One day in 1977, Betty Burchfield was flipping through a magazine in the beauty parlor in her hometown of Stamping Ground, Kentucky, when she saw an article about a recently founded organization called the United States Croquet Association. As it happened, Betty’s husband, Archie, took more than a passing interest in croquet, so Betty tore out the article and gave it to him that night at supper, unknowingly launching one of the unlikeliest plotlines in the history of American sports.

Both forty years old in 1977, Archie and Betty had grown up in Stamping Ground, a sleepy bluegrass community of seven hundred some twenty miles from Lexington. They met in high school, where Archie starred in basketball and baseball and Betty was a cheerleader, and their childhoods seemed to have sprung right out of the Archie and Betty comic books. Betty was the prettiest girl around, with blonde hair and sweet, wide green eyes. Archie ran three and a half miles to school each day and earned a reputation as both an athlete and a prankster: One night, with a friend, he stranded a live goat atop the town’s water tower. Both their families farmed tobacco and raised a few cows and some hay, as did Archie after trying out college for six months on a basketball scholarship. He married Betty when they were twenty-one, and they had three children, David, Shari, and Mark, and became the legal guardians of Archie’s much younger sister, Reba. In 1973 Archie bought a sixty-acre farm outside of town. He planted twenty of those acres in burley tobacco, put the rest in hay, and bought fifty or sixty cows. He named the place ABC Farm. The A stood for Archie, the B for Betty. The C stood for croquet.

He had begun playing the game in 1961, when he and Betty lived in town. Each night when they went to bed, they could see lights in the distance that stayed on until late. Archie wondered what they were for, and one night he drove over to find out. The lights, it turned out, illuminated a croquet court behind the Stamping Ground Christian Church on which a group of local men played each night. Archie knew about croquet, of course—everyone knew about croquet in Kentucky, where residents had avidly played a unique version of the backyard game, known as Kentucky croquet, on hard-packed clay courts ever since the Depression—but he had always thought of it as an old man’s game. It turned out he was right. The “old men” behind the church that night invited him to play and then beat him like a rented mule. Then they laughed about it.

Losing at anything, let alone being ridiculed, didn’t sit well with Archie. He got hold of a mallet and practiced at the church every day when no one was around. After two weeks, he returned one night to play, pretending he hadn’t hit a ball since his first time. Once he had whipped the men behind the church, Archie took his tractor and scraped out two courts on his farm. He practiced on them nearly every day for two years, from whenever he finished his farm work until bedtime, with Betty bringing his suppers down to the court. In 1962 he won his first district tournament. By 1977, when Betty gave him the magazine article, Archie had won several state championships in both singles and doubles, and the family spent virtually all of its vacation time going to and from croquet tournaments, much to the children’s chagrin.

The pictures in Betty’s article showed people dressed up in white clothes, holding tall, cool drinks and standing around flower-bordered croquet courts laid out on grass. One photograph showed the founder and president of the United States Croquet Association, a man named Jack Osborn. Intrigued, Archie got his number and called him up in New York City. “Understand you boys play some croquet,” he said to Osborn and then invited him to bring his two best players to Kentucky for a match. Uncharmed, Osborn was neither slow nor particularly polite in telling Archie that he and his rube buddies could never hope to compete with the high strategy and skill levels of USCA players. Then he hung up. Which sounded to Archie a lot like being laughed at.