Tiddlywinks in the Olympics?

Would you believe tiddlywinks in the Olympics? Well, the grand old man of the high-level game, Dave “The Dragon Lockwood” hopes to convince Prince Philip to include tiddlywinks as a demonstration sport in the hometown 2012 Summer Olympic games. Turns out the prince is a tiddlywinks enthusiast, too.

Though enthusiasts claim that tiddlywinks goes back to ancient times, the generally accepted date of the game’s birth is 1890. This date marks that swell skill for organizing and standardizing sport the Victoria-Era British so often showed: soccer, rugby, cricket, several card games, croquet, tennis and surely many more. After 1890, the patents and copyrights on game sets and rulebooks flew furiously, and tiddlywinks became a major fad in through the Gay Nineties. The modern game is said to have originated in 1955 at Cambridge, around the same time a smaller craze for the game was rippling Stateside.

And like so many British-standardized games, tiddlywinks ports an extensive vocabulary, making any discussion about the game completely incomprehensible to outsiders. Basically, you must mash a squidger (the round instrument which has been rigidly defined as having a diameter of a minimum 25 millimeters and a maximum of 51 millimeters) on a wink (the game disks) to propel it into the pot (which must be concave with a base of 38 millimeters and a diameter of 48 millimeters) or, alternatively, to squop an opponent’s wink (to propel the wink onto an opponent’s wink so as to disable it).

Lockwood himself has had quite a tiddlywinks career. He dominated the game, bagging an unprecedented nine title defenses from 1978-1982. And in 1996, Lockwood won the top event in the game, the Cambridge Open. Once the top dog, Lockwood currently ranks 8th on the table. Lockwood is not alone in his chip-flipping Olympic aspirations, either: son Max, at 16 years old, is currently ranked 52nd worldwide. Sons Jon and Ben, 13 and 10 respectively, are improving skills to achieve world-class status daily, potentially making the Lockwoods tiddlywinks’ answer to the Polgar sisters of chess.

But is it a sport? Geez, if ballroom dancing and poker, two currently rave faves on ESPN, are sports, well…and don’t get any non-Canadian starting on curling. Olympic tiddlywinks’ll be worth a few laughs, no doubt. And no jokes about synchronized swimming, please: The poor ladies have been left out of the 2008 Olympics and probably for good. Long live winks!