Welcome to the Small Town Bringing Back an Ancient and Violent Stick Game

I first heard about tiddly (or "Newfie Quidditch," as one friend called it) in the most Newfoundland way possible: talk radio. My fiancee and I were headed out around the bay to do some wedding preparations when I heard a woman call into VOCM Open Line to promote something called the "9th Annual World Cup of Tiddly."

Despite growing up on the island all my life, I had no idea what she was talking about, or even what the game was. All I gathered from the radio is that it involved bricks, sticks, and running around a field whipping them at each other—some archaic and violent bayman's game that died out in the second half of the 20th century after Newfoundland joined Canada. But now, apparently, the sport was being revived with great enthusiasm, and they were holding the World Championship that weekend in the town of Carbonear.

Obviously, I had to go and figure out what the fuck was going on. What I found was a ridiculously fun game, and the makings of a full blown cultural revival.

The woman who called Open Line that day turned out to be Judy Cameron, arguably the world's leading authority on tiddly. Everyone I met in Carbonear assured me she was the heart and soul of the whole operation. "She's the one calling around in January to get everything set up for July," one of the organizers told me.

Before Judy Cameron returned to Carbonear from Ontario in 2005, practically the only written information about the game was a pithy description in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English ("A children's game in which a stick, balanced on a rock or over a hole, is hooked or flicked into the air and struck with another"). Not only has she been the driving force behind the game's revival, but she has also written about it for The Rooms (NL's archive, museum, and art gallery) and National Geographic.

When I caught up with her before the games, she was immediately able to pinpoint why I had no idea what the game was. "You're from Grand Falls? They didn't play it around there that much. But they played it in Springdale."

"Certain parts played it," she told me. "Carbonear played it, but [the neighbouring community of] Harbour Grace didn't play it. They had more money in Harbour Grace, so they had bats and balls I guess."

No one is sure of the game's origins, but it was probably brought to Newfoundland from Europe. As far as anyone knows, it was first played on the south coast near what is now the town of Argentia, but Judy suspects its origins are in Elizabethan England or Ireland. She believes it was probably spread to other parts of the world by the British empire. Several people I met at the World Cup told me they had met some Filipinos on a cruise ship who claimed to have played tiddly in their home country. In the early 1990s, a geologist from Carbonear was doing fieldwork in Yemen, where he discovered that the rural Yemenis were playing a nearly identical game called Al-Gahtabah.

So, maybe World Cup is a bit of a misnomer, even if it is a safe bet that the Harbour Rock Hillbillies will never face a challenge from the Yemeni delegation. "Well, I figured in Carbonear, people believe that the world begins and ends in Carbonear," Judy laughs. "It's kind of a bit of a tongue-in-cheek thing. But, you know… there are people from Newfoundland who come home on holidays and try to make it around the time that tiddly is being played, so that they can play. I like things like the World Cup of Soccer, the World Cup of this, that, and the other thing, so, if people can't go to Rio, then they can always come here and play tiddly, right?"

Despite the game's spread across the four corners of the earth, it's not hard to see why tiddly would have flourished most in the hardscrabble corners of pre-Confederate Newfoundland. The game was played with two sticks (one long, one short), and two bricks - or, if bricks weren't available, two rocks, or a hole in the ground. Two teams of anywhere between two and 20 people take turns alternately batting and throwing the sticks at each other.

Tiddly's sing-song Irish name belies its brutish nature: imagine cricket's rugged, sketchy cousin from the bad side of the tracks. It is not a gentle game. While I was there on Sunday, I saw more than a few people take spinning sticks to the chest, and quite a few cracks to the shins. And, inevitably, at least one guy got nailed in the balls.

"We recommend people wear [safety gear], but, well, they're not going to do it, because they're macho men and women," Judy told me. "We've had people dislocate shoulders diving to catch the stick. These are 50 year-old people who forget they're 50. And we're very nervous about having younger kids play, in this day and age, because of injury consciousness, so we've limited it to 16 and over."

The game itself moves through three phases: the hook off, the bat off, and the tiddly.

All three phases involve hitting the short stick into the outfield with the long stick, where it's either caught (resulting in an out) or thrown back to the batter. The hook-off involves flicking the small stick out while it's laid flat across the bricks, and the bat-off involves tossing or holding the stick up in the air. The tiddly itself involves leaning the short stick up against the bricks, then tapping it so that it flies up in the air and then batting it out. You get three tries to do this—it is crazy hard—and then you're either out, or you get points based on how far away it lands. There are three outs, and then the teams switch.

Judy explained the rules to me over the phone, and I readily admitted that I couldn't wrap my mind around it. "Once you've seen it, it isn't so bad," she assured me. "It's more complicated when you're talking about it. When you see it, visually, it's easier to understand."

She was right.

