THE TRUNDLING GAME. A "Crack" About Bowls.

Free Lance, Volume VI, Issue 289, 13 January 1906, Page 6

THE TRUNDLING GAME. A "Crack" About Bowls.

PERHAPS you have seen lots of small groups of prosperouslooking gentlemen, mostly wearing grey whiskers and topped by white hats, carrying onion-kits about the city? They are not onion kits ! They are nets to hold their bowls in, and the prosperous gentlemen are bowlers. Maybe there are among these middle-aged and aged bowlers many who have solemnly deprecated the passion of the young New Zealander for sports, but if you follow the bowlers to their lair you will find that they have erected arc lights on the green so that they ' may fight the battle of wood when fair Luna has gone to> slumber. • • « Bowlers are usually business men, but to get two business men talking bowls one might imagine that no thought of mere work ever entered their heads. In fact, once the hand is on the trusty onion-bag, and the feet turned to the green, the grey-beard becomes a boy again. So juvenile have many bowlers become by virtue of the -trundling game, that the creature comforts of middle-aged life have been tabooed, for the "wee drap" has become so wee on many greens that it cannot be seen at all. • • • The strenuous footballer of this season is the canny bowler of next. He — the strenuous one — usually sets out for his first green with the fixed intention cf showing the veterans the real way to play the game. He goes to teach, and remains 1 to learn. He finds out, as he gets out of the novice stage, that the pastime that looks so easy to< him gives him a stiff forearm, and, perhaps, a pain in the back of the neck, and feels

that as a tip-top antidote to common, or garden, "graft" it has as many "points" as cricket and football, and a large superiority over billiards and bridge. * * # It is so eminently respectable, too. But, above everything, it is so democratic. There are no courtly bows!, and "Your turn, Sir George'" or "A little more grass, my lord!" It is either Smith, or Jones, or "Jack," or "Bill." The ability to play a canny bowl is a better passport to the heart of a timber roller than a note-head with a coronet on. Most bowlers have been athletes, of course, and most "has-beens" of the football and cricket fields run to flesh. Bowling is a successful struggle against the onward march of adiposity, and the green the Mecca of true democrats. • • * Think, too, of the qualities it demands from a man : a keen eye, steady nerves, self-confidence, even temper mured to ups and downs, and a good judgment. What man thinks of the sordid cares of business as he , leaves the green with somebody's Feathers, or So-and-so's Ferns? What cares he about seven o'clock dinner as long as the green is true, and the rival team keen. Then, the small jealousies inseparable from games of skill? Merely a spur to greater perfection. And when the tournament is all over, and the veterans present their fresh-ly-peeled faces to the adoring gaze of their families and employees 1 , what blissful times for all concerned. Never an angry word for months. There is no' time for angry words when all their words are needed to "fight their battes o'er again."