The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship

by Stephen Potter

  On the other hand, playing against the introvert crusty cynical type, remember that sportingness will be wasted on him. There must be no unsportingness on your part, of course; but a keen knowledge of little-known rules and penalties will cause him to feel he is being beaten at his own game. (See under ‘Croquet, rulesmanship in’.)

  When questioned about the etiquette of gamesmanship – so important for the young player – I talk about Fidgets. If your adversary is nervy, and put off by the mannerisms of his opponent, it is unsporting, and therefore not gamesmanship, to go in, e.g., for a loud nose-blow, say, at billiards, or to chalk your cue squeakingly, when he is either making or considering a shot.

  On the other hand, a basic play, in perfect order, can be achieved by, say, whistling fidgetingly while playing yourself. And I once converted two down into two up when playing golf against P. Beard, known also as the leader of an orchestra, by constantly whistling a phrase from the Dorabella Variation with one note – always the same note – wrong.1

  A good general attack can be made by talking to your opponent about his own job, in the character of the kind of man who always tries to know more about your own profession than you know yourself.

  Playing-for-Fun Play

  The good gamesman, like the good sportsman, never plays for large sums of money. But something can usually be made out of the situation if your opponent expresses a wish to play for the ‘usual half-crown’, or a wish not to do so. It is obviously easy for the gamesman to make his opponent feel awkward by countering his suggestion that they should play for stakes with a frank ‘Come, let’s play for the fun of the game’. Alternatively, if your opponent refuses your offer to play for half a crown here is a neat counter:

  LAYMAN: Half a crown on it? No, I’m not particularly anxious to play for money. What is the point? If one starts worrying about the pennies …

  GAMESMAN: Exactly. If money is important to you, much better not.

  LAYMAN: But I meant –

  GAMESMAN (friendly): Of course.

  Nice Chapmanship

  A bigger subject which may be introduced here revolves round the huge question of nice chapmanship and its uses. (I refuse to use the hideous neologism ‘nicemanship’ which I see much in evidence lately.)

  Here is the general principle: that Being a Nice Chap in certain circumstances is valuable when playing against extremely young, public schooly players who are genuinely nice. A train of thought can be started in their minds to the effect that ‘it would be rather a rotten trick to beat old G. by too much’. Thereby that fatal ‘letting up’ is inaugurated which can be the undoing of so many line players. R. Lodge, at sixty-five, always said that he had never been beaten, in a key match, by any decently brought up boy under twenty-five, and that he could always ‘feel ’em out by their phizzes’.

  Audience Play

  Nice chapmanship is, of course, closely associated with sportsmanship, especially in its relation to the question of playing or not playing to the audience. There is obviously some value in a good hearty ‘Have it again’ early in the game (of darts, for instance), or the lawn tennis ball slammed into the net after the doubtful decision, especially if this is done so that your opponent can see through the ploy2 but the onlookers cannot.

  But the experienced gamesman knows that if he is playing to a small audience he must make up his mind whether he is going to play to the audience, or whether he is going to retire behind an impersonal mask of modesty.

  In general, the rule holds – LET YOUR ATTITUDE BE THE ANTITHESIS OF YOUR OPPONENT’S; and let your manner of emphasizing this different attitude put him in the wrong.

  For example, if your opponent is a great showman, assume (e.g., at snooker) an air of modest anonymity; be appreciative, even, of his antics; then quietly play your shot, so that the audience begins to say, ‘I prefer G.’s game. He gets on with it, anyhow’.

  Per contra, when in play against a dour opponent, who studiously avoids all reaction to the audience, implying that ‘this is a match’ – then, by all means be the ‘chap who doesn’t care a damn’ … though ‘Of course – sh! – old L. is taking this devilish seriously so I must keep a straight face’.

  (There is some danger of counter-gamesmanship here. The layman, if he is wise, will pursue his poker-faced policy and you may find your assumption of ill-suppressed gaiety wearing thin. I have myself experienced a partial paralysis in this situation.)

  So much for some of the principal general ploys. Now for some common technical phrases.

