The British Open Croquet Championships is a long established
event
which is hosted by the Croquet Association.
There are both Singles and Doubles Championship titles. This
event
was combined together with the WCF World Championship in 2001 -
there, in London, I saw Jacques Fournier play against Reg Bamford in
the semifinals - Reg went on to win his first (of 4) World
Championships against Robert Fulford in game 5 in the best of 5
final. (There were lots of trophies awarded at the end of this
week long event.) (During this British open, Reg won two games
with sextuple peels SXP, which is the 2nd time an SXP was done in
the British Open Finals - the first was done by Keith Wylie against
Nigel Aspinall in 1971.)
The following reports are extracted from Chris Williams, the
Croquet
Association,
Croquet World Online Magazine and the Nottingham Board.
In July 2008, Ben Rothman and Paul Bennett teamed up to represent
the
United States on the Solomon Cup in Manchester England played in
Heaton
Park. Danny Hunneycutt and Stewart Jackson were fellow team
mates
along with Ron Lloyd and David Bent. The US team faired well
against the British team in spite of our defeat. Ben and I
were
put on the BBC radio news early in the week and Danny Huneycutt, our
team captain, was on the BBC TV along with Keith Aiton, the British
team captain. At the end of the tournament, in the last
singles
match against Stewart, Keith Aiton pulled off a tremendous
demonstration of a difficult sextuple SXP peel-out followed by a
spectacular octuple OXP peel-out.
The team stayed over to play in the British Open, Ben and I played
as
doubles partners and made it to the playoffs against fellow teammate
Danny Huneycutt and David Goacher. Danny and David made it to
the
finals against Robert Fulford and James Death.
In singles, Paul Bennett made it to the third round of playoffs
against
Johnathan Kirby, and to the semifinals of the plate against Chris
Patmore.