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Marbles in the News
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A Game for All Ages
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Original Publication Date: October 25, 2004. From "The Telegraph," a Macon, Georgia newspaper
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COCHRAN - When old men get on their knees to shoot marbles, the wrinkles on their faces seem to vanish.
A cigarette dangling from a mouth and a pack of chewing tobacco protruding from a back pocket can easily escape notice.
When old men shoot marbles, they aren't old men anymore. They are little boys in tattered overalls and bare feet. Their roars of laughter and competitive zeal make a gathering of retirees sound like recess.
On a Sunday afternoon when many men are shooting deer or watching football, the Grit Marble Players take a trip back in time.
"To see these old men get back to their childhood, it's just great," said Bub Way, a non-player who came out Sunday just to watch. He didn't know about the group until a couple of weeks ago. When he heard about it, he had to see it himself.
"When I was in grammar school, that was the thing," he said. "You took a pocketful of marbles with you."
Every other Sunday the club of 18 members meets at Hillside Bluegrass Park. But it's not just older folks. The youngest member is 12-year-old Stephanie Berryhill. They compete for a roving trophy. The winner gets to keep it until someone else wins it.
"My grandpa and dad play, and I finally decided I wanted to win the trophy," said Stephanie, who has snatched it a couple of times from her elderly playmates.
The oldest member is 84-year-old Joe Legg, a retired Cochran pharmacist. He hadn't played marbles, he figured, in more than 60 years when he joined the club five years ago. He bends down and gets back up a bit more laboriously than when he was 12, but he finds it to be good exercise.
"It limbers me up," Legg said. "I have arthritis, and it really helps."
The group started in 1999. The idea came when 63-year-old Giles "Rink" Kirkpatrick found a marble while working at the annual bluegrass festival held at the park. He showed it to Ken Powell, Bleckley County's probate judge, and the two began reminiscing about playing marbles when they were children. They thought it would be a good idea to get some of their old schoolmates together again.
They held their first marble shoot on the grounds of the old Roddy School that Kirkpatrick and others in the group attended. In Kirkpatrick's youth, he and his friends played marbles the way teens today play video games. He's hoping to pry a few away from the TV and revive a mostly dead sport.
"We're trying to bring it back, hoping young folks will get interested in it," Kirkpatrick said.
His 14-year-old granddaughter, Dedra Kirkpatrick, is a regular marble player. She'll take shooting marbles to playing video games any day.
"It's so much fun," she said. "It's about the only sport I've ever liked."
The game they play is a bit more complicated than some may think. The traditional playground form of marbles involves drawing a circle, and then trying to knock an opponent's marble out of the circle.
The game the club plays is called Rolly Holly - sort of a golf version of marbles. On a concrete floor under a shed, they have a series of small holes, somewhat like a practice putting green. The first task is to try to shoot a marble into the first hole, and after that the player becomes "live." A player can then shoot at the marbles of other live players, and if you hit one, that player has to give you a marble. The person with the most marbles at the end wins.
Rink Kirkpatrick said everyone is welcome to come out, watch and try their hand. A few children were getting marble lessons Sunday. To compete in the tournament, players have to put up an annual membership fee of $20.
Though the club normally meets every other Sunday, it will be having a tournament this coming up Sunday, starting a 2 p.m., because they played on an off day this week.
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This submission was made by Debbie Hoback, Prospect, TN on September 26, 2006
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