  Ruggership and Ruggership Counter-Play

  Under the heading of ‘Ruggership’ comes all that great interplay of suggestion summarized in the phrase ‘Of course, this isn’t my game’, with the implication that ‘this game is rather an amusing game, but not grand, dangerous and classical like my game …’. If ‘my game …’. is rugger or polo or tennis (see under ‘Tennis players, how to press home advantage of, over lawn tennis players’), then very good work can be done with this gambit.

  But it has severe weaknesses, and a promising gamesman in his second year may be able to counter with some such simple inquiry as this:

  COUNTER-GAMESMAN (with interest): When did you last play rugger?

  GAMESMAN: Oh! How long since actually playing? I wonder.… I was talking to Leggers the other day –

  COUNTER-GAMESMAN: Yes, but how long is it since you played yourself? I mean what date, roughly, was it when you last held a ball in your hand?

  GAMESMAN (hard-pressed): 1913.

  COUNTER-GAMESMAN: A bit of a time. But that, I imagine, is one of the grand things about rugger. If you’ve ever kicked a rugger ball, at a prep school or home club, you feel that you’re a rugger player for the rest of your life.

  Much exaggerated praise has been churned out in honour of gamesmanship and its part in the building of the British character. Still, if we study the records, they do reveal not a little of courage in the overcoming of apparently hopeless odds. I am thinking, of course, of G. Tearle – not the actor, but the croquet-player. And, indeed, some of the prettiest effects of gamesmanship are to be seen when an expert in, say, croquet, plays golf, it may be, off the same handicap, against a real expert in, say, rugger – a man who really has played rugger, twice capped for England. The rugger man certainly starts with a tremendous advantage. His name is a legend, his game is glorious. Croquet is considered, by the lay world, to be piddling, The two meet on the common ground of golf; and even golf, to the rugger man, is considered fairly piddling. Yet I have seen Tearle not only break down this view but reverse it, so that in the end the Rugger international would sometimes even be heard claiming that he came from croquet people, but that his character ‘was not suited to the game’.

  Tearle by long practice actually made capital out of croquet. And let me add that Tearle’s triumph demonstrates once again that it is in these long-drawn-out reversal tactics that training and the proper diet stand you in such good stead.

  Counterpoint

  This phrase, now used exclusively in music, originally stood for Number Three of the general Principles of Gamesmanship, ‘Play Against your Opponent’s Tempo,’ This is one of the oldest of gambits and is now almost entirely used in the form ‘My Slow to your Fast’. E.g., at billiards, or snooker, or golf especially, against a player who makes a great deal of ‘wanting to get on with the game’, the technique is (1) to agree (Jeffreys always adds here ‘as long as we don’t hurry on the shot’); (2) to hold things up by fifteen to twenty disguised pauses. Pegtop tees for golf were introduced by Samuel in ‘33 for this use. The technique is to tee the ball, frame up for the shot, and then at the last moment stop, pretend to push the peg a little further in or pull it a little further out, and then start all over again. At the next hole vary this with Samuel’s ‘Golden Perfecto’ peg tee, made in such a way that the ball, after sitting still in the cup for two to three seconds, rolls off. (Fig. 4.)

  Through the green, the usual procedure is to frame up for the shot an
d then decide on another club at the last moment.

  Fig. 4. Samuel’s ‘Championship’ (2d.) and ‘Golden Perfecto’ (4/6) golf tees. A = ‘Cup’, B= ‘Neck’, C=‘Upper Shaft’ D=‘Lower Shaft’, E= Point or ‘Plungebill’.

  Note. Do not attempt to irritate partner by spending too long looking for your lost ball. This is unsporting. But good gamesmanship which is also very good sportsmanship can be practised if the gamesman makes a great and irritatingly prolonged parade of spending extra time looking for his opponent’s ball.

  At billiards, the custom of arranging to be summoned to the telephone on fake calls, so as to break your opponent’s concentration, is out of date now and interesting only as a reminder of the days when ‘couriers’ were paid to gallop up to the old billiard halls for the same purpose. In snooker, the usual practice is to walk quickly up to the table, squat half down on the haunches to look at sight-lines, move to the other end of the table to look at sight-lines of balls which may come in to play later on in the break which you are supposed to be planning. Decide on the shot. Frame up for it, and then at the last moment see some obvious red shot which you had ‘missed’, and which your opponent and everybody else will have noticed before you moved to the table, and which they know is the shot you are going to play in the end anyhow.

