Trends

Colour to grow bowls

Bowls clothes today are no longer required to be white; colour is everywhere in shirts, pants and occasionally in skirts.

Gone are the nurse and ice-cream boy styles of dressing for the game. It’s all about colour, and particularly among the younger players.

Gone too are the sober brown shoes to be replaced with white Hush Puppy type loafers as long as they have flat soles.

The bowls, or woods as they are sometimes still called, have also changed. Now when you visit a bowling green you will see any of the colours of the rainbow being used where in older times it was strictly black or brown. Now your eyes will be dazzled by the many hues of the bowls used today.

The other thing that is going to change the face of bowls is the influx of black, coloured and Asian players taking up the game.

Bowls, for all its slow-mo appearance, is anything but boring. Nor is it an enclave inhabited only by old people. There are many young people in the game and it is in their hands that the future and survival of the game lies.

By its very nature bowls seems to be a slow, boring game. It is, to outsiders.

But once you have allowed yourself to be enchanted by its wiliness, it will not let you go. It’s exciting, it’s addictive and educational. It entices you in with its many tricks of the trade and when you learn your way about, you are likely to be hooked for the rest of your life.

But bowls is in danger.

Its very existence is threatened by a lack of publicity occasioned by a lack of knowledge of what to do to make it better known by the people that administer the game.

There is also a hiatus in media coverage.

It has always been considered boring — it takes along time to complete a game; elitist — it appears to be a game only for affluent or semi-affluent white people; and, old fashioned — still 19th century.

Most of this is true, but then again most of it is false.

While there are many that cling to the old traditions of the game there are more who want to see it as one of the sports all people can play.

And things are being done about it.

Some years back those diehards who controlled the game with a will of their own nearly destroyed it by their actions and it was only when a few modern thinkers, putting their bowls lives on the line, decided to attack the norm.

They lobbied for coloured clothes and the welter of new, young faces crying out for a new approach won the day and colours became the wear.

Then the bowls manufacturers, also probably coerced by these younger thinking people began to introduce coloured bowls — red, blue, green, yellow, orange, mustard; why only last week I saw purple bowls on the green. And while there was an outcry of disgust from the diehards, today it is fully accepted.

Henselite are now even introducing an attractive speckled bowl, aimed at the more modern player.

Bowls SA, through its development committee, saw the light way back in the 90s and concerted efforts were made to bring the game to races other than the whites who had until then dominated the game with words like “They won’t want to play the game. It’s too slow for them.”

They were wrong and today you will, at any bowls club, see players of colour enjoying a game of bowls with their white clubmates.

The coloured players have progressed so far that three of them have played for SA in international competitions and provincial sides all contain numbers of coloured players.

And this has not been window-dressing. All those players have earned to right to their places in their teams.

The advent of what at first was called pyjama cricket had a huge effect on bowls. Bowls officials realised that they needed to so something similar in bowls.

First, they threw away the rule book about clothing and the only regulation in the Laws of the Game today is that flat-soled shoes must be worn.

Then they set about changing the way the game is played so much so that today international games are no longer decided in the fours discipline by the long winded results over 21 ends, but rather two sets of nine ends are played. If there is a tie at that stage, there is a sudden-death play-off.

Similarly, the other team disciplines follow this style while singles is mostly played over seven ends.

In another innovation — mostly played at unofficial tournaments — two-bowls pairs and triples have become the norm in an effort to speed up the game and make it more interesting to spectators.

All these new ideas are bearing fruit, but in recent weeks something new had joined the ranks.

The Western Province Bowls Association, through its ebullient president, Sergio Martinengo, a former CEO of Checkers, has introduced their Super 10 competition that targets under 45 players only.

What Sergio did was split his Western Province district (41 clubs) into five zones and had his provincial selectors pick sides to represent each zone. A prerequisite was that men and women under 45 should be chosen and would play together. They then asked neighbouring Boland, presided over by another forward thinking gentleman, Martin van Zyl, to enter a team.

The result — instant success and players in other age groups are now asking the president to arrange games for them in the same mode.

They will play a round robin of five matches over Saturday afternoons to decide the winners.

One of the big advantages has been the emergence of a new batch of sponsors for the game and each of the six that joined up also put up a sizable amount of money in sponsorship so ensuring that their players were suitably dressed in their colours and their company names were prominent.

It is ventures like this that will ensure growth in the game and perhaps in the near future we might find ourselves with a bowls population of 50 000 as it once was (in the 60s) and not the 30 000 we have today.