High Old Fling At The National Ringer Derby

It was summer's last holiday weekend, and the whole thing had the peaceful, bucolic air of an oldtime American picnic. The occasion was the AAU's National Horseshoe Pitching Championships. The setting in Salisbury, Md. was a shady grove of maple trees hard by a purling stream where ducks paddled placidly against the current, small boys still-fished for sunnies, and watermelons were stacked in a high pile. It was as wholesome and serene as you please, but there was one small thing wrong with the picture—on the first day, with the exception of one old man on a bicycle, nobody showed up to watch. This initial lack of interest was so obvious to the competitors that one of them eyed the elderly cyclist and muttered sarcastically, "Here comes our spectator."

There was, however, one good reason why spectators were scarce. The rival town of Crisfield, Md., only 33 miles from Salisbury, was holding its annual hard-shell-crab race and, as a bonus attraction, they were crowning Miss Crustacean of 1963, a hazel-eyed beauty named Christine Massey. To top it off, the outgoing Miss America, with only one week left of her reign, was dropping by to give the proceedings an extra touch of class. What were the horseshoe people to do?

Moving quickly, the sponsoring Wicomico County Recreation Commission announced it would give away barbecued chicken by the plateful (chickens outnumber people in Salisbury by some 150 million to 1). Then the commission put on display its own hazel-eyed beauty queen. According to the ribbon across her front she was Miss Runner-up of 1963, and according to her own admission she was a runner-up for Miss Delmarva Peninsula Chicken Festival. "I'm here today as a chicken representative, and I don't know exactly what my duties are," said Miss Runner-up.

It was obvious that whatever her duties she was fulfilling them handsomely: 135 people came to the pitching grounds to look her over, to sample the chicken and, at last, to watch the horseshoe tournament. (As for Crisfield, it was having its own troubles. Governor J. Millard Tawes's entry won the hard-shell-crab race. To avoid any suggestion that they run a tainted crab race, the embarrassed officials disqualified the first finisher and awarded the victory to the second-place crab.)

Meanwhile, back in Salisbury, with the six-row metal grandstand packed with chicken-fed spectators, the horseshoe-pitching contest was about to get under way. For a moment the horseshoe officials were as close to embarrassment as those at the crab race: one of the stobs (the AAU rule book calls them stakes, but everybody knows they are stobs) on Court 4 was a full inch under the regulation height of 12 inches. The matches were momentarily delayed while a stob-puller was brought, the stob pulled out and a one-inch plug inserted in the bottom of the stob hole. Ready once more, the 19 players from five states dug in for the round-robin competition, grumbling, as they did so, about the quality of the red clay for the pits imported from Baltimore just for the championships. But then, horseshoe players are always critical of the clay. It is either too sticky or not sticky enough, too hard or too soft. Dr. Sol Berman from New Jersey, who is such a horseshoe perfectionist that he uses shoes custom-made of a copper alloy, said you get the best clay by going to a brickyard and getting soft bricks discarded as imperfect. "You have to get there before they bake the bricks, of course," Dr. Berman said in amplification.

As the play finally commenced, Randall Jones, a man described (by himself) as the ramrod of organized shoe-pitching in North Carolina, explained what it is all about. "You're trying to pitch a 2�-pound shoe 40 feet and fit the 3�-inch opening around a one-inch iron stob," Jones said in a whirl of statistics. "And, Mister, if you can do that, you've really done something."

As each player really tried to do something, he called out his points to the scorekeepers, who sat solemn as a platoon of owls marking down the ringers and the totals. "Four dead" meant that each player had thrown two ringers. "Three ringers, three," meant that one player had thrown two ringers, while his opponent had managed to throw only one. The man with two ringers gets three points. "Ringer each, one point," meant that each had thrown one ringer, and the next closest shoe, which had to be within six inches of the stob, counted one point. The situation where both players failed to score a ringer was so rare in Salisbury that it is not worth explaining.

Accuracy, indeed, seemed to improve as the tournament moved along and the games got tougher. In one game Darrell Eller of High Point, N.C. threw 13 ringers before missing the stob. "He's slipping," said Ramrod Jones. Another player who showed good early form but did indeed slip before he got to the finals was Leroy Hill from Broadway, Ohio. Hill has a problem. Back home in Broadway, population 75, horseshoe pitching is only a minor talent for the other 74. "I don't get enough competition," says Hill. To get any at all, he lets his friends throw three shoes to his two. This sort of thing, of course, would never be permitted under AAU rules.

As the eight-man round-robin finals progressed, spectators forgot about Miss Chicken Festival Runner-up and leaned forward in their seats to watch the players. They leaned out so far, in fact, that several people in the front row came close to getting the 2�-pound iron horseshoes wrapped around their necks. To avert such a grim possibility, play was suspended while spectators and players lifted the entire grandstand and carried it back eight feet. Mayor Frank R. Morris of Salisbury, who had come out to lend the dignity of his office to the occasion, was right in there heaving with the best of them.

Out in the pits it became apparent that the championships were going to have an all-North Carolina finish. Walter King of Asheboro, tossing ringers with nonchalant skill, had moved well out front; and the only man with even a remote chance to beat him was Conrad Murphy of Winston-Salem. At 51, Murphy has a top weight of 145 but had trained down to 136 (including a wad of tobacco that resides in his right cheek) for the nationals. "It's one of the most exercising sports in the world because you move all over," he said during a break. "If anybody wants to lose weight, tell them to pitch horseshoes."