I’m American and never heard of this sport in my life yet article painted a similar picture in my mind.
I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.
Kids just love to play.
The local ‘conker trees’ were famous!
The main detail I remember was that soaking them in vinegar was supposed to make them stronger!
Money has nothing to do with it, most of my friends had computers, some had those mini cars to drive — it was a wealthy area.
Round here, in the olden days the kids would fashion a crude type of ball called "basse" by cutting up a broken bicycle inner tube into a bunch of small rings, threading all the rings on a piece of string and tying this mess up in a particular way to form a roughly spherical object.
It does not roll well at all, but the kids stand around in a circle and kick the basse around to each other, trying to keep it in the air. If you cause it to fall to the ground, you lose.
Extremely common for kids to play this at least into the mid 2000s where i'm from, i moved away so i don't know if they still do
Did you grow up in a city? I'm mid 30s and we used to regularly play conkers in the village where I grew up.
A lot more kids in the background smoking cigarettes around the bike sheds as well, but that's another story :)
Cheating was always rife with people using all manner of techniques to try to preserve and strengthen their conkers: soaking in vinegar, baking them, coating in nail varnish, &c.
Pretty sad to hear it's fallen out of fashion, as it was good, cheap fun and, with long enough string, not very dangerous.
It would be nice if we stopped stigmatising play. Growing up doesn't mean we stop playing. Acting grown-up might mean stop playing, but it's just that — an act, and a likely childish one. Real adults don't give up on what brings them joy.
Luckily, I grew out of that and I do not feel self conscious when playing as an adult or being goofy.
- C. S. Lewis
Inner-city kid, same age as you, and it was everywhere. Not universal, I guess.
I see parents and children collecting horse chestnuts in the local market square and arboretum still today though, and it brings back fond memories of rapped knuckles and entanglement "clingy-niner's" or "clinchies" in some games, depending who you were playing with.
Also, I think this follows how most sports come to be. They are started as child play, when we have the time/leisure/energy, then they eventually become something some of us want to continue with as adults and the rest of us will pay to watch because we enjoy the sport so much (often fostered during youth play).
There are dozens of sports that I have no interest in simply because I wasn’t exposed to them as a kid. As an older American, we did not play Soccer(football) when I was a kid. It’s pretty popular now and my kid has had me go to professional games and such but I still just don’t really understand the game/rules/strategy or fully appreciate the difficulty of things that occur. I could learn I suppose but I still just have little effort in doing so as a middle aged person. I could say the same about Cricket and a handful of other sports that I never played as a kid but know are popular elsewhere. Likewise, when people move to the US, it usually takes them a while and likely never fully get into American Football and Baseball. Basketball has become more global and so I do expats that follow that sport. More likely than not, they follow the sports that interested them as a kid and just live with the time zone issue.