  For chess tempos see ‘Chess, tempi’.

  ‘My Tomorrow’s Match’

  In a Key Friendly, or any individual match which you are particularly anxious to win, the best general approach (Rule IV) is the expression of anxiety to play today, because of the match tomorrow. Construct a story that you are playing A. J. du C. Masterman.3 Or perhaps the name should be A. C. Swinburne (your opponent will feel he has vaguely heard of this name). Go on to say (if the game is golf) – ‘Do you mind if I practise using my Number One iron today?’ – (no need to use it or even have one) – ‘as I want to know whether to take it tomorrow’. Take one practice shot after having picked up your ball, at a lost hole. Seek the advice of opponent. Ask him ‘What he would do if he found himself playing against a really long driver, like A. C. Swinburne’.

  Game Leg (also known as ‘Crocked Ankle Play’, or ‘Gamesman’s Leg’4)

  ‘Limpmanship’, as it used to be called, or the exact use of minor injury, not only for the purpose of getting out of, but for actually winning difficult contests, is certainly as old as the medieval tourneys, the knightly combats, of ancient chivalry. Yet, nowadays, no device is more clumsily used, no gambit more often muffed. ‘I hope I shall be able to give you a game,’ says the middle-aged golfer to his young opponent, turning his head from side to side and hunching up his shoulders. ‘My back was a bit seized up yesterday … this wind.’ How wretchedly weak. ‘O.K. My youth versus your age,’ says the young counter-gamesman to himself, and rubs this thought in with a variety of subsequent slanting references: ‘You ought to take it easy for a week or two,’ etc. No, if use the hackneyed ankle gambit you must, let the injury be the result of a campaign in one of the wars, or a quixotic attempt to stop a runaway horse, at least.

  But, here as so often, it is the reply, the counter, wherein the ploy of the gamesman can be used to best effect. Indeed, there is nothing prettier than the right use of an opponent’s injury. There is the refusal to be put off even if the injury is genuine. There is the adoption of a game which, though apparently ignoring and indeed even favouring your opponent’s disability, will yet benefit you in the end. In their own different ways, the ‘Two F’s’, Frier and Frith-Morteroy, were the greatest masters of the art of ‘Countering the Crock’. No one who heard them will ever forget their apologies for sending a short one to the man with the twisted ankle, their excuses for the accidental lob in the sun against an opponent with sensitive eyes. But the Frith-Morteroy counter, though not for beginners, has more of grace, and needs more of explanation. Let it be lawn tennis – Frith’s game. Frith against ‘Novice Gamesman’, we will call him.

  Novice Gamesman is limping slightly. ‘Hopes he can give F.-M. a game, but his rugger knee has just been prodded back into place by old Coutts of Welbeck Street.’ Right. F.-M. is full of sympathy. F.-M. sends not a single short one. In fact he does nothing whatever. His supporters become anxious – and then – during, say, the first game of the second set, while they are changing sides Frith is heard to say (on arriving at point K – see Fig. 5) ‘Ooo!’ sharply.

  The Game Itself

  Fig. 5. Diagram of tennis coun to show Frith-Morteroy’s path of changing, and the position S from which he makes his ‘echo’ attack, in Morteroy Counter Game Leg play. Point K on the line FM-FMl is the position from which the demi-cry is made (see text). At point S, on the line FM2, the full cry is made (see text). ‘STOP’ marks the usual position for the actual verbal interchange or ‘parlette’.

  NOVICE GAMESMAN: What’s that?

  FRITH-MORTEROY: Nothing. Nothing. I thought –

  N. G. (further away): What did you say?

  F.-M.: Nothing.

  The game continues. But at that next cross over, Frith says ‘Ow!’ (point S, Fig. 5). He pauses a minute, and stands as if lost in thought.

  N. G.: What’s up?

  F.-M.: Nothing. Half a moment.

  N. G.: Something wrong?

  F.-M. (rubs his chest with his knuckles): No. No. It’s only the old pump.

  N. G.: Pump?

  F.-M.: Yes. The ancient ticker.

