Croquet is OK

Tom and I spent two years planning and then two years building our home on 360 acres near the sawmill in small town Greensboro, Georgia. We ended up with a big ole beautiful place that played background to an astonishing mix of good and evil. Shelley and Donny were engaged there and Sara and Eric lived the early part of their marriage in our guest house. Kathryn and David announced their engagement on our front steps. Two weddings and numerous receptions, fund raisers, family gatherings, high teas and croquet tournaments were hosted the 10+ years we lived there. A big barn and beautiful thoroughbred horses. Labradors and Jack Russells, cows, chickens, pigs for a while. The evil part - well that’s another story. It will be about the power plant.

We were nearly finished with the house and were standing on the sun porch looking at a huge, Grand Canyon gulley in what would be our back yard. “I think I’ll build a croquet court”, Tom said. I had learned by now that Tom was an out of the box thinker and I was passive about it - okay, sure honey. Also, I didn’t have any better ideas.

“Croquet courts,” Tom explained, “have to be level like a tennis court with grass like a putting green.” Soon dump truck after dump truck load of fill dirt arrived - I think there were about 40 a day for a full week. And it still sagged. And was lumpy.  So the dirt kept on coming, big efforts and machinery tried to level it, bent Bermuda sod was brought in and by the time the house was finished, in the spring of 1982, so was the court.

By now we had been contacted by someone from the United States Croquet Association, saying they had heard we were building “courts” and would like to send someone to see “them”. We had one ¾ size rolling court, but were excited to have an introduction to the Croquet Big Time.

It was pouring rain the Sunday they came - two carloads. Out tumbled several men and one woman all dressed in white, even their rain gear was white. They wanted to play. Tom was worried about anyone setting foot on his new court which was standing in several inches of water. They didn’t care and so we had our first little match. During play on a noticeable bump, Tom commented, “well, I’ve learned a lot - my next court will be full size and level.”

So he built not one, but two more courts, one of them lighted. And they were full size and level. They made a beautiful back yard and Tom loved tending to them. Out of all the parties we had, we only allowed dancing on the middle court twice...once for Tom's 50th birthday and again for Shelley and Donny's wedding reception.  Otherwise dancing, and a lot of it, was done on our big brick patio.

Our area of Georgia, only 80 miles from Atlanta, was changing. Georgia Power dammed up the Oconee river and developers swarmed in. Timber land was suddenly lakefront property or a golf course - I think there are 12 golfcourses, centered around the championship Reynolds Plantation complex. Tom convinced two of the resorts to install croquet courts, so we had five in the area - unheard of in the croquet world except at Palm Beach or Newport.

Our last big croquet tournament was “the Masters of Croquet” held the Saturday before the 1988 Masters and boasting a $35,000 first prize. I think some of the old timers were not happy that we had reduced their elite sport to playing for prize money, but they came anyway. A team from Australia won it. Southern Living Magazine was there and ESPN and a local Atlanta station. ESPN did a feature on Peter, who was the youngest champion in the country. Heady stuff.

We were invited to tournaments in Palm Beach, Scottsdale Arizona, Palm Springs, Newport and Hilton Head, but we mostly enjoyed playing in our back yard. After we had to leave it (yes, another story, and a long one) we talked about staying on the circuit, but Tom was very competitive and did not want to play with no place to practice.

During this time, mid to late 80s, we partied hard; smoked and drank too often and too much. Before the clubhouses at the lake were completed, our house was the gathering place for a core group of six or seven young, unmarried adults - who always felt free to bring friends and who always, it seemed, stayed for whatever meal it was time for. Some of these played key roles in the power plant story.

Tom stopped drinking liquor around 1992 and gave up beer (he was the Miller Lite king) a year or so later. He said, often and to anyone who would listen, that he wished he had never touched the first drop of alcohol.