Lawn Bowling

By Vince Basehart

“Your wrist is turning,” says Ray Spiro, the South African.

I have just rolled a size 4 Henselite brand lawn bowl, an object resembling a cannon ball, across the pristine grass of the Santa Monica Lawn Bowling Club’s green, or “pitch.” I am attempting to place it as close as possible to the “jack,” which looks like a cue ball, about one hundred feet away. I miss by a mile.

I explain that I was trying to put a twist on it, like throwing a slider.

“No. Keep your wrist straight.” Spiro, the club’s president, demonstrates a perfect lawn bowler’s movement: crouched low as if to genuflect, empty hand braced on the knee, arrow straight wrist supporting the bowl, followed by a graceful underhand arc. The bowl is delivered to the pitch as if it was a fragile egg.

The Club has generously taken me under its wing this afternoon.

There are exactly two dozen players, male and female, to make up eight teams. Most are retirees, some considerably younger, many from the British Commonwealth, all looking like they would be comfortable on a Scottsdale golf course. In a collection of sunhats and white purpose-built shoes, a sporty woman in silver sneakers stands out.

These are the people at Douglas Park you regularly pass on Wilshire, and think, “How easy could that be?”

Trust me, it’s not. Not only are you trying to get as close to the jack without hitting or overshooting it, but your bowl arcs either left or right due to it’s slightly flattened sides, and one weighted side. Opponents can block passage to the jack with their bowls, or “split the head” by “throwing the hammer” to scatter your bowls far from the target.

The club includes plenty of Americans of course, and other people from around the world, but the British connection is significant.

The contemporary version of the game was developed in the British Isles and moved across the Empire, where many people still take it up as children. Comparatively, perhaps having to do with that tiff in 1776, it is barely on the radar screen of the average American, except for a handful of mostly seniors.

With all the British, Australian, South African and New Zealand accents around me, and the general Hail Britannia vibe of the game, I suddenly become thirsty for a good gin and tonic.

Noreen Wilkie is one of the younger players, an athletic looking Aussie, who fills me in a bit on strategy. She talks about playing “long” or “short” and how a team’s Skip, Vice and Lead -- a team’s most expert to novice players, respectively -- work together to knock out or surround the other team’s bowls.

The place has at once the quiet, intense air of a Masters putting green and the gabby camaraderie of a pool hall. Bowls traverse the 120-foot green in about ten seconds, and opponents will hoot or congratulate each other as appropriate. I can already sense why people love this game and why they like being here.

Many carry their own bowls, in sets of four, in specially designed bags. Or you can grab a set from the shack in the corner which has a kettle strapped to its side which dispenses not, alas, gin and tonic, but, I am warned, “horrible coffee.”

Zev, a philosophical Russian built like a circus strong man, takes over my tutorship. At about 70 years old, Zev could still snap me like a twig.

I roll a few bowls at the jack and, magically, they seem to congregate near it. Zev smiles. “Good. That’s consistency.” But he mocks my approach a bit, not stating, but suggesting, that it looks girlish.

Moving a hand from his head to his chest, Zev explains that he’s big into “the mind-body connection,” stress reduction, and body control the game requires.

Becoming overconfident, I overshoot the jack for the first time. “Remember,” says Zev, searching for the right words, “this is a game of precision, and of grace.”