  N. G.: What—heart?

  F.-M.: I’m supposed not to be using it full out at the moment. Only a temporary thing.

  N. G.: Good Lord.

  F.-M.: It’s all right now!

  N. G.: Good.

  F.-M.: Couple of crocks!

  N. G.: Well. Shall we get on?

  ‘Couple of crocks’. Observe the triple thrust against the Novice Gamesman. (1) Frith establishes the fact that he, also, labours under a handicap; (2) the atmosphere which Novice Gamesman has built up with so much restraint, but so much labour – the suggestion of silent suffering – is the precise climate in which Frith is now going to prosper, and (3) – most important of all – Frith has won the gamesmanship part of the contest already, set and match, by sportingly waiting, say twenty-five minutes, before revealing his own somewhat worse disability. Novice Gamesman having mentioned his rugger knee – a stale type of infliction anyhow – is made to look a fool and a fusser. More, he is made to look unsporting.

  I believe it is true to say that once Frith-Morteroy had achieved this position, he was never known to lose a game. He made a special study of it – and I believe much of his spare time was spent reading the medical books on the subject of minor cardiac weaknesses.

  Jack Rivers Opening

  After this most successful of basic plays, may I dare to end this chapter with a very simple but favourite gambit of my own?

  I call it the Jack Rivers Opening. I have written elsewhere of the sporting-unsporting approach, always to be revered as the parent of modern gamesman play. But if sporting-unsporting is vaguely regarded as a thing of the past, the gamesman knows that it is a habit of thought still rooted in many British players.

  Perhaps the most difficult type for the gamesman to beat is the man who indulges in pure play. He gets down to it, he gets on with it, he plays each shot according to its merits, and his own powers, without a trace of exhibitionism, and no by-play whatever. In golf, croquet, or ping-pong – golf especially – he is liable to wear you down by playing the ‘old aunty’ type of game.

  My only counter to this, which some have praised, is to invent, early in the game or before it has started, an imaginary character called ‘Jack Rivers’. I speak of his charm, his good looks, his fine war record, and his talent for games – and, ‘by the way, he is a first-class pianist as well’. Then, a little later: ‘I like Jack Rivers’s game,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t care a damn whether he wins or loses so long as he has a good match’.

  Some such rubbish as this, although at first it may not be effective, often wears down the most successfully cautious o
pponent, if the method is given time to soak in. Allow your opponent to achieve a small lead, perhaps, by his stone-walling methods; and the chances are that – even if he has only been hearing about Jack Rivers for thirty minutes – he will begin to think: ‘Well, perhaps I am being a bit of a stick-in-the-mud.’ He feels an irrational desire to play up to what appears to be your ideal of a good fellow. After all, he remembers, hadn’t he been once chaffed for breaking a window with a cricket-ball when he was on holiday at Whitby? He himself was a bit mad once. Soon he is throwing away point after point by adopting a happy-go-lucky, hit-or-miss method which doesn’t suit his game in the least.

  Meanwhile you begin to play with pawky steadiness, and screen this fact by redoubling your references to Jack Rivers. You talk of the way in which Jack, too, loved to open his shoulders for a mighty smite, landing him in trouble as often as not; but the glorious thing about him was that he didn’t care two hoots for that … and so long as he had a good smack, and a good game …, etc.

  So much for the Principal Plays, in gamesmanship. Now for the other gambits which must be brought into play as the game progresses.

  4

  Winmanship

  … for the love of winning …

  Life and Laughter ’Mongst the

  People of North-Western Assam,

  by P. V. Chitterje; trans. Evadne

  Butterfield

  This is a short chapter. The assiduous student of gamesmanship has little time for the minutiae of the game itself – little opportunity for learning how to play the shots, for instance. His skill in stroke-making may indeed be almost non-existent. So that the gamesman who finds himself winning in the early stages of the match is sometimes at a loss. Therefore, although I am aware that this book must stand or fall by its all-important Chapter 6 on ‘Losemanship’, yet this seems to me the place to set down a few words of help and friendly advice to the winning gamesman, to help him keep his lead; to assist him to maintain his advantage, and rub his opponent’s face in the dirt.