Lawn Bowling: The Laziest Game in the World?
We first heard of it during the Commonwealth Games. A quick history of bowls, from Julius Caesar's centurions to Southampton's 1299 club, and how the biased ball actually works.
This is a precision sport!!! HAHAHAHAAH!
The first time we heard of that sport from a know-it-all during the Commonwealth. We of course boasted about knowing better things in life then but then a quick Google search later revealed interesting facts about what is arguably the laziest game in the world.
Also known as “Bowls”, “Bowling On The Green”, “Bocce” lawn bowling has in fact been around for several thousand years.
Historians suggest the game made its way across Europe with Julius Caesar’s centurions. At that time, and still today among Italians, the game was known as “bocce”. By the 13th Century, “bowls”, was entrenched in the British Isles. At the turn of the century, 1299 AD, the Southampton Old Bowling Green Club was organized in England. The club remains active today which holds the record of being the oldest in the world.
By this time you would be scratching your head with the sudden bombardment of those dates but you got to start some where.
Today’s rules, the flat lawn, and even a dress code, seem to derive from the Scottish. Over time, the waves of Scottish emigrants took their game with them and established clubs in many countries, the colonies of the Western Hemisphere among them.
The Canadians kept it alive, spreading it from coast to coast. After such a enlightening history lecture you would be screaming “What’s the hell is Lawnbowling?”
Well, apart from being the laziest game in the world, the high-octane sport of lawn bowling is distinguished by use of a biased ball. That is, the ball is deliberately lop-sided so that it always curves toward the flat side as it slows down. The object of the game is to obtain points by getting one’s ball(s) closest to a small white ball, the “jack”, which may be anywhere between 75 and 108 feet away. The skill is to gauge the curve to achieve this even when an opponent may have guard balls blocking the “jack”.
Bowls are delivered either forehand or backhand, and never aimed straight at the jack. Which a bowler selects is dependent on the position of other bowls already in play.
Rules of the game vary somewhat from country to country. Whereas in Canada tournament games are played to 21 points, in the United States when the ends are completed the leader wins, much like the end of the frames in ten-pin bowling.
Coach of Indian squad (yes we do play the game and also have a Lawn Bowling Federation of India established since November 21, 1985 to boast of. However our show at the CWG 2010 isn’t worth mentioning)…. So the coach of Indian squad Richard Gale, however, compares the action of bowling to gym lunges.
From the December 2010 issue of FHM India.
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