Bowling on the Green

The game was bowls. Expert leadsmen,* and skippers,/- oldsters mostly, gathered last week at Franklin Field in Boston. Here teams of four were playing for the U. S. championship, which, after many a ball had glittered over a smooth patch of turf, was awarded to Buffalo. In these championship matches the game was a network of rules and conventions. As in all modern bowling-on-the-green, however, the general procedure was this: the first player, or lead, sent his bowl--the size of an indoor baseball--into one of the rinks marked off on a 40-yard square green in an effort to hit the "jack" or to rest as near it as possible. Following players, up to the number of four, tried also to hit the jack, or to knock opponents' bowls into the ditch which surrounds the green. At the end of a round, the side which had bowl or bowls nearest the jack was counted winner.

In Boston last week stood Charles E. Black, U. S. singles Champion Bowler. Once Illinois tennis champion, he took to bowling ten years ago. Now, as he watched the bowls sliding as if upon green ice with the mechanical accuracy of bearings around a greased axle, he commented on the origin, development, tendencies, of the game he loves. A straight gentleman with a red Dutch face, he looked like the shade of Peter Minuit, onetime (1623-32) governor of New Amsterdam, legendary champion of New Amsterdam bowlers, as he said: "All the big sporting events are Chicago bound. The bowling tournaments might well be' held there.''

The courtiers of Confucius, men with bitter yellow faces blackly stitched into acute angles, invented a game. They would stand, fantastically foppish in long sleeves and ivory silk, silent on the shiny green leather of China turf, each holding in his hand a great smooth ball of polished wood. It was a picture in suave bright colors infused with a slow and graceful motion. There would be a swish of light brilliance above the lawn, a brush of spinning wood on grass, a far-away microscopically delicate click as wood touched porcelain. The game was first to pitch balls into a circle, then to make later balls touch or rest close to the original--like a marbles match, played by dignified giants. When it was over, muttering clipped but vociferous explanations of successful rolls, bundling their complicated silk togas about small nervous bodies, the courtiers of Confucius scurrying like ungraceful peacocks, would go back through green or garden to palace or to palanquin.

Clicking smoothly over groomed lawns, globes of lignum vitae or other dark and ponderous fibre, rolled down into India, over the Himalayas, through the hot, level borders of Persia onto the deck of a Spanish boat, over the blue waving turf of the Mediterranean, through Spain to England. Here, half the world away from China, yokels at twilight gathered on a sward, awninged by oak trees, bordered by oak-beamed cottages, breathed hard and bent over to twirl great wooden spheres--bowls, they called them in England.

Gradually rules rather than decorative diversion came to govern the sport. There grew to be two main divisions--the one called "bowling" or "ten-pins," playe'd now in indoor alleys by barflies and roustabouts; the other called "Bowls" or "Bowling-on-the-Green," a handsome recreation for gentlemen, a game which in tempo compares with other present-day exercises, as the courante compares to the Charleston. It is played now by members of the Elizabethan Club at Yale University, and by the members of many an old, austere and gentle club, who are too antique for the frantic antics of the pastimes practiced by younger popinjays. No longer foppish, no longer clothed in silk or jerkins, they still narrow their eyes to an Eastern slant, still gabble noisily as they heave their greens about, "the closest thing I ever saw. You couldn't have put a peacock's feather between the two. . . ."

* First bowler on a team. /- Last bowler on a team, captain.