Shoot-out in Central Park

In September, with the cow money in Archie's pocket, he and Mark and Betty drove up to Manhattan in Archie’s old Mercury. None of them had ever visited there before, and by the time they left a week later, none of them wanted ever to go back. Flabbergasted by the inbound traffic, Archie swore that if he ever found the Holiday Inn, he would not move the car again until they left. Mark wanted to walk home the minute he saw the New York skyline, and that urge never subsided. Betty thought it had to be bad for your health to live so close to so many people. After they checked into the motel, she called Shari back home. “Honey,” she said, “I kinda wish you were up here with us, but I’m mostly glad you’re not.”

The tournament ran from Wednesday through Sunday, and most competitors got to New York at least two or three days early to practice on the Central Park courts. The Burchfields arrived in time for only one practice game. There to meet them in the park was a larger group of both competitors and spectators than Archie had ever encountered before. To their surprise, he and Mark found themselves somewhat notorious, greeted with a mixture of thinly disguised disdain, curiosity, and an underdog support that swelled throughout the five-day tournament, during which fans came to refer to them as the Kentucky Riflemen. Writers from the New Yorker and Interview wanted to talk to them and played up their outsider status. “You could feel the tension,” Scott Cohen wrote in Interview, “whenever the Burchfields took the field.”

All this was heady stuff for a twenty-year-old farm boy, and Archie worried that it might affect Mark’s play. “Just don’t think,” he told his son. “I’ll tell you what to do on every shot. All you have to do is do it.”
Mark had his own concern. He approached Betty with it the night before the tournament began, and Betty went to Archie. “Mark says he’s only worried about one thing. If it comes to where a match is on the line on one of his shots, he don’t want you to tell him how important it is. Can you do that?”

“Yeah, I reckon,” said Archie.

“I reckon you better,” said Betty.

Three unusually strong teams were competing at the ’82 Nationals. Richard Pearman and John Young, from Bermuda, were smart, experienced, and technically superb. Teddy Prentis and his father, Ned, had won the doubles title for two years running. The team considered the odds-on favorite was composed of the two best-known names in American croquet—Archie Peck and none other than Archie Burchfield’s old nemesis Jack Osborn. Described as “a devotee of New York café society” and black-tie-and-sneaker “croquet balls,” with an elegant shock of silver hair sweeping back from his high forehead, Osborn made no bones about his take on his chosen pastime’s place in the culture. “Croquet in America,” he had declared, “is a sport for the affluent class.”

Unlike Kentucky croquet, in which a match can last all day, USCA games have a time limit of an hour and a half. A player wins either by reaching twenty-six points first, or by leading at the end of regulation play. In the event of a tie when time expires, the match goes into overtime, but even so, USCA games rarely last two hours. Having once played a twelve-hour match on clay (and many over four hours long), Archie had developed mental stamina, Zennish patience, and a belief that “ninety percent of the game is played above the neck.”

Moving his wedding ring around with his thumb and superstitiously tapping on his ball with his mallet as he did on clay to rid it of dirt, he would stand between shots like a Percheron in a paddock of polo ponies, expressionless, mentally spinning out different strategies for up to four shots ahead, and waiting for an opponent’s slightest mistake. When his turn came, he was a quick and fearless shooter who was, it seemed to Archie Peck, impervious to pressure. Whenever it was Mark’s turn to shoot, Archie would walk over to where he wanted the ball to end up, tap the spot with his mallet, and say, “Just put it right here, son.”

Playing nearly flawlessly in this way, the Burchfields found themselves on Sunday facing Peck and Osborn for the national doubles championship. “It was as if some father-and-son team had come out of the sticks somewhere,” a person who witnessed the match observed, “and wound up playing Federer and Roddick in the U.S. Open finals.”

