I have a side line making custom "professional grade, sorta" croquet mallets. Don't laugh, it really is a "thing" with the college crowd, and provides me with some serious (to me) gun money. The mallet shafts are strictly ash (think baseball bat material) for resilience, the heads are pretty much anything the customer wants but I steer them toward what works. These heads, typically 3" square x 12" long and weighted with lead inside to meet regulations, take a beating unlike a gunstock will and need to resist abrasion/bumps/nicks/moisture/etc. So far out of 100+ units, I've used walnut, hard maple, and cherry, plus one solid ebony and a couple solid rosewoods. Walnut absorbs the repeated shocks of ball whacking best. Counterintuitively the maple ones, while harder, develop the most hairline cracks and cherry is the quickest to actually chunk out. (Note the ends are faced with a tough 1/4" thick polymer plate but that merely delays the inevitable because of energy transfer into the wood.) The ebony one I doubt will ever actually be played with, it hangs on an egotistical champion's wall.
