SKILL AND SPORT

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 17, 20 January 1940, Page 10

SKILL AND SPORT

Various games claim the honour of being the most sporting. Cricket has tried to confirm its claim by coining the phrase "It isn't cricket" for anything that is unsportsmanlike. But bowlers, who have just concluded a big Centennial tournament in Wellington, could probably put forward a record that would compare favourably with any other sport. Not that bowlers do make any claims. They are content to say their game is sociable and they take the sportsmanship for granted. Of course, they have advantages. Bowls is a game in which permanent superiority is difficult to establish. Skill certainly counts, as the recurrence of certain names in this and other tournaments proves, but it is not everything. One might take a cricket eleven of the highest Test standard and say that it would always beat a team of average County strength. But a bowler with a champion team would never say it was unbeatable, only that it Would be difficult to beat if it played up to its best form. Perhaps because of this delightful variability, the game has never invited professional attention. Nor, though it is interesting and even exciting, has it attracted a "gate"-— other than the old bowlers and their friends who always find a welcome on the bank.

The game of bowls has a further claim to distinction. It is one of the most ancient of games, dating from at least the thirteenth century. Also, it has been banned by the State as dangerous—because it was thought likely to interfere with the practice of archery. A modified ban remained on the Statute Book of England, in fact, until about 1845. It forbade servants, apprentices, artificers, and others to play except on their masters' premises, and people who played elsewhere were liable to a fine of 6s Bd. But long before the law was repealed the game was popular as a private recreation, though sometimes condemned because it was associated with gambling. An inn in Oxfordshire for long bore a picture of Charles I, who is said to have lost. £100 on a day's play, stating that the King there "drank from the bowl, and bowled for what he drank." Henry VIII was also a lover of the game, but whether all or any of his several wives encouraged him is not recorded. The bias in bowls dates from the sixteenth century — Shakespeare has a reference to it— indicating that by that time such skill had been developed1 with the straight bowl that something, was needed to make it more difficult. Other variations have since been tried, such as the crown green, but for bowlers generally the present game is hard enough, though it. always looks easy. And while the game continues to be a sociable recreation for amateurs; no one will try to introduce extra difficulties resembling those the Mikado proposed for billiards: "A cloth not true, with a twisted cue and elliptical billiard balls."