If so; I was only made aware of it, AFTER I picked that word; And 'news-googled' "tiddlywinks." 'bk' --
 
 
No Nod to Winks from the 'IOC'
 
By Kevin Paul Dupont | March 7, 2010 {boston.com}
 
Tiddlywinks. Okay there; You’ve been warned.
 
We’re going way off menu here {just this once}, for a few words on winks. Humor me. When I called down to the Globe library {some of us vets still refer to it as “the morgue"}; They were certainly amused. I said, “Tiddlywinks," and the researcher LOL’d..{hey, I’m at least that hip, IMHO}.
 
Two weeks of watching curling at the Olympics can get a man to thinking; What about the winkers?
 
Tiddlywinks has never been an Olympic sport, but with the next Summer Games {2012} to be staged in London, a small group {of course} of the world’s top tiddlywinkers made some noise in recent years, that they’d like their game included on the 2012 Olympus manifest. Stare long enough at that five-ringed Olympic logo, and it’s pretty obvious you’ll see it’s a winks tournament just waiting to happen!
 
Tiddlywinks, for the very, very few of you who don’t know, was invented in England. Which is why the winkers felt they could make a case for London 2012. A Brit, Joseph Assheton Fincher, applied for the parlour game’s first patent in 1888, which means it trailed by only 10 years the nascency of the legendary Manchester United Football Club.
 
A diverse lot, those strait-laced Victorians, what with playing football and doing all that winking in their parlours - the latter a sport of true Olympic proportions.
 
Truth be told, the winkers didn’t get very far with the International Olympic Committee’s big thinkers. They weren’t rudely rebuked, told to take their squidgers and go home, but they eventually learned that there won’t be room for boondocking, scrunging, or squoping at the world’s biggest athletic love-in. No Olympics, not even as a demonstration sport.
 
Pity, I say, and not just because of neat words like “boondock,’’ or simply because I think winking is just as worthy as curling, or that just one of its many virtues is that it’s a shooting game that doesn’t require a rifle. Thank goodness. Really, the biathlon thing - ski like mad, then pull out a rifle and go all “CSI: Olyville’’ - as sports go, it’s nothing but a bad Batman movie. If only that kind of gun-toting law enforcement were around back in the day when the IOC’s bigwigs were reaching into money pots all over the world to collect their goody bags before voting {wink, wink} on the next host nation.
 
Synchronized swimming. Now there’s a case for tiddlywinks. Slam dunk. And don’t get me started on short-track speedskating, the sport that has cannibalized the grace, endurance, and near-poetic beauty of long-track speedskating and turned it into a form of NASCAR without the ribs, beer, and chewing tobacco. Sure, Anton Apolo Ohno is a heck of an athlete and obviously in outstanding condition, but boy it’s hard to watch that sport without wondering what will happen to their fragile minds if one of them actually ever catches up to that invisible mechanical rabbit they’re all chasing.
 
Full disclosure: I am not a winker. Yes, shocking. Oh, like many, I suppose, I had my moment with a squidger, but it’s not one that I recall. Anyone, though, can appreciate that it takes some touch and strategy and cunning and guile and a fair amount of mental stamina and micro-mechanical skills to keep those winks from flying all helter-skelter. All of those skills apply to the Olympics, summer or winter, and it seems the tiddlywinkers just haven’t been given a fair gromp {attempt to jump a pile onto another wink} from the IOC.
 
In years gone by, MIT had a vibrant and accomplished bunch of winkers. One of the world’s premier players, Dave “The Dragon’’ Lockwood, arrived at MIT in 1970 not knowing diddly about tiddlywinks. As a freshman, he checked off baseball, skydiving, and tiddlywinks as things he’d like to try while in Cambridge. Within two years, he was on his way to England with some of his MIT pals to beat the most accomplished Brits at their own game of potting winks.
 
Lockwood, 57, in recent years wrote to Prince Phillip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband, imploring him to convince the IOC to open the Games to tiddlywinks. Prince Philip, noted Lockwood, had long been recognized as a strong supporter of the sport. As in tiddlywinks, when reaching out for kindred spirits, it’s probably best to aim top-shelf.
 
“I wrote to him a number of times,’’ Lockwood said Friday, reached by phone at his home in Silver Spring, Md. “I never heard back from him directly, but his secretary wrote back and I got the feeling he at least read the letters. You know, when the big event in life is your next garden party, tiddlywinks would probably be interesting to a royal.’’
 
But, alas, no real love for winks from Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. One wonders if maybe the royals don’t want the rest of us in what might be their best sport, other than levying taxes, changing the guards, and trooping the colors.
 
When 2012 rolls around, the world’s best winkers will be pot out of luck at the London Olympics. It’s both a crud {forceful shot, meant to destroy a pile of winks}, and a crying shame I say; Especially for those of us who just survived two weeks of curling.
 
Kevin Paul Dupont’s “On Second Thought’’ appears on Page 2 of the Sunday Globe Sports section. He can be reached at dupont@globe.com.