Bowls: Champion goes down fighting

Being eliminated after just the second game in section qualifying at the national championships would normally seem an abject failure for a 2003 Superbowls titleholder.

But Rob Ashton at least had the consolation of bowing out of the singles only after an epic battle with the great Rowan Brassey.

Ashton, with 30 Wellington centre titles to his credit, was one of the most notable early casualties at the championships in Auckland.

Brassey won 21-20 after the pair had come to the last end 20-all, which in itself had been a triumph for Ashton's tenacity.

Earlier in the match he had trailed 10-0 and twice when Brassey had been holding the game, Ashton prolonged the battle by killing each end with drives.

Sadly for Ashton he had come to his early showdown with Brassey by placing himself in a sudden-death situation in his very first game with a 21-17 upset loss to little-known Northlander Rihai Whaikawa.

As Ashton ruefully admitted, that was not the best preparation for a match against a bowler of Brassey's class.

To make his predicament even worse he found himself forced to drive early against Brassey's impeccable draw play and was quickly 10-0 down.

"Against Rowan I made it hard for myself," Ashton said.

"But I'm glad I at least made a fight of it. I just dug in and actually when up to 15 or 16 I thought even against Rowan I had a chance. And when it's 20-all it's anyone game."

It took, indeed, a toucher with a dead draw for Brassey to gain the decisive winning shot and Brassey himself was full of praise for Ashton's comeback, although not surprised.

"He played extremely well over the final stages and showed what you can do if you want to stay in a tournament," he said.

Ashton said he had paid the price for taking too long to adapt to the pace of the greens.

As was the case against Brassey, he was forced to peg back a big early deficit against Whaikawa.

He appeared to have done this, but then lost the match when his drive on the last end took out all his own bowls and left Whaikawa with four shots and the match.

The other big casualty was Brassey's pairs lead, world under-25 champion Jamie Hill, who was upset firstly by Northlander Sam Nelson and then Mairangi's Murray Radojkovich.

National under-30 representative Adam Newman was another non-qualifier and Nelson's Ali Forsyth, the champion last year and in 2003, qualified despite a third-round loss to Howick's Les Brown.

By his third game Brassey, who despite his outstanding national and international record over nearly 25 years has never won the singles title, had qualified. But Ashton was not the only bowler to make an impression on him.

A 17-year-old from the tiny Waitoa club in Thames Valley, Te Aroha College schoolboy Callum John, lost to Brassey - but by only 21-13.

John admitted afterwards to having been thrilled to have been on the same green as Brassey and said it had been an invaluable experience.

His immediate priority after the match was to get Brassey's autograph on his recently published biography.

Besides youth as exemplified by John, section play at the Henderson headquarters of the Dorchester-Holden championships illustrated the sport's increasing ethnicity spread.

As well as Whaikawa, whose dearest wish is for more Maori to be playing bowls, Onehunga's Sam Toloke, a Tongan just one year out of juniors and third in the recent Auckland singles, also needed only three matches to qualify.

The reduction to just two wins to qualify, because of Thursday's weather abandonment, took much of the drama out of the women's pairs section play with 132 of the 206 field qualifying.

Reigning singles champion Shona Klimeck and her Hokonui club lead, Adele Greenfield, lost their second match, but other powerful combinations such as Marlene Castle and Wendy Jensen, Jan and Marina Khan, Sharon Sims and Mary Campbell, and Lisa Dickson and Jessie Ann Law had no problems.

* Bowls has lost one of its former champions with the death of Bruce Ballinger in Australia.

Ballinger, a product of New Plymouth's famed Paritutu club, played from the Taranaki and Hawkes Bay centres and was the national champion of champions singles titleholder in 1989 and 1990.