BOWLING.

Auckland Star, Volume XLII, Issue 149, 24 June 1911, Page 16

BOWLING.

With the exception of golf, no game played by amateurs has developed so rapidly or attained such public favour of late as the ancient sport of bowls The making of bowls, says "Cestrian," in "Bailey's Magazine," has long been a profession, kept strictly in a few hands, and a smart bowl turner is a jewel to any maker. Lignum vitae, for centuries the substance from which playing bowls have been manufactured, comes from the Weei Indies, and is an expensive kind of hard wood—so hard that it withstands everything in the shape of blows, but feels the changeableness of our British climate.

Of late years bowls have been made of a new material —excelite—a weather-de-fying, hard substance, unaffected by all and every outward condition. Tests, upon a specially constructed floor, render the bias of these woods as true as man can make anything with his hands and a lathe. A costly material to produce, excelite bowls figure out at more than the usual lignum vitae woods, but they are certainly worth the additional expenditure, for the very reason that their bias is true and accurate, and can be implicitly relied upon to '"make" in exactly the same way. Furthermore, heavier weights can be given in various sizes than is possible in lignum vitae.

A most bewitching charm about the game of bowls is its uncertainty. The run of a green and the run of a set of bowls vary as much as do the run of a .billiard table and the balls used upon it. The temperament of the player, too, has always to be taken into consideration so, too, has the condition of the nerves and the eye. Nerves and the eye play no little part in this ancient of games, which, to the uninitiated and the unen-

thusiastic appears so simple or so uninteresting in its repetition of tactics. The variability of results, when studied, will prove the in-and-out "form" which bowlers display. They prove more—that something is wrong with either the nerves or the vision of the player. The eye is, perhaps, more troubled than the nerves in ordinary play; in championship finals or international events it is the nerves which suffer most. The writer has yet to meet the bowler who can lay his hand on his heart and say he has played off a final tie and felt no trace of nervousness.