June 29th
What a scorcher! And we haven’t got a game because the opposition couldn’t raise a team. The first really beautiful afternoon of the summer and we haven’t got a game. Bugger!
I could go on about the parlous state of the game when a club can’t raise a team in the middle of the summer, but to do so would be to give an impression of perspective, breadth of vision. Whereas the truth is that I’m gutted because I am just about to hit some form, I need “green-time”, and I can’t play next week either because I’m away for the day. It’s got the makings of a crisis.
We convene anyway in our shed of a clubhouse and somehow two trebles get organised. I say “somehow” because after announcing my arrival, I slide out and wait greenside with my crossword and Factor 50.
Although I am both Captain and Chairman, and therefore the natural person to do the organising, I deliberately take no part in the process. For reasons I am aware of but would struggle to explain, I have evolved a Tito-esque form of leadership at the Club. I occupy the important positions of responsibility and authority but I “do” next to nothing. I do “do” the stuff that nobody else wants to do – the post-prandial speeches and the AGM (and, very occasionally, I resolve a smouldering dispute before it catches fire), but I don’t “do” the stuff that normal captains and chairmen do. And it seems to work, but I’m not sure why. It wasn’t always thus, but now it is, and everything gets done, in a fashion, by all sorts of people, and there’s not a blazered official in sight.
Of course there are drawbacks. It would take me around 45 seconds to organise 12 names into four sets of 3 to play two matches of trebles. The presence of a tricky cryptic crossword and a tub of Factor 50 was no accident: they were borne out of experience.
When we eventually coalesced into our trebles, I found myself teamed up with my normal start-off man who is suffering a virtual collapse in form and the 12-year old who has only ever hurled a few woods in his short life. As I said, there are drawbacks.
The boy had with him his Dad’s bright red woods. In the week I had played a few ends with him and his Dad and he was playing with black woods. When the first wood went careering out of his hand at virtual right-angles, I became suspicious. I picked up the wood and realised that it was a size 7; that is, designed to fit the hand of a very large, fully grown male of the species; ie his Dad.
They were only practice ends and so I walked to his end and asked why he was playing with his Dad’s woods? “Jason told me to”, came his ready reply. Jason, his elder brother, looked at me with a wrinkled nose beneath a worried frown that said: “Because you have taken the unusual step of walking to our end in the middle of an end, although it is only a practice end, I am now fully aware that the red woods were probably not a good idea; and I’m hoping that you are not going to ask me if I can remember why I ever thought they might be a good idea because I can only remember thinking that as an elder brother with 5 years experience of bowling I should maybe offer an idea to my little brother who has no experience of bowling. But I really have no idea what ideas are – especially good ones.” I pursed, and dragged the little one off to the clubhouse to find something more suitable.
Against all the odds we had a decent game although my rhythm had not completely recovered from last week’s psychological mauling. The last wood of the match summed it up. The jack just a yard from the ditch, the scores level but they are holding shot with a close-ish wood. I have an open, swinging hand but miss the line with a perfectly weighted wood. Aaaarrrgh!!!
But it’s the performance of the 12 year old that gets me thinking. The fact is, hopeless as he is, it is obvious that he is a natural competitor. We are bowling 3 woods each, and most of the time his third wood is better than his second, which itself was better than his first. Granted, all three woods were, most of the time, fairly hopeless in the context of the match, but that mattered not a jot to him as he strove in his inexpert way to get better each time he was on the mat. His striving was unimpeded by the embarrassment of being hopeless, by the anxiety that comes with being part of a small team, by being amongst adults most of whom were strangers to him. He was just having fun trying to get that pesky bowl to land somewhere near that jack.
Two thoughts formed: 1. You can’t teach competitiveness 2. We should all have his attitude.
We’d finished by 5 o’clock and the sun was still blazing and so 8 of us played a game of rinks (4 against 4, two woods each). Thought number 2 was buzzing around my consciousness and so I had a good laugh at myself for my inveterate seriousness when it comes to throwing bowls at jacks. Immediately, the sense of being able to imagine the whole swing, that I had a fortnight ago, came back. And, surprise surprise, the woods started to hit the spots with that deliciously identifiable perfect pace.
The last wood of this little game was a perfect contrast to my afternoon’s other last wood. This time, I had very little room but knew from the other ends we had played in this direction that I could afford to be a little outside the line as long as I had an inch-perfect pace. I had to beat a wood that was barely nine inches from the jack from a distance of about 30 yards. My wood looked a little wide all the way down but curled beautifully at the end to nestle in right behind the jack. I got a clap.
It is the inevitability that stays with you. The inevitability of the wood doing what you want it to do when you have “timing” at your disposal. The addictiveness of that feeling of knowing that the shot is going to be perfect, even before you have played it, is what is at the heart of natural competitiveness. It is what makes us all go back, time and time again, to repeat ad nauseum the acts of shot-making that our chosen sport demands. It is what drives the pursuit of pointless