The greatest Golf Croquet game ever played
Cairo, 2013. Reg Bamford, one hoop from defeat in the world final, wins five hoops in a row under lights. Watch the game, and play the comeback.
Play the comeback — 6–2 down, five hoops from defeat. Click and hold to aim, release to strike.
Watch it
Cairo, April 2013. The Golf Croquet World Championship final, game five, under lights. Reg Bamford was two hoops to six down. Ahmed Nasr, playing at home in front of an Egyptian crowd, needed one more hoop to be world champion.
Bamford won the next five.
The final ran the full distance. Bamford took the first game 7–5, Nasr levelled with a 7–3, Bamford edged the third 7–6, and Nasr squared the match with a 7–4. Two games each, one to play.
In the decider Nasr moved to 6–2. At golf croquet a game is first to seven hoops, so from there he needed a single hoop, and any one of the next five would have done it. He won none of them. Bamford took hoop nine, then ten, then eleven. At 6–5 the match was level in all but name. He drew even at six–all, and then, seven yards out under the floodlights, ran the thirteenth hoop to win the game 7–6 and the championship.
Nasr is a fine player, and with the match level at two games each and a 6–2 lead in the decider, the title was his to lose. On the night it was Bamford who held together when a single mistake would have ended it, five hoops running, away from home. Call it the best game of golf croquet ever played. We think it has a strong case.
Reg Bamford, of South Africa, is the most decorated player the game has produced, with world titles in both golf croquet and association croquet. The 2013 championship in Cairo was the tenth staging of the golf croquet world title.
The full final
All five games of the final are on our own ad-free video library, croquetvideos: Game 1, Game 2, Game 3, Game 4 and Game 5. Game five, the decider, is up the top.
