Hays Brooks Butler - Balls on the Lawn

Text copyright 2014 by Brooks Butler Hays.
Illustrations copyright 2014 by Jeremy Stein.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-3327-0 (epub, mobi)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous edition as follows:

Hays, Brooks Butler.
Balls on the lawn : games to live by / by Brooks Butler Hays ;
Illustrations by Jeremy Stein
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4521-2639-5 (pbk.)
1. Games. 2. Outdoor games. I. Title.
GV1203.H3995 2014

796dc23

2013032641

Designed by L.J. Ortiz

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a mans life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Like Jeffersonian democracy, religious zealotry, and smallpox, lawn sports were destined for the New World. Stowed aboard the ships of early European settlers, stacked head to toe with the cultural ideals that would come to spawn Huckleberry Finn and MTV, lawn sports were fated to find their perfect habitat across the mighty Atlantic. The United States of America was always meant to be one giant grass lawn, waiting to be cleared, manicured, and readied for liquor-soaked leisure games.

If there is one lawn sport that blossomed most naturally in the soils of American life and culture, it is horseshoes.

Never mind that horseshoes were thought to have been first pitched by Roman soldiers and later banned by English lords. There is something deeply, distinctly American about the game. For instance, picture this: over 150 years ago, tattered Civil War infantrymen, weary with war and loose from one too many healthy swigs of recently-bartered corn whiskey, exchange pleasantries around a campfire. Eventually, out of boredom, or out of the anxieties of battle, or maybe both, they decide to pierce the grass of their camp with a couple of rusty iron rods.

They set the stakes some forty feet apart and lazily proceed to toss twisted hunks of metal at themthe steel shoes of army mules, to be precise. The game at this time is still a novelty, yet their enthusiasm grows with each toss. By the campfire, they are hollering and carrying on about ringers and leaners, while their superiors discuss flanks and cavalry positioning and high ground in the officers tents.

When one of them has amassed the proper number of points to be declared the victor, the game begins again. New players join, while the men on the sidelines tell stories of their wives, lovers, and family and occasionally tend to the fire so there is enough flame to light the playing field. In fleeting moments of silence, as they inhale on their corncob pipes, each man wishes quietly, separately, secretly that the preservation of the Union could be achieved in as pleasant and as bloodless a manner. If only.

Okay, maybe lawn sports are not always this romantic, but sometimes they are.

Yes, there is something uniquely, gloriously American, wonderfully patriotic (in a Whitman meets Southern Agrarian sort of way), about all lawn sportsnot just horseshoes, but the entire fruitful family tree. A simple ruggedness in the subtle poetry of miniature sport, in these contests designed for the everyman. This is true even in the fact that most lawn sports are themselves immigrants: bocce was imported from Europe (chiefly Italy), and croquet and lawn bowling were first seeded and germinated among Britains colonies throughout the world, from Bombay to Johannesburg to Brussels.

Lawn sports and unadulterated individualism share a natural affinity. No referees, no team sponsors, no stadiums, no media coverage, no ten-dollar hot dogs, no labor disputes (well, labor disputes are pretty American), no signing bonuses, no team meetings, no drug testing (certainly no drug testing). Just friends, some moonshine, and the perfect blend of camaraderie, leisure and impassioned competition.

Lawn sports are also inherently egalitarian. They are the epitome of Jeffersons original dream for the New Republic: one vast nation of small farms, a political citizenry of intellectual, self-sufficient homesteads. It is a moving thought. It didnt happen, but the closest approximation of that Ameritopian vision takes Jeffersons agrarianism a step further, carries out the great thinkers dream to its ultimate ends: every man, a plot of land, and a set of horseshoes, maybe even a shed full of lawn games. A country defined not by labor, but by leisure, by subtle flicks of the wrist (and often sizable drinking habits). A nation defined by lawn sports.

Okay, lets break the fourth wall here.

I fucking love lawn sports.

In the eccentric cloud-city of my dreams, in this old, weird America (which is so purely American that it is not America at all), in a small-town just down the road from Big Rock Candy Mountain, lawn sports are in fact the only method of competitionand even the main method of communication. Portly old men with mustaches and overalls intermingle with young intellectuals in skinny jeans and Elvis Costelloesque horn-rimmed glasses. In this gender-neutral, postracial, class-blind world, people of all ages and stripes stand side by side at the horseshoe pit.

Some are working class and gruff, others polished and well-educated; some derelict, others proper in custom and manner (it takes all kinds to populate an imaginary metropolis of lawn sports). But here there is no work to be done. The men and women of this dream-world are committed only to loafing, leisure, and casual competitionto lawn sports, small talk, and cocktails.

This fantasy world may strike some as simply a re-creation of college life, or more pointedly, of my own college life in particular: and maybe thats true. But would that be so wrong? It was a time and place when, for me and my friends, lawn games were held in such guarded reverence that little else mattered. All of our worries and cares, our regional affiliations, intellectual curiosities, unique insecurities, political pedestals, and class distinctions sloughed off in egalitarian companionship. Granted, in truth we were mostly white, male, and well-off, but with each other, we felt like a diverse and exotic group. Thursday through Sunday, little else moved us to action besides lawn sports. Sex was secondary, to be pursued once there was no more sun with which to light our lawn of sport. Intellectual pursuits were a side matter, to be squeezed in between hangovers on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And beer was as intrinsic as any other piece of sporting equipment. Yes, our lives were governed by an economy of leisure.