Experience #5- Go Lawn Bowling (Winner takes, loser rakes!)

I was doing a little research about my home town online and discovered that right here in Lakeland there is the Lakeland Lawn Bowling Club. I had never heard of this in my life. Who knew?? I perused their official website and decided it would be totally fun to take them up on their ever-standing offer to give anyone free lessons. So my Dad and I laced up our required flat-heeled tennis shoes and headed out to the rink.

Our lessons were taught by Christine and Don. Christine is the President of the Club and Don is the Treasurer. Lovely people, really, and they wore their name tags and everything! They were very knowledgable and totally official! (Don even let me carry the tape measure) You also learn real quick that everyone out there playing has an accent- either English or Scottish and it totally adds to the authenticity of the game. At one point I felt like I was out on the highlands somewhere and that a sheep might come wandering through the green.



The basic premise of the game is that there is a small colored ball, called the jack, that is rolled out first and then points are scored by rolling the 'bowls' (seen at right) as close as you can to the jack. Sounds simple. The one caveat is that the bowls are not round and are biased to one side. Meaning, that when you roll a bowl it curves very hard to one side as it slows down. (Just make sure that you know which way it is going to curve- remember that the smaller dot on the outside needs to face the direction you want it to go. According to Don, "Everyone makes that mistake once in a while" which, in our case, "everyone" meant Mike :) Anyway, that is what makes the game fun and challenging.

Here are some other fun facts of note: The game is played on a giant astroturfed field, called the green, that is divided up into seperate rinks, similar to lanes in regular bowling. The rinks are 36.5 meters long, approx. 120 feet. The green is also completely surrounded by a small sand 'ditch' that catches your ball when you put a little too much heat on it (good thing for you, Dad!).

Anyway, Dad and I started out playing each other and I killed him. Just check out that score on the very official scoreboard:
Okay, okay, the score was not actually 53 to 2 (you can only score a maximum of 4 points per 'end' and we only played 4), but Don was amused at our hijinks, and hey, we aim to please!

After that whoopin', we teamed up to play some 2 on 2. Me and Don (I nicknamed him "Mr. Clutch") vs. Christine and my Dad. Playing 4 on 4 is really fun. After Dad and I bowled our four bowls a piece, it was then time for Don and Christine to go and they could totally wreak havoc on all the work we had just done. Don ended up being incredibly adept at smoothly 'bowling the jack' and Christine was very precise at whizzing her bowl down the rink and hitting out the jack and opposing bowls many times. However, Me and Don were victorious in the end, as this TRUE score would indicate:

And now I would just like to take a moment to show you this: That I bowled the jack from about 110 feet away! (Dad, your attempt to fluster me with the long ball did not work that time! Mu-hahahahaha!) And as you can see, Christine quickly marked it with a chalk X to indicate that whatever happened to that bowl, it was still 'live' because it had touched the jack. But you already knew that...




My amazing form... You can also see the 'rake' in the background. That handy dandy little device helps you scoop up all the balls when the 'end' is complete. I told them I needed one of those for all of Luke's toys. It would be genius! Plus, whichever team won the points did not have to rake up all the balls for the next turn. Hence the phrase, Winner Takes, Loser Rakes!




Well, I had never been Lawn Bowling and now I can say that I have! Who-hoo! I highly recommend it. And a big thank you to my Dad for going with me and not dressing completely in white as he threatened to do. He was pretty good, not as good as me, of course, but as he explains it, his poor performance was due in part to his "footwear holding [him] back." And I humored him by letting him change the scoreboard on this one too :)