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A League of His Own

Now that sports are a spectacle of seven-figure contracts and rock star attitudes, there’s something about Walter Croft’s hand-carved replicas that could make you get misty about the bygone Love of the Game. Maybe it’s the twenty-three hours it takes him to perfectly dimple the surface of a wooden basketball or the real thread he sews in-to the buttons of a basswood baseball jersey, or the fact that he halves, weighs and then hollows out each football, basketball and baseball to make sure they’re the same weight as the real thing.

“I just do it for the heck of it, just to see if I can do it,” says the Coventry resident, who attempted his first sports replica about three years ago, looking at his sons’ equipment. His latest labor of love is a full-blown Red Sox locker, furnished with batting helmet (sanded and polished to shine like plastic), cap (texturized, of course, to look like fabric), bat, ball, glove, Ramirez jersey and cleats—a project that took him over a year, just long enough to see Manny take off for the Dodgers. “That was a disappointment, but what are you going to do?” he says good-naturedly. After all, the game isn’t really  what drives him to put his heart into each piece.

“I get lost in it,” says Croft, “and my kids are into sports big-time. I like to give them something to put on their desks.” See Croft’s locker at Woodcraft in East Greenwich, located at 1000 Division Street. —Nicole Maranhas

Everything you see here (yup, even the basketball) is carved from wood:

Photography by Ron Cowie