Winking In

For the visiting British players, the U.S. tour was a ruddy marvel. The five-week campaign carried them from the towers of Manhattan to the arch of the Golden Gate, from the green hills of Stratford, Conn., to the quiet lanes of Philadelphia. They gamely took on all comers, from the New York Giants to a pickup squad of actors and writers at the Bucks County (Pa.) Playhouse Inn. The result after a dozen matches: a dozen triumphs for the Britons. "It appears," said British Team Captain Peter Freeman with sovereign contempt, "that America's best players are only slightly superior to America's worst."

British Stratagems. It may also be that U.S. players are not yet attuned to tiddlywinks. As the British see it, the game is played under two sets of rules--children's and international. Yankee players, when they are able to recall the game at all, play only children's rules, thereby missing the delicate stratagems that color international play. In understanding the international version, two specialized verbs are crucial: to "squidge" is to press a small wink with a large one (the squidger), sending it flipping through the air toward the target cup at the center of the table; to "squop" is to squidge a wink onto an opponent's wink, thereby temporarily retiring the enemy wink from play.

A squopped wink cannot be squidged again until it is de-squopped, either by the original squopper or by a squopped player's partner who manages to squidge a third wink atop the second and spill the squopper off.

U.S. players usually manage to recall squidging techniques from their childhood days. But the squop shot is entirely new to them, and on the tour the usual death knell to a strong U.S. squidging attack was the glad British cry, "Well squopped!" The English winkers -- Freeman. 23, Philip Moore, 21, David Willis, 23, and Eliza beth King, 22 -- found most U.S. opposition easy, but the easiest was the team of New York Giants, including Offensive Tackle Roosevelt Brown and Halfback Bob Gaiters. The match was defaulted by the Giants. "We apparently were too frightening in our warmup." said Free man. "Brown would have been putty in my hands." Shockingly Superior. The most arduous contest was a six-hour winkathon in San Francisco, in which seven U.S. teams were shut out in quick succession. The touring Britons dashed off a challenge to President Kennedy, asking him to field a team.

Back came a meek refusal from Football Coach Bud Wilkinson, the President's consultant on physical fitness: "This chal lenge is appreciated, but it would be most difficult to assemble here a pickup team that would offer any challenge at all to such a redoubtable group as yours." Last week, when the British winkers met the likes of S. J. Perelman and Stage Director-Producpr Mike Ellis in Bucks County, there was a hint of opposition. Perelman lost with a debonair, hand-in-pocket flair; Ellis' keen squidging eye and steady wrist made him one of the few Yanks who avoided a shutout.

Good as they looked in the U.S.. the British visitors are not champions back home. Playing for the Oxford University Tiddlywinks Society (the OUTS), they won the Prince Philip Silver Wink Tournament last spring, but lost to Bristol in the All-England Tiddlywinks Open. The loss, Freeman explains unwinkingly, was outrageous: "It was merely because we were so shockingly superior that we were inevitably shockingly overconfident."

But it is not whether you win or lose. The game itself is a national asset, says Freeman. "There is an enormous amount of physical strain on wrists and elbows and to the squidging fingers. There is terrific mental pressure and unbearable tension. The game provides excellent mental conditioning. Had the Empire been built on tiddly winks, perhaps we would never have lost it."

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