It wasn't easy standardizing a rural folk tradition into a tournament. "Everyone had versions of the rules," Judy told me. "Even when we started playing it [for the World Cup], people would say 'well, we didn't play it like that, you were allowed to catch a stick with your jacket,' and stuff like that. So [there was] a lot of refining of the rules, every year, we'd end up having to tweak something or other."

"A lot of people used to play with broom handles, and find that they're not that hardy anymore. So the first team we had that one, the Irishtown crowd… one of those guys goes off every year and makes sticks out of alders, out of old trees, and stuff like that. But then teams were going, and they were picking ones that were the lightest, stuff like that. So now we said 'No, you can't go out picking your own… we'll just put a set out by each team, so now you all use the same ones.'

"I tell ya, they're smart. Any way to give you an edge."

Although tiddly goes back a long way in many parts of the province, there was a time where it seemed like the game might go extinct.

The game's popularity, unsurprisingly, started to wane once Newfoundlanders became Canadians. Confederation was meant to usher in a more modern and prosperous Newfoundland, and in most cases this meant the island's more 'backward' traditions, rooted in its history of grinding poverty, started to disappear.

This is Judy's theory, anyway. "When Confederation happened [in 1949], and people actually had cash money around the bay, like the baby bonus and stuff like that, then they could afford balls, and bats, and gloves. In the years before, nobody really had stuff like that. And in the 60s, you had the cultural thing—you had television, and you were seeing baseball and softball, hockey, soccer… and also, gardens [and fields] were being gobbled up for housing too."

"It did kind of go away, probably from the mid 60s on," according to Judy. "I don't know if people were playing it at all."

But in the years since, the province has been through several waves of a cultural renaissance. The most recent one started swelling about a decade ago, when high oil prices brought a glimmer of prosperity and pride to the province after the bleak years of the 1990s and the cod moratorium. People were moving home and connecting with their communities and traditions in ways that they hadn't for a long time. The ground was ripe for a tiddly comeback.

Judy's story is typical in this regard. "I moved away in the 60s, and I was living in Ontario for a lot of years. I moved back in 2005, and there was a lot of people, when they'd get together, they'd talk about Tiddly, because they played so much of it here."

"We resurrected it [in] 2007. The first year we only had men's teams, and we played in the pouring rain. And then the next year we added the women's, and then it sort of grew from there."

Originally, the whole enterprise was powered by pure boomer nostalgia. "When we brought it back, we were amazed," Judy told me. "And a lot of our audiences were older people, who remembered the game. But now, it's become a quote-unquote 'friendly' competition between various factions within the town."

And it's true. More noticeable than the dynamics of the game itself is how many people showed up to play it. I was expecting to show up and only find a cluster of boomers trying to relive their glory days, but instead I found a cross-section of the entire community out to play. Most of the players were probably between the ages of 20 and 40, and over the course of the afternoon, some teenagers and younger kids started playing their own game of tiddly over the far corner of the field.

Enthusiasm for the game is infectious—which is understandable, because it's fast-paced and super fucking fun to whip sticks around and bash them with a bat. Outside an officially regulated and refereed tournament, I imagine that this game is exponentially better (and more dangerous) when played a couple of beers deep.

It's hard not to fall in love with this game after seeing it played a few times. This seems to be how the World Cup of Tiddly has taken off among the younger crowd—and not just in Carbonear.

"I get calls from people when they have reunions down in Merasheen or other isolated settlements like that," Judy tells me. "They want me to send them a copy of the rules, and they'll include it as part of their festivities."

"So I think it's a bit of that, a bit of nostalgia for the simpler times. And people are more concerned nowadays with history—with keeping historic houses, and things like that. I think they're afraid that it's all going to go."

But based on what I saw that Sunday, I don't think tiddly aficionados have anything to worry about.

"That's why people have kept this going," Judy said. "Not just me, but even the winning teams—I mean, the first year we did this, I made the trophies myself and they fell apart when I presented them [laughs]. But they took it and put bolts in it and now it doesn't fall apart anymore."

When it was all said and done, Judy invited us to join the winner's circle for a post-game beer in the small community centre at the far end of the field. It was the kitchen party vibe of here that tied the day together. It wasn't hard to see why people were playing this game again after all these years, or why new and younger people born long after tiddly should have been extinct are picking it up.

A gloriously hot summer day, a couple of games of tiddly with the b'ys, some laughs and a scattered tin of beer together in a cramped kitchen of painted particleboard listening to old stories of life around the bay—this was Peak Newfoundland. The whole day crackled with an undercurrent of energy you can't find anywhere else and that early evening kitchen party was positively glowing by the end of it. It was a spiritually restorative experience.

I have no doubt that people will playing tiddly in Carbonear for many years to come. And I can't wait to come back next year with my own team to take a crack at the next World Cup.

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