Jack Osborn - Assuming The Critic's Role

Assuming The Critic's Role

Osborn strongly opposed the USCA's sponsorship of International Rules events as a staple of American play. "The International Rules are not particularly suited to broader tastes of Americans," he told Croquet Magazine in 1987. "It is less tactically involved and far less interactive. I'm not saying that the British game doesn't have its merits, but it does not have appeal to the greatest number of American players."

To build a strong national association, Osborn thought it essential to provide USCA members with uniform standards, and only one game: the American Rules game. This policy gave rise to the formation of the American Croquet Association as a promoter of International Rules play. The rival association flowered for a while, then withered after most of the reforms it proposed were taken up by the USCA itself during the reign of Foxy Carter, who succeeded Osborn as USCA president in 1989.

But Osborn did succeed in establishing the American Rules as the dominant game in America. From the perspective of 1996, a strong case can be made that he was correct in his assessment of the relative prospects for the two games in the American culture. For while the western states produce most of the top-ranked players on the United States International Team, they provide little more than one tenth of the total membership base of the USCA.

In the early nineties, Osborn worked to develop Croquet International Limited as the leading supplier and distributor of quality croquet equipment in the United States. Osborn remained a strong figure in the USCA and the Croquet Foundation of America. He was a highly vocal critic of many of Foxy Carter's financial and administrative reforms.

In the subsequent presidency of Bill Berne, now in the final year of his second two-year term, Osborn's criticism of the organization became ever more strident, in tandem with the USCA's failing financial fortunes and the administrative chaos at headquarters that resulted in a 100 percent turnover of staff in a one-year period.

Such was the disarray in the USCA that Osborn voiced to many his fear that the USCA would not survive. His many friends and supporters rallied to honor him at an Appreciation Ball in Palm Beach produced by the Croquet Foundation of America and to let him know that the darkest hour for the USCA had passed, and they would not allow his creation to die.