BOWLER’S SHOULDER.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17347, 30 September 1924, Page 3

BOWLER’S SHOULDER.

AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE. The little more and how much it is, The little less and what worlds away. From time to time -we hear of tennis elbow, writer’s cramp and other athletic diversions, but in the opinion of acute observers, doctors will shortly have to prescribe for a new disease—bowler’s shoulder (says a London paper). In other words, bowls, always well established in Great Britain, is now becoming quite an infectious disease in the South country. New greens are springing up almost with the frequency of hard tennis courts, and on Saturdays and early closing days one here and there comes upon little parties of self-centred, middle-aged, somewhat abstracted men, each smoking a wellworn pipe and carrying with tender solicitude a little black case. They are taking their “ woods ” to a match. Bowls, like golf, used to be dubbed an old man’s game, but youth, or comparative youth, is now paying it serious attention, knowing that it calls for hard thinking, self-control and genuine all-round intellectual ability. Other games, perhaps, test a man’s physique more, but bowling calls for qualities of will and moral© in as great a degree as any. When once a bowl has left the bowler’s hand there is no retracting. It is then as inevitable as Fate or a move by Capablanca. A man may not run after his wood crying, “ Stop! stop! I didn’t mean that!” The other bowlers would merely sneer at him with their pipes, and Skip would call upon him to resign forthwith. No; the bowler bowls and the moving wood moves on. Omar was undoubtedly a bowler, and when a later poet wrote: If you can make the unforgiving minute Full sixty seconds worth of distance run, he was obviously thinking of bowls. It is the bowler's habit when he has bowled to jerk himself upright, stand on tip-toe and watch the wood of destiny roll on, his elbows and shoulders wriggling with the intensity of his mental struggle. Subsequently, as he lifts his woods tenderly, and soothes them with a silk handkerchief, he may feel a pain in the shoulder, and will think it rheumatism. It is really bowler’s shoulder.