On a July morning in 1588, Sir Francis Drake was enjoying a game of bowls on a lawn in Plymouth, England. Drake had circumnavigated the Earth and harassed Spanish ships and settlements in the name of Queen Elizabeth. The Spanish Armada, he was told, had been sighted off the coast of England.
Drake was unhurried. “There is plenty of time to finish the game and thrash the Spaniards, too,” he remarked, before proceeding to do both. Lawn bowling, even in the face of history, is a calm, leisurely game. Santa Maria has a lawn bowling club of its own, and on the sunny, quiet morning of March 20, six members gathered to play.
“It is a game of millimeters,” mused club member Tony Witten, watching his shot go wide.
The Santa Maria club maintains a clubhouse and a faded turf green across the street from the public library. Sturdy wooden pergolas cast a lattice of shade on the benches around the sides. There’s a drinking fountain and a dry-erase scoreboard.
The members gathered for 12 rounds (called ‘ends’) of bowling that morning were competitive, deftly skilled, and sensitive about their age. They had, for the most part, taken up lawn bowling in the later part of their life, after retirement. The club has upwards of 40 members. The space is maintained with their dues—at $40 a year, a steal compared to a single round of golf—and by their volunteer labor.
In their early retirement, members traveled to Cambria and Oxnard to face off other clubs in doubles and triples tournaments. Now, they don’t travel as much, but they still bowl. The oldest member in attendance was 94 years old. Jim Graham, the former president of the Santa Maria club, has been bowling since he was 19. He’s 81 now.
Lawn bowling is a variation on a game that’s very, very old. Some evidence suggests that Egyptians played something like it 7,000 years ago, with balls made from stone. The Romans called it bocce, and, through conquest, spread their version of the game across much of Europe. By the end of the 13th century, lawn bowling had distinguished itself with a club in Southampton, England.
Lawn bowling balls are called bowls because they aren’t really balls. They’re irregular elliptical spheres, flattened at the poles, with one end slightly flatter than the other. This uneven quality lends the bowls to long, subtle curves when they’re rolled across the green. It’s called bias, and is a matter of preference; some prefer more bias in their bowls, some less. Generally, quick throws lend themselves to less of an arc.
“The small logo is the direction you want it to curve,” said club member Jerry Libsack. “The center of the ball is the direction you want it to curve. You want to make sure that you don’t want to throw it this way or that way,” he demonstrated, inverting his grip on the bowl, “because then it will wobble like an egg, or a potato.”
A bowl thrown with too much force will overshoot the jack—the target, a small ball—and is “heavy.” Most throws aim for a smooth, uninterrupted transit of the ball through an opening on the rink so that it comes to rest as close to the jack as possible. This is called “drawing to the jack.” In a tight situation, bowlers may want to reset the end by knocking the jack out of bounds, bringing about a “dead end” and a reset.
Graham, the former president of the lawn bowling club, explained that the game requires an attentive eye, an arsenal of different throws, and the patience for years of practice.
“It’s a very strategic game,” he explained. “In order to play it correctly, it requires a great degree of skill. To become good at it requires years of experience and practice. The various shots that can be played and need to be played. You need to look at the position of the object ball, the position of the opponent’s bowls, there’s a whole mess of shots that you are required to be able to play if you’re good. So it’s a challenge. It’s a challenging game.”
That challenge can be heard after the throws, when bowlers will often coax and cajole their bowls with gentle words as they roll across the field: “No matter what, no matter how hard you talk to the bowl, once it’s left your hand, it doesn’t do what you ask it to,” he said.
Graham said that lawn bowling, like any sport, is won or lost on degrees of talent or drive.
“The hard part is developing the skills to play the shots that need to be played,” he said. “You’re trying to outdo your opponent, you’re trying to outthink your opponent, and in team events you’re trying to motivate your team, like in any other sport. If they’re daydreaming, I would tell them to get their head in the game. That’s motivation.”
Lucia Outten, who made a comeback on March 20, after trailing for most of the day, to win by two points, said she enjoys the game on good days and bad ones.
“It’s just a lot of fun,” Outten said. “It’s just exciting. It’s like golf: You can be good one day and lousy the next, but when you’re good it’s just great. There’s a lot of thought that goes into it. Where you have to hit your ball in golf, you have to aim yours into the right place. So it’s along the same lines.”
Lawn bowling, however, is a casual game meant to be played slowly with friends. Like golf, it lends itself to socializing. The clubhouse in Santa Maria is modest and sparse in decoration, but in Commonwealth countries clubhouses will often contain bars and are set up for full-on celebrations.
Club member Libsack said the sport is so loved in Australia that he attended a wedding at a bowling green while he was travelling there.
“They were dancing and singing, and instead of bowling they were in the clubhouse celebrating,” he said.
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 2, 2015.