Windsor, California Such Splendor On the Grass

By MARGARET CARLSON

Allan Cleland's nose grazes the grass as he stoops to draw an imaginary line between his ball and the wicket in the final round of the Sonoma-Cutrer Vineyards' version of the World Croquet Championship on May 19. Ireland's Simon Williams, who the day before had been doing a fingertip push-up to calculate a similar shot, anticipates that Cleland will attempt a triple peel and, incidentally, not stain his immaculate summer whites. Australia's Cleland, like 23 of the other best players from Ireland, England, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and the U.S., has come to what some consider the best croquet court in the world to wrest the title from New Zealand's Stephen Jones. "Bloody good," says Williams of the three-ball break. Cleland goes on to defeat Jones, 26-12, in a 90-minute match. The prize: an Omega watch, not much to those on the pro golf or tennis circuits but a king's ransom on the croquet tour and another sign that the once upper-crust game is trickling down.

Croquet as played in this stretch of paradise is a far cry from the backyard game forced on kids to keep them from killing one another before the hot dogs are served. The grownup version is a maze of complicated tactics, arcane terminology and bizarre rules played against a ticking stopwatch. A good player must have the wrists of Jack Nicklaus, the concentration of Bobby Fischer and the eye of Minnesota Fats. Ricocheting at precisely the right spot off the steel wicket is one way to get the grapefruit-size ball through the narrow hoop, anchored an unforgiving 9 in. into the ground with a clearance of one-sixteenth of an inch. A bewildering array of possible shots -- the simple roquet (a straightforward hit), the croquet (a split shot) and others, like the bisque, the take-off, pass roll, cut rush and cannon, that are too intricate to describe -- must be calculated a dozen moves in advance if a player is to peg out for a finish against a single stake in the center of the lawn. It helps to have a sadistic streak since it is as important to hamper an opponent with a difficult "leave" as it is to advance one's own game.

Under American rules, a player also has to worry about "deadness," a state almost as final in croquet as it is in life. A player whose ball has hit another ball is considered "dead" on that ball. He cannot hit it again unless he passes through a wicket. This can leave a player cooling his heels on the sidelines for a half an hour while his opponent hits through. Darryl Zanuck, one of old Hollywood's croquet fanatics, who included Harpo Marx, Samuel Goldwyn and Louis Jourdan, described the predicament: "When you're three-ball dead, you're just a useless bum."

Croquet originated in France during the late 1400s, migrated to England and Ireland in the 19th century and arrived in the U.S. in the 1860s. The game's popularity has waxed and waned over the years, but it is once again finding a serious audience. The U.S. Croquet Association, in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., boasts that sales of high-quality mallets and sets have doubled in the past three years, while the number of croquet clubs has grown from five in 1977 to over 300 this year. More people are buying backyard sets, and public courts are springing up in Tulsa, Phoenix and Rockford, Ill. The final round of the New York Championship Croquet Tournament was played on June 17 at public courts in Manhattan's Central Park before a hushed crowd.

Croquet makes golf, a game to which it is often compared, seem like a no- brain activity pursued on AstroTurf. It is hard to see how the game could miss. In what other sport can you sip champagne and nibble strawberries on a velvety green lawn in pristine outfits that will never suffer from sweat stains? Since mental acuity rather than muscles, speed or stamina is what matters, it is a truly coed sport where women can play men without a handicap. It is also perfect for those who are no longer thirtysomething or in perfect shape. American Croquet Association president Stan Patmor, his tailor-made plus fours obscuring a few extra pounds, has seen the Sonoma-Cutrer championships grow dramatically since he became tournament director in 1986. "The game works for everyone -- old, young, fit, not so fit. It's beautiful to watch, and it's beautiful to play."

Although at its most watchable the game is played in a Gatsbyesque setting in the wealthy enclaves of Palm Beach, Newport and the Hamptons, some blue collar is beginning to poke through the white. Many of the sport's ranked players trained on public courts; most of them work for a living and pay their own way to competitions around the world. At the vineyards' tournament, Dublin's Williams, a musician and graphics designer, was defeated by Debbie Cornelius, a secretary from England who had played a dairy farmer and an engineer. Players in Central Park included a bar owner, a steam fitter, a hairdresser, the maitre d' at New York City's Rainbow Room and Wall Street types.

Still, with upkeep of a 105-ft. by 84-ft. lawn running about $4,000 a year and a set of croquet equipment costing as much as $3,500, the sport's appeal to the masses is limited. The court at Sonoma-Cutrer, built on 16 in. of sand from Bodega Bay, is mowed three times a day during the tournament to exactly three-sixteenths of an inch by lawn-mower blades with the precision of Ginsu knives and then groomed with a metal comb by a greenkeeper. The dependable sogginess that keeps British courts so lush is helped along here by a state- of-the-art sprinkler and drainage system percolating at 32 in. an hour. The boundaries and hoops are rotated so that no spot of grass gets worn down, creating undesirable breaks.

And you have to be rich enough not to let something like the fear of fungus keep you awake at night. "Your court can disappear on you if you're not careful," says Tom Lufkin, a member of the game's hall of fame who has built his own court at his nursery in Northern California. Lufkin, who played for years on Samuel Goldwyn's two courts in Beverly Hills, recalls those glory years of the game when fierce rivalries between literary lions like Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman led to marathon grudge matches on the producer's courts. Woollcott once said, "My doctor forbids me to play unless I win." He played such a vicious game that his friends made a film in which he was burned at the stake for kicking his croquet partner. When Goldwyn died, his wife, who had built the courts as a present to her husband after he could no longer play golf, turned off the water supply. Two days later, says Lufkin, the court was gone and a way of life ended. But that was then.