Game bridges generation gaps,Competitive fire burning brightly,Personal challenge of player and bowl a stimulating mix,‘Relaxing’ sport just the ticket,Ron’s spikes not required on green

Tim and Ginny Sherriff wish they had found bowls earlier. At tournaments they have seen that the really good players are in their 40s, or younger. Picture by Liam Clayton

BOWLS stories by John Gillies

GO to any bowling club’s junior championships and you might see a bowler in his 20s in earnest competition with an opponent in his 70s.

Bowls is like that . . . young, old and in between on the same green.

You can play a good game into your 80s and beyond, but if you want to scale the heights, start young, say those in the know.

“We should have started playing 20 years ago,” Tim Sherriff said.

He and wife Ginny took up bowls in 2014, in their “mid-60s”.

“We got invited to play one afternoon. We’d never been on a bowls green and we fell in love with it.

“We’d thought it was a game for old people. We believe now that if we’d started when we gave up rugby and netball, we’d be good bowlers.

“We’ve left it too late. We’ll probably become quite useful bowlers but whether we get much better, I don’t know.”

Injury forced Tim to give up playing rugby in his mid-20s and for much of the time since then he has been active in management and coaching for the Ngatapa club.

He farmed in the hill country near Eastwoodhill Arboretum until the mid-1990s, when he came into town and bought Gas ’n’ Gear. He retired last year.

“I was 65 when I took up bowls. I talk to guys older than me and they say, ‘I’m not old enough to play bowls’. People play rugby and soccer, and then they take up golf. They don’t consider bowls because they think they’re too young.

“We’ve just been to Auckland with the under-eights (bowlers with up to eight years of bowls experience).

“The players who are really good are in their 40s, and some are in their early 20s. It’s a good sport to take up while you’re still relatively fit and you are sharper.

“When Ginny and I took it up, we’d go for a walk to watch a championship tournament. We’d watch Steve Goldsbury, Robin Jefferson, Vern Marshall . . . we couldn’t believe the skill level.”

Ginny Sherriff has played competitive sport all her life. At 15 she had to have dispensation from Mayor Harry Barker to play for the Poverty Bay senior netball reps because she was under 16, and at tournaments she had a chaperone.

In those days, the Poverty Bay playing uniform comprised a red gymslip, black stockings, white long-sleeved shirt and a tie.

Then came marriage and a family. When the children were both at school, she played golf, first at the Patutahi course and then at Poverty Bay, and competed at regional level.

“After golf I had a spell in hospital, in a coma for 40 days.”

Complications after a routine operation led to TTP — a rare blood disorder in which clots inhibit the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the organs. She was on life support, which she says was about to be turned off when she came to.

“I think I survived because I was fit,” Ginny said.

After that scare, she was open to a suggestion to give bowls a try. She thought it was a game for “old ladies in long dresses”, but soon learned it was “so much about the top two inches”.

“It’s an intriguing sport,” she said.

“A friend, Ronnie Crone, took me under her wing and got me to play lead in her triples team, with another junior (Beverly Davy), and we won the centre title.

“I soon realised the competitive game is not for cissies. You are playing from 8.30am to 5.30pm for two days in maybe 30-degree heat.”

But Ginny also says it is a great way to meet people: “It’s a very social sport, even at a competitive level.”

She and Tim have played together in mixed pairs . . . “Sometimes it hasn’t worked out.”,Ever since Ray Young teamed up with Bill Scott and Joe Lockwood to win a mercantile tournament at Kahutia Bowling Club, he knew he would return to bowls.

He would have started earlier, but he had to have both hips replaced, and then one had to be redone six years after it was first replaced.

Time passed, and Ray Smith at Plumbing World told him he was “full of it” and would never play bowls. So a year later, hip problems behind him, he took up the game. That was three years ago.

“I knew I would enjoy it, but I’ve got to enjoy it even more because every year you get better,” Ray Young said.

The comradeship is “incredible”, he says, but it is the competitive side of the sport that excites him.

“It’s a real thinking game. You have to nut so many things out . . . about every green you go to, every person you play against or with, and the weather.”

Ray played rugby in his youth, and was the regular halfback for High School Old Boys for most of the 1970s, when Poverty Bay could give big-name teams a hurry-up.

In 1974 he was training with the representative squad and was picked to play against Bay of Plenty, but had to pull out with a back injury.

In 1972, as a 19-year-old, Ray had helped HSOB win the Lee Bros Shield, symbol of local club rugby supremacy. The following year he played for the Olympians — alongside All Blacks Blair Furlong and Ian MacRae and some top Auckland players — against Poverty Bay, scoring one try and almost scoring what could have been the winner.

He remembers the influence of coaches like Garry Thompson, Peter Florence, Pat McQuillan and Brian Cairns, but some of his other memories are not so clear.

“I had a lot of concussions on the way,” he said.

“The ambulance was on the field twice, and I had two other major knocks.

“My last game was about 1981, against Rangatira at Te Karaka. One of my best mates, Barry Hyland, was heading for the tryline, and I wasn’t about to let him score. I stopped the try but they carted me off, concussed. That was the final straw.”

