Lawn Bowling More Than Just a Game

Al Pollock was working the lawn bowling crowd like a comic in the Catskills.

“He’s two years older than God, this guy,” the rotund, white-bearded Pollock barked as a fellow bowler hunched over to fling a hard plastic ball across the faded green sod of the Oxnard-Joslyn Lawn Bowlers Club.

“He should be good--he was doing it on the Mayflower!” Pollock cracked.

Pollock’s one-liners were nonstop, a jovial refrain for the aging men and women who have made lawn bowling in Oxnard part of their lives and, in some cases, their deaths.

Since 1994 the club at Wilson Park has been more than a patch of green where some 80 members from across Ventura County can sharpen their skills while getting some low-impact exercise. Wedged between a senior center and a shuffleboard deck, it serves as a social crossroads--a place where birthdays are marked, the sport’s finer points are pondered and a bottomless well of corny stories and off-color jokes are shared.

At the center of it all is a pastime that originated in ancient Egypt, took root in Europe at least 900 years ago and continues to be popular worldwide.

The object of lawn bowling is simple: Roll a 3-pound ball, known to devotees as a bowl, closer than other players to a smaller ball called the jack.

Amador Martinez, a stocky retired Defense Department worker with a white cap pulled low over his eyes, is the Oxnard club’s top player, many members say.

Sheepishly, he nodded. He is pretty good when he hits the green, he said.

“It’s a mental game and you have to have the right attitude for it,” Martinez said as he tucked his knees together, crouched and made his bowl.

On the other side of the green, his two teammates eyed the ball closely and gauged its distance from the jack with a tape measure, an essential accessory when a fraction of an inch can make the difference between victory and defeat.

Some 37,000 people in the U.S.--most of them retired--are among the 4 million who play the game worldwide, said Joe Siegman, the editor of Bowls Magazine, which is considered a must-read among aficionados. Southern California is a lawn bowling hotbed, with three dozen clubs.

In Oxnard, many members are in their late 70s and early 80s. They talk of heart attacks, hip replacements, angioplasties, melanomas, arthritic joints and other maladies of age. For weeks and sometimes months at a time, bowlers have had to pull back from the club’s four-times-a-week competitions. But rarely does someone quit for good.

From time to time, members gather at their pink-and-white clubhouse and travel en masse to a pal’s funeral, an island of lawn bowlers in their regulation whites amid a sea of mourners in black.

“I thought that part was kind of hokey at first,” club president Ken Barrabee said of the funeral tributes. “But then I realized how important it is.”

A display case on a wall near the clubhouse kitchen is a memorial to bowlers who have passed on. Against a field of green felt are blue name tags with white lettering--one for each of the 25 members who has died since the club began.

Retired aerospace engineer Bill Taschek doesn’t get depressed when he glances over the names. At least they went, he said, with a legacy of friendships formed at a time in life when some people shut themselves off from the rest of the world.

“We’re all here to have fun and a good time,” said Taschek, 74, a ruddy-cheeked Oxnard resident who served as club president last year when his predecessor had a heart attack. “You get a little bit of exercise and a lot of fun. I gave up golf for this. Golf was bad for my ego.”