is played at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.

American croquet boomed in the Victorian era until the bluenoses inevitably noticed an abundance of drinking, gambling, and co-ed socializing on the greenswards. “The game is the gaping jaw of Hades,” a puritanical magazine writer editorialized in 1898. Banned in Boston, croquet soon died away elsewhere. Despite an 1869 blast by a preacher at a Methodist camp meeting in what was then Cottage City and now Oak Bluffs (“. . . liable to lower the moral standard of the camp”), a negative 1876 editorial in the Vineyard Gazette, and a 1934 Boston Herald editorial that accused women of manipulating balls under their flowing skirts, the game survived on the Vineyard. A similar game, roque, had devotees on seven Island courts.

In the 1930s, Herbert Bayard Swope, executive editor of the New York World, and critic Alexander Woollcott played on a court at Swope’s estate on Long Island. At a court on Lake Champlain, Woollcott introduced the game to playwright George S. Kaufman, poet Dorothy Parker, and other literary lights of the Algonquin Round Table. Swope’s major opponent, presumably giving voice to his efforts, was Harpo Marx, although the best in the crowd was novelist Kathleen Norris. Circulating among influential people, croquet caught fire with the likes of diplomat W. Averell Harriman and producers Darryl Zanuck and Samuel Goldwyn. Actor Louis Jourdan used to place a lighted cigarette on the finishing stake, run the court, and take another drag
before the cigarette went out. But celebrities do not mass-participation make. By the late 1950s, according to Winning Croquet, the game had lapsed to desultory suburban contests with rubber-tipped mallets. Only in Kentucky and the North Carolina hamlet of Aulander, according to Schott, did a tradition of high-level play continue.

Croquet emerged anew in the 1960s, when residents of the Hamptons took up the game on Long Island, creating the New York Croquet Club and accepting an invitation from the Palm Beach Club for a match in early 1969. Competition was interrupted for a day while the New Yorkers watched Joe Namath and the Jets win the Super Bowl in Miami. Spearheaded by Jack Osborn, who organized the United States Croquet Association in 1977 and promoted the game until his death in 1996, the New York club played a challenge match with England in the 1970s and was beaten badly. You can imagine how the Yanks reacted. They started creating clubs and competing seriously. The association began playing Britain in the Solomon Cup series, named after yet another Jack, Jack Solomon. Today there are about 300 USCA clubs with 3,600 members and a competitive tour from the Florida Keys to Vermont.

The Vineyard game has spread slowly, by word of mouth. When Schott rented an Edgartown house in 1981, he heard about a July 4 exhibition with Jack Osborn and three other outstanding players at Ben Smith’s Point Way Inn. He watched, fascinated, and the next day attended a clinic run by Bostonians. Schott enrolled at the croquet association school in West Palm Beach, built a court at his Dover, Massachusetts, home, and played at Smith’s Edgartown Mallet Club from 1981 to 1997. When Smith sold the Point Way Inn and left the Island in 1997, play shifted to a court at the late Earl Radford’s home on Chappaquiddick. In 1999, retired judge Sherwood J. (Woody) Tarlow persuaded the Edgartown Parks Department to build the current courts – turf and one-eighth-inch bent grass by Donaroma’s Nursery and Landscape Services – which were unveiled on June 16, 2002. The open-admissions Edgartown Croquet Club has 24 active members – more than 100 people show up for clinics over the summer – who also play informal competitions on Chappaquiddick and East Chop courts. Schott often pairs skilled players with novice partners, and a handicap system of up to twenty extra shots (bisques) reduces player disparities through a flight system (as with chess, players compete against others of similar ability in one of three flights). Players who learn croquet in June have won tournaments in September.

Back on the Edgartown courts, Cecily Greenaway interrupts my reverie with a spectacular “jump shot.” Hitting downward, she induces her three and seven-eighths-inch-diameter ball to fly over another one and peel (a croquet term) through a wicket only one and one-sixteenth inches wider. Applause rings out. As people tire, though, play declines and good-natured insults fly through the air. “We’ve gotten to know each other very well,” says Schott’s wife Sally. “That’s why we use insults.”

Next door, raucous cheers follow a homer in the Bank Cup softball game between Martha’s Vineyard Co-operative and Dukes County Savings banks. “We need more of that here,” says Sally Schott. “No, we cheer like this,” Cecily Greenaway says, gently tapping her hands together.

When croquet play ends, for placing first overall Sally Schott wins a papier-mâché boat filled with dessert goodies; the grateful players give her husband an original glass ashtray by Deborah Buress. Croquet is too much fun to be enjoyed by so few people. Has anyone ever given a clinic to, say, a class of middle schoolers, I ask Jack Schott.

“We haven’t,” he says, “but we would.”

They should.