Dozens Gather, Roll the Bowl in Homage to a Stately Sport

The craziest thing about lawn bowling isn’t that it’s played on butch-cut grass by stiff-jawed players dressed in white hospital-orderly uniforms.

It’s the blasted thingamajig--not a ball, really, but an object called a bowl--that is slightly flat on one side and therefore nearly impossible to roll straight.

Nobody knows quite what to make of these tricky 3-pound, 10-ounce spheroids of unpredictability. Like some wooden bronc slipped out of its holding pen, (actually, they’re made of durable phenolformaldehyde) they’re immediately going every-which-way-but-loose.

Just listen to these players describe the black-and-orange bowls that are the heart and soul of this age-old sport.

“It’s like rolling an out-of-aligned tire down a freeway,” said one hurler.

“It’s more like the earth, it wobbles on its axis,” said another.

“No,” said a third. “It’s an elliptical spheroid that’s been stepped on. It drives you crazy.”

Local lawn bowler Jim MacWhinney summed up the bashed-in bowl as well as the sport itself: “It’s eccentric,” he said. “Like the people who roll it.”

Two dozen lawn bowlers from 48 states gathered this week at Rancho Bernardo Community Park for the national championships of the American Lawn Bowls Assn. So, let the partying begin, dudes!

No way. Just joking, folks. Lawn bowlers aren’t to be confused with the beer-guzzling, slam-dance crowd. After all, this is a gentleman’s game, favored over the centuries by the likes of George Washington and Sir Francis Drake.

“What other sport can you say that the players shake hands before the match and shake hands afterward?” one bowler said of the contest, which ends today.

“Fights just never happen here on the bowling green. You can’t say that about other sports.”

The sport, derived from the Roman game of boccie and popularized in Britain, still attracts mad hordes to matches throughout Australia, where 600,000 people play the sport and where a competent instructor can earn more than $100,000 a year.

In England, where the first lawn bowling club was started in the 13th Century, matches are televised to a audience nationwide. But here in the colonies--er, America--the sport lingers in obscurity, relegated in the eyes of many as a thing octogenarian golfers do on their days off.

Today, there are only about 5,000 avid lawn bowlers in the United States, more than half of them hurling here in Southern California, local enthusiasts say.

But people like Richard Sayer, a 26-year-old Pennsylvanian competing with his father, George, in the doubles competition, are out to change that staid image.

“Hey, man,” he says, “you can be as young as 12 to play and as old as the hills. My grandfather still plays at age 95. And, if you don’t watch out, he can still beat you.”

Don Phillips, former president of the Josyln-Lake Hodges Lawn Bowling Club, says lawn bowling isn’t as popular here because of America’s strange extracurricular habits.

“We as Americans are so busy watching football and baseball and going to the beach that we don’t go to parks where lawn bowling is played,” said the retired Navy pilot. “So, a lot of people don’t even know the sport is being played. But, believe me, it is.”

Phillips, who says there’s only so much golf a person can play in retirement, opted instead for a sport where players usually dress impeccably in all-white uniforms and move about the lawn with the grace and energy of athletes half their age.

It’s a sport that combines aspects of Italian boccie ball, Canadian curling and American shuffleboard. It has the mechanics of chess, the spin of billiards and all the frustration of golf.

Baseball has innings. Football has quarters. Hockey has periods. And lawn bowling has ends--21 of them, in fact, in the average game. Played on a 120- to 132-foot grassy lane, or rink, the trick is to roll the bowls closest to a cue-ball-sized target called a jack.

In doubles matches, teammates roll from either side of the lane, delivering their shots from plastic mats. Each bowl rolled closer to the jack than any of the opponents’ bowls counts one point. Like lane bowling, there is a gutter--in this game situated at either end of the rink--to arrest overpowered balls.

The maximum score in one end, or inning, is four. It’s common for one player to have bowls in position for three points and then have his opponent take the end, 1-0, by rolling his last bowl inside the group.

“It’s like playing cards,” MacWhinney said. “You have to be awake all the time. You have to know which bowls are yours so you don’t inadvertently help out the other guy. The technique is to bend the knees and get low. And you bounce the bowl, you try and roll it.”

Contestant Ed Quo, singles champion from Southern California, added: “The secret to this game is being able to repeat your delivery. You’ve seen golfers with big, looping backswings or funny putting styles. It doesn’t matter, as long as you keep doing it.”

At the conclusion of each end, a referee measures the distance from the bowls to the jack with a tape measure. Sometimes, the bowls are so close, a crisp dollar bill is used, folded over until it rubs between them.

“You’ve heard of ‘close but no cigar,’ ” said lawn bowler Mike Michalek. “Well, in this sport, you get the cigar for being close.”

The week’s competition brought out the likes of self-employed businessmen and construction workers from 20 to 70. There was even a retired Marine brigadier general. And the one-upmanship was fierce.

As in golf, it’s a faux pas to talk while another player is rolling. Break the rules and there are looks to kill. Also, it’s bush league to run down the lane and follow your shot like a Canadian curler to see just how close it lands.

There are few high fives. Like the silent language between a baseball pitcher and catcher, most messages between teammates are delivered by hand signals.

For lawn bowlers, the humor is all inside stuff. “There’s lots of funny things that happen out there,” Quo says. “But you have to know the rules. I mean, if you didn’t know the rules about basketball, how funny would a missed slam dunk be?”

But, by far, the biggest blunder for a lawn bowler is unleashing a “whiskey.”

Because the bowl rolls erratically, misplayed shots can go completely haywire--often rolling off the field of play. When that happens, players say, all hell breaks loose on the usually subdued bowling green.

The name “whiskey” comes from a practice in Scotland where the errant hurler had to buy a round of drinks for the rest of the team.

Even today, pulling a whiskey brings instant ridicule.

“It’s definitely no fun,” MacWhinney said. “People boo at you. Horns blow. Bells ring. Whistles blow. Let me tell you, you feel like a fool.”

But when the bowl is delivered properly to arc along the grass, the sight is pure poetry in motion, players say.

“I just think it’s an exciting sport to watch,” said Eleanor Michalek, a 65-year-old Escondido resident, as she breathlessly watched the goings-on.

“But more fun (than watching) is to play. For a gal like me, you’re bending, you’re stretching, you’re walking. In the two years I’ve been playing, people always tell me ‘Eleanor, you look like you’ve lost weight.’

“And the doctor tells my husband he’s in the shape of his life. And you know what? It’s the lawn bowling.”

After 51 years as a lawn bowler, George Sayer says there’s something wise about the sport. “My dad will still be playing on his 100th birthday, so there must be something to it,” he said.

“We may be eccentric. But we’re not crazy.”