THE BOWLING TOURNAMENT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25431, 12 January 1944, Page 2

THE BOWLING TOURNAMENT

An event to which a great rhany members of the community have long been looking forward with mingled feelings of expectancy and anxiety will be begun in this city this morning. It is in a mood of expectancy that the opening of the New Zealand bowling tournament has been awaited, because the occurrence of the war has almost necessarily caused an interruption in the series of these tournaments, and the resumption of them affords the occasion for the meeting of hundreds of kindred souls assembled from all parts of New Zealand, from Whangarei in the north to Invercargill in the south, and from virtually every town of consequence in the Dominion with the solitary exception of Gisborne. It is because the success of a tournament of this description depends vastly upon the weather in which it is held that the opening of it has been awaited with a great deal of anxiety. The climate in Dunedin is not more capricious than that of other parts of New Zealand, but because it has been the subject of many aspersions, mostly from persons whose experience of it has been extremely limited, local bowling administrators have been particularly concerned lest the weather for the tournament should prove unfavourable. The organisation of a tournament in which more than 1000 persons will participate and for which every bowling green in the city and suburban districts has been requisitioned has been a matter calling for the minutest attention to detail and for the utilisation of every hour of daylight between breakfast and supper for a whole fortnight, and obviously it is liable to be grievously upset if the present expectations of good weather should not be realised. Whether the weather be fine or foul, however, the Dunedin community is not likely during the period allotted for the tournament to be unaware of the presence in the city of the many hundreds of visitors whom the event has attracted. The game of bowls has drawn to itself in the past quarter of a century an ever-increasing number of devotees. There were strange rumours not so long ago of the disturbance of domestic relations in many house-

holds through the absorption of the head of the family in his game of bowls in the protracted twilight of a Dunedin summer evening to an extent that was disruptive of all the plans that had been carefully laid for the night’s amusement. The wives of the bowlers, however, were not slow to discover, as the wives of golfers had previously done, a means of asserting themselves in the face of severe provocation. So it is that in the appropriate season the spectacle is almost daily to be witnessed in the streets of parties of whiteskirted, white-hatted, white-shod women, upon whose usually ample figures are worn blazers with colours defying those of Joseph’s coat and in whose hands carried 'bulging bags. Their, revenge is as complete as the purpose of their attire is obvious, and their example has been' so extensively followed that it need excite no surprise if within the next ten or twelve years a Dominion tournament for women bowlers is projected, if not actually organised. The interest, therefore, in the tournament that begins to-day will not be confined to the participants and their fellow members in the clubs to which they belong. That the tournament will be productive of a keen rivalry among the contestants that will at the same time not be destructive of that desirable spirit of camaraderie which is commonly manifested at gatherings of the kind may be confidently anticipated. And in that anticipation the visitors to the tournament will be warmly welcomed to the city.