Maryland family's game is serious stuff

WASHINGTON — Dave "The Dragon" Lockwood has heard it all before.

He has seen the smirks; he has heard the jokes. But as a former world champion, he also has basked in the glory of a sport that some describe as just the right mix of skill and intellect.

And now he is passing that on to his children.

NASCAR has the Earnhardts; baseball, the Ripkens; and football, the Mannings. Now competitive tiddlywinks has ... the Lockwoods.

From his Silver Spring, Md., home — where tiddlywinks practice is wedged among homework assignments, soccer games and wrestling matches — Lockwood is grooming a dynasty.

Even as he hones his skills — hoping to recapture the No. 1 ranking he last held in 2001 — Lockwood is busy schooling his children in the ways of the squidger. All five of his children play tiddlywinks, and of them, Max, 16, the middle child, appears to have the most potential to join his father in the top echelons of the wink world.

Max is ranked 52nd in the world in tiddlywinks. But his brothers, Jon, 13, and Ben, 10, also have potential, their father said.

Jon and his father are scheduled to compete in April in England at the world pairs championship and the English pairs tournament.

The Lockwood children said it was natural for them to take up the sport. They grew up watching their dad compete, and last year — the 50th anniversary of the modern game — Lockwood took the family to England for the festivities.

"Tiddlywinks doesn't sound very serious," said Max, who participates in other sports, such as wrestling, and who started a tiddlywinks club at his school. "But you start playing, and you realize how different and challenging it is to do each shot. There's so much strategy."

Added his father: "Sometimes it's hard to stand up and take the ridicule that comes when you say that you take tiddlywinks seriously. But it does have a physical element."

The elder Lockwood was a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he was handed a list of activities he could participate in. On the list: tiddlywinks. "So I checked it off, along with baseball and skydiving," Lockwood said. "I didn't think they were serious."

But a few weeks later, the captain of MIT's tiddlywinks team called. And kept calling. Lockwood went to a meeting and discovered he had a knack for the squidger (the tool used to launch the winks).

Two years later, in 1972, Lockwood was on a plane to London, where the Americans battled the English. The Yanks won. Lockwood eventually earned a No.1 ranking from the English Tiddlywinks Association. He is hoping to return to the top this year.

He seems to have the momentum. Lockwood teamed with son Jon for the North American Tiddlywinks Association pairs tournament, held recently in the basement of a Potomac, Md., home.

Around the room, more than a dozen winkers — mostly boys and men, from middle-school students to adults — warmed up. They set up the tables and smoothed out the felt pads. Lighting was adjusted. There was laughter and a bit of backslapping. Phrases such as: "It's a good potting squidger," "If you're on this, you boondock" and "The blue's over the yellow — I could consider double-booning" filled the air.

As he and Jon played, Lockwood dispensed advice: "Just focus on the shot. Don't worry about the situation." "Quick and continuous motion. Quick and continuous motion." Jon sometimes rolled his eyes and made faces at his father.

But the father-son combination proved a winning one. The two Lockwoods won first place, and Dave Lockwood moved up one notch to eighth in the world. Max, partnered with another player, came in second. Ben, the youngest Lockwood, made it to the semifinals before being knocked out.

When most Americans think of tiddlywinks, they probably envision a brightly colored Milton Bradley set procured from the local drugstore.

Lockwood said real tiddlywinks, which involves two or four people, is played on a 6-by-3-foot felt mat. Winks come in four colors — blue, green, red and yellow — and two sizes: two large winks and four small ones in each color. And there's a pot, generally a red cup, in the middle. The winks are shot using a squidger (a disk that is one to two inches in diameter).

Players earn points ("tiddlies") for the number of winks they land in the cup (if a player lands all his or her winks in the cup, it's known as "potting out") but can also block opponents from reaching the pot by "squopping," or covering, their winks. Players take turns and are awarded points on the basis of who fills the cup first.

Got that?

Though the sport traces its roots to late Victorian times — the earliest patent application was filed by Joseph Fincher in 1888 — most historians think modern tiddlywinks was developed in 1955 by a group of Cambridge undergraduates. It is not known whether alcohol was involved.

In the 1960s, up to 37 English universities played the game, said Severin Drix, author of "History of the North American Tiddlywinks Association, 1962-1969."

The game arrived in the United States in the early 1960s. In 1966, the North American Tiddlywinks Association was formed. Most U.S. tiddlywinks players trace their lineage to Cornell, Harvard, Ontario's Waterloo Lutheran University (which in 1973 became Wilfrid Laurier University) or MIT, Lockwood's alma mater.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the North American Tiddlywinks Association this year, Lockwood is hoping to persuade Prince Philip, reportedly a tiddlywinks aficionado, to suggest that tiddlywinks be chosen as a demonstration sport during the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. Could an Olympic medal be in the offing?

If the Games can have synchronized swimming, he said, why can't there be winks?