Unlike his partner, Archie Peck had become fond of both Burchfields and considered their presence at the Nationals a good thing for the sport. He had gone out of his way all week to treat the shy, homesick Mark kindly, and he and the senior Burchfield had developed a considerable liking and respect for each other. But that didn’t affect Peck’s feeling about the outcome of the game. “Let’s get this over in forty minutes,” he said to Osborn as they walked onto the championship lawn on that cool, clear September morning. “The champagne is already over there and I want some of it.”

Since Wednesday, the crowd had nearly tripled in size to more than two hundred people, many of whom cheered the Kentucky Riflemen when they appeared on the grass. They kept up their support throughout the match, although for most of it, it seemed all but certain that Archie Peck would indeed get to the champagne with little delay.

“We had the game in our pocket,” Peck explains. Now a hearty seventy-three, and director of croquet at the National Croquet Center in West Palm Beach, he recounted the last half of that match to me with relish. “About an hour in, Jack ran a break of nine wickets, and we basically had the game won. But Jack had such a big ego, and he really wanted to humiliate these guys, so, on his last shot, instead of playing it safe, he tried to go through a wicket at a nearly impossible angle and missed it. Well, that let Archie back in, and he pretty much ran the table. When he finished shooting, the time was nearly up and they were ahead twenty to nineteen. Jack still couldn’t make his wicket, so it was Mark’s time to shoot. I was dead on Mark”—meaning Peck could not hit Mark’s ball—“so Archie walked over and put his mallet head down between my ball and the wicket I was going for on my next shot. It was only about an eight-yard shot, and if I made it we’d be tied and go into overtime. Archie put his mallet head in the one spot that would block me from going through the wicket and said, ‘Just put the ball right here, son.’”

Then Archie walked over to Betty and whispered, “If he don’t make that shot perfectly, it’s all over. I feel like I need to tell him.”

“Don’t you dare,” his wife whispered back.

In the sudden, pin-drop silence, Mark lined up, shot…and put his ball exactly where Archie had indicated. Archie Peck still had time to try to jump his ball over Mark’s and go through the wicket to tie the game. He made the jump but failed to clear the wicket. The Burchfields were national champions.
The crowd erupted into five minutes of cheering and applause.

Archie Peck walked over and gave Archie Burchfield a “big bear hug.”

Betty ran onto the lawn, crying, and hugged Mark and then Archie. Archie hugged his son.

“Now we can go back home,” said Betty. “Thank God for that!”

“I gotta get the car outta New York first,” said Archie.

“And we got a stop to make,” said Mark. “The Bowhunters Warehouse in Pennsylvania.”

Epilogue: Basking in the Glow

After their New York victory, Archie and Mark Burchfield became overnight celebrities. Stories about them appeared in the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, People, USA Today, Interview, and Connoisseur, and Archie made voluble guest appearances on The Pat Sajak Show and Charles Kuralt’s On the Road.

Though much of the croquet world never fully accepted him socially, Archie became, ironically, that world’s biggest celebrity, and one of America’s most popular ambassadors for the game. On grass, he went on to win the national doubles title again in 1987 (with Damon Bidencope), two national club-team championships, and numerous regional titles. Despite rarely having the means to travel to many competitions or to play anything close to full-time, he remains fifth in the USCA’s overall cash prize ranking. He also continued to play on clay, and by the time he died, in February 2005, he had won nine Kentucky state titles in singles and seven in doubles. In 1995, he was inducted into the United States Croquet Hall of Fame. “Archie,” his friend Archie Peck told Sports Illustrated, “is the greatest thing that ever happened to this sport.”

Perhaps the only person in the annals of American athletics to win a national championship in a sport he didn’t even like, Mark Burchfield collected his bow and arrows in Pennsylvania, helped his dad harvest their last six acres of tobacco, and resumed hunting and fishing. When a reporter asked how he was adjusting to life back in Kentucky after New York, he said, “It’s quite a change from life in the fast lane, but we’re in a slow car.” Regarded by many croquet cognoscenti, including Archie Peck, as one of the most naturally talented players in the history of croquet, Mark never played in another tournament.