Hitler Tried, Despised Cricket

After yesterday's very depressing story about the Waffen SS vets parading through Riga, Latvia the day before, one is in need of some levity. Watching the Republicans demand an up-or-down vote on the healthcare bill in the House while demanding not to have one in the Senate is merely ironic rather than amusing. Fortunately, Ben MacIntyre has a column in today's Times about Adolf Hitler's experience with cricket in citing a piece in the Daily Mirror in 1930. It seems that before he became a dictator, Hitler tried playing cricket once and determined that it was not suitable for the Aryan master race.

Shortly after the First World War, Hitler was recovering from wounds suffered in combat and discovered some British former POWs nearby. As the Mirror piece by Oliver Locker-Lampson reads, "He had come to them one day and asked whether he might watch an eleven of cricket at play so as to become initiated into the mysteries of our national game. They welcomed him, of course, and wrote out the rules for him in the best British sport-loving spirit."

Apparently, Hitler returned a few days later to offer a friendly match: British POWs XI vs. the Hitler XI. Afterward, Der Fuhrer decided the game needed changes. He "advocated the withdrawal of the use of pads. These artificial 'bolsters' he dismissed as unmanly and un-German . . . in the end he also recommended a bigger and harder ball." Apparently, the flow and rhythm of test cricket over its customary five days (with scheduled breaks for drinks, lunch and tea) lacked the blitzkrieg pace of overrunning the Netherlands.

Joseph Goebbels said, "German sport has only one task; to strengthen the character of the German people, imbuing it with the fighting spirit and steadfast camaraderie necessary in the struggle for its existence." Any game that can go on for five days and end in a draw clearly fails by this measure.

Cricket has some lovely terms: sticky wicket (when the grass is on the wet side), leg-before-wicket (when a batsman is out because the ball hit his pads that were blocking the stumps and bails), hit for six (baseball fans think home run), and googly (effectively a screwball). There is also a "duck," or to baseball fans "a goose egg," that is zero. A batsman who is out before he scores a run is "dismissed for a duck." And if he is out on the very first ball in his at bat, it is known as a "golden duck." With that understood, the last words are Mr. MacIntyre's:

Sadly, the scorebook from Hitler's first and only cricket match has not survived. We will never know how much his team lost by, where he batted in the order, and what score he made. But we can certainly speculate. His angry contempt for cricket, his attempt to invade the rules and alter them in his own image, and his inability to comprehend the complexities of the sport all point to one, inescapable conclusion: he was out for a golden duck.

Hitler has only faced one ball.