Ray coached HSOB teams for six years — at under-19, u21 and senior reserve level, the highlight being the u19s’ undefeated title-winning season of 1985. He also managed lower-grade HSOB teams and — for two years — the HSOB premier team in a period that included a championship win under the guidance of coach Craig Wilkie.

Ray started refereeing in 1990 and still controls junior games and serves as touch judge in premier matches. Administration and referee coaching also keep him busy.

At 65, he picks and chooses his plumbing jobs, and if an enticing game of bowls comes up, he puts the work aside.,Jeff Davis has been playing bowls for 11 years, having had his appetite whetted by his Mitre 10 team “Jeff, Joy and Cally”, who competed in mercantile bowls at the Poverty Bay club.

He and wife Joy (who started club bowls two years after Jeff, having seen how much he enjoyed it) are members of the Poverty Bay club.

“I’d been involved in rugby, surf lifesaving?. . . it was always team events,” Jeff said.

“I found with bowls it was me and the bowl, competing against other people. Sure, we have team events, but if you deliver your bowl well you have completed your job, and if your bowl gets taken off the head, so be it. For me, it’s the personal challenge.

“We’ll bowl from 8.30am through to 6pm. We’ll feel tired but really good about it.”

Jeff said bowlers could be divided roughly into three groups:

- The social bowlers who rocked up on Tuesday, Thursday and or Saturday, had two games, then a drink and a chat with their mates, and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

- Social bowlers who were a little more competitive and took part in club competitions.

- Bowlers who enjoyed competition and sought out tournaments where they would compete against better players. He and Joy belonged to this group.

“We also go to Australia and play bowls there,” Jeff said.

“You meet a lot more people with bowls than you would with golf. For the past two years we’ve played in June/July tournaments at the Maroochydore Beach Bowls Club on the Sunshine Coast. Lots of Kiwis take part, and they have good-quality bowlers.”

Jeff, 71, has been retired 10 years. As a youngster he was a rugby winger, then a forward, and played for Old Boys at under-21 level. In surf lifesaving, he competed in six-man rescue and resuscitation competition for the Waikanae club. He left Gisborne when he was 19 and returned “about 40 years ago”.

He and Joy were in the Gisborne Mitre 10 store for 26 years before they retired.

“A lot of people, when they retire, don’t have a personal challenge,” Jeff said.

“Bowls give you a challenge, but it’s also a great way to meet people, get out in the open air and keep stimulated.”,Jim Wilson took up bowls less than two years ago.

He and his wife Jean came to New Zealand in 1965.

A native of Ardrossan, on the North Ayrshire coast in south-western Scotland, Jim served his apprenticeship as a shipwright at a yacht slip on the Clyde, and was keen to emigrate. When he learned a job had been arranged for him in New Zealand with Gisborne builders Story and Lomas, Jim found building work on Scottish council houses to prepare.

Once here, he spent 20 years as a carpenter, 14 years in the freezing chambers at the Kaiti freezing works and five years selling insurance.

Now retired, and widowed, Jim enjoys the camaraderie and social side of bowls. He joined the Gisborne club after he was invited along by a member of the City of Gisborne Highland Pipe Band, for whom he has been secretary/treasurer for 11 years.

“When he introduced me to the bowlers, he said, ‘Jim wants to join the club’,” Jim said.

“I found everyone very friendly, and it’s a nice relaxing game. Sometimes it just takes someone to give you that little bit of support.”,Ron Robertson, 2011 World Masters Athletics male athlete of the year, started bowling just over a year ago.

He had not long before won the eight-kilometre cross-country race for men 75 to 79 years old at the 2016 World Masters Athletics Championships in Perth. But it was the only one of four races he had entered that he was able to complete.

Six weeks before the championships he had pulled a tendon off the bone in his right shoulder, and the injury flared up during his gold-medal run.

But after resting up at home, Ron went down to the Gisborne Bowling Club greens to “see what they were doing”. His shoulder injury meant golf and running were out of the question.

“No one invited me; I’d had a bit of a break and felt like doing something,” he said.

“Someone came up and started talking, and soon I was playing.”

Ron and his wife Yvonne had played mercantile bowls, and he thought it would be reasonably easy to pick up.

“It’s a lot more challenging than I initially thought; that’s why I became more interested.”

And coming from a sport in which he trained alone most of the time and competed as an individual, Ron enjoyed the fellowship of the greens, the clubhouse and being in a team.

He has had some success, being half of a duo that won a club junior pairs title, but says he has not been particularly competitive. He has been happy with weekday afternoon club play, club tournaments and the occasional practice session.

Ron is grateful for the warm welcome he received from club members, the tips from experienced players, and the loan of a set of bowls while he decided whether this game was for him.

Having started his medal-winning and record-setting running career in his late 30s and bowls in his mid-70s, Ron is a confirmed late adopter of new sports. But he also believes in the value of starting young to develop the necessary skills and game sense.

He has been helping prepare Ilminster Intermediate’s AIMS Games cross-country team for the past few years, and he sees great benefits in bowlers starting young.

“I’d thought bowls was primarily an older person’s game but I realise now it can be very much a young person’s sport. It takes a long time to come to terms with the skills and knowledge the game requires at the higher levels.”