Bowls and Bowlers

Waipukurau Press, Volume XXIV, Issue 125, 28 October 1930, Page 2

Bowls and Bowlers

AN ANALOGY OF LIFE.

GAME WORTHY OF OLYMPUS. The following article, which strikingly portrays the ideal of the ancient game of bowls, is taken from the Perthshire “Advertiser’ ’of June last, will no doubt be read with especial interest by local bowlers: — “Long ago 1 was a bowler —years and years ago, when 1 was young and strong and Pasty, with a clear eye, a steady hand, and a mathematical bump so highly developed that the lightening computation of wind, green, weight, and bias was child’s play to my ingenious mind. Golf never appealed to me. It lacked repose. Cricket was merely an outrageously violent form of primitive baseball. Lawn tennis I tried, and abandoned it on realising that if I wanted to play pingpong I could do so quite comfortably at home. The difference between bowling and those other sports (so-called) is that the one is a game, while the others are merely physical jerks. There are persons who will deny this; but 1 decline to bandy words with ill-man-nered and contradictory people. Now as I watch the graceful movements of the players on the Public Green, I see that bowling is not only a game worthy of Olympus but an analogy of life. There is the green, which stands for the battlefield of the world; there is the jack, which represents the supreme ambition of the human heart; there are the skips, who embody the principle of an often disregarded authority. You

take your bowl, you weigh it warily, you calculate your distance, you sniff the wind, you note the obstructions in your path, you hear the entreaties, the objurgations, the soft, cooing words of affection that stream from the lips of your commanding officer at the other end —right at the centre of disturbance, as every brave captain should be —and then, hvith a prayer to your patron saint (for all bowlers are devout and simple-minded creatures) you throw'. In the moments that follow you enjoy the delights of Elysium or the tortures of—another kind of place entirely! Either your bowl speeds unerringly to its goal, or it lags reluctant on the way and mulishly refuses to “be up”; or it sweeps sullenly’ aside and declines even a nodding acquaintance with its neghbours; or it dashes mischievously in where angles fear to tread, and smashes a “bonnie heid” for which your skip was inwardly thanking every god in the Pantheon; or, like vaulting ambition, it o’erleaps itself, and plunges in frantic disillusionment into the

' ditcliT That’s the way of bowls; ! that’s the way of life.

. Just thing of it for a moment. ■ How many of us ever stand still for a space to compute the forces we are up against? One half of the wretchedness of life is due to the fact that we refuse to look ahead further than an inch or two beyond

the nor’easterly point of our noses. We have a vague formless idea of what we want to do, of where we

want to go, of how we want to get there; and when we deliver our bowl and find that it is either a wobbler, a

waster, or a wanton witch, we are ready enough to blame anything and everything but ourselves. The rink

is bumpy, or the light is bad, or the green is “heavy” or “ower daumnt

keen,” or “the mat’s no’ even,” or we got the wrong hand to play, or “the wind spiled th’ draw,” or any explanation we can hit upon to salve our ‘amour propre, and delude the

world—any explanation save one, the one the devil gave when to his amazement he found himself like lightning fall from Heaven, “I wisna’ thinkin’ o’ fat I was dae’n.” There is

so little forethought in human life that the wonder is that this weary old world is still alive and doing business.

The main thing in bowls is to “be up.” It is your busines to “get there.” It is the business of life as well, whether you are a statesman or a scavenger. In other words, you must do your job thoroughly. Spasmodic shots in bowls, spasmodic sweeps in scavenging, may be astonishingly successful once in a while; but the sportsman, the statesman, or the scavenger who makes a principle

of spasms will find in the end that he has no principle left to work upon. That is the tragedy of many a life. Thus, ye merry bowlers, I salute you. I take off my hat and bow as gracefully as “the rheumatics” and three score years and ten will per-

mit, you are not only apostles of a cult of pleasure compared with

which all other forms of recreative amusement are as dust and ashes; you are peregrinating parables of life, and your green is the universe in little, a reproduction un miniature oi the jolly old mixty-maxty world which for a moment you have chosen to forget. If you tell me that you never thought of this before, I shall not blame you! I down to write about you. Behold how the mere sight of your sturdy figures and ruddy countenances unbars the gates of imagination and bids the inspiration flow!