A family playing Denver Croquet at the Overlook Hotel.
Denver Croquet is a fictional specialized version of the leisure sport known as croquet. It involves using a wooden mallet to tap balls across a landscape with the objective being to get them to roll through a half-hoop called a wicket. Examples of Denver Croquet were seen in the 1997 television miniseries adaptation of The Shining, which was a faithful adaptation of the 1977 horror novel of the same name by author Stephen King. King also wrote the teleplay for the TV miniseries, which was directed by Mick Garris.
In the film, guests of the Overlook Hotel in Colorado can be seen playing Denver Croquet outside the front steps of the hotel. The hotel's manager, Stuart Ullman, explains the sport to his new winter caretaker, Jack Torrance. He reveals that it was invented by one of the hotel's previous owners, Horace Derwent. "As was the case with Derwent", Ullman revealed, "...everything in the game is larger than life". The mallets, balls and hoops were twice the size of those used in traditional croquet. The child guests of the hotel loved the game, and the adults came to appreciate it as well.
Miles away from the hotel, Jack's psychic son Danny Torrance, perceived visions of the players reacting to the game as his father was finalizing his interview with Ullman. When Jack returned home to tell his family that he had gotten the job, Danny hallucinated about seeing a bloody croquet mallet in the passenger seat of his father's red Volkswagen.
This vision foreshadowed future portents, for in the following months, Jack would go insane as a result of the ghostly entities haunting the Overlook and attempt to murder his son with a croquet mallet.