Horseshoe aces pursue world title in aging sport

Published 7:56 am Saturday, August 8, 2009

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Entire families compete at once. Announcers ask competitors to volunteer for scorekeeping duty so the next round can begin.

Welcome to the most relaxed championship on the planet – the world horseshoe pitching tournament.

Players, even those at the top of the sport, insist they enjoy the camaraderie and picnic atmosphere of the game as much as the competition. Even so, it’s tough to interest kids in a game with a frontier flavor in an age of the Wii and Gameboy.

The average age of the 1,330 competitors is 53, say organizers of the tournament, which ends today.

“I see a lot less young people playing,” said Alan Francis, a 14-time world champion. “To me, it’s a scary trend.”

It’s not easy to promote a game if children aren’t exposed to it at picnics and family cookouts – and players say that doesn’t happen today nearly as much as it did two or three generations ago.

“There’s really not a lot of young people who are joining right now,” said Crystal Sheehan, who at 20 is one of the few young players in the tournament’s adult divisions. “I think a lot of the younger ones think it’s for older people and they’re not really interested. But I think it’s good fun. I love doing it.”

In fact, the smiles and “Howdy, neighbor!” attitude disguise some serious competitors.

These are people who can take a two-pound horseshoe with an opening just 3 1/2 inches across, throw it at a stake 40 feet away and get a ringer seven or eight times out of 10.

They can discuss clockwise vs. counterclockwise spins, whether a particular shoe is better designed for a flipping or turning style of pitch and how squishy the clay in the pit should be so that a shoe will “grab the mud” when it lands.

The key? Focus only on the stake and the delivery.

“You’ve got to try to make yourself like a machine – do the same thing every time,” said Arthur Tyson, a 69-year old player from New York.

The game may have started thousands of years ago with soldiers tossing rings at stakes in the ground, which evolved into the English game known as quoits. When horseshoes became common, bored soldiers took to tossing them instead.

The National Horseshoe Pitchers Association of America says the game really took off when soldiers came home from the Civil War. Over the next few decades, the sport was played with rules that varied across America.

The first “world championship” was held in Kansas in 1909. In 1914, the Grand League of the American Horseshoe Pitchers Association formed and standardized the rules. The game has changed a bit since then – the stakes are taller now and set two feet farther apart, for instance – but it’s basically the same.

This year’s championship field is the largest since 1,542 pitchers showed up in 1999. But Sipma said the total number obscures the fact that the adult divisions are shrinking as more pitchers move to the elder divisions.

“What scares me,” he said, “is those elders are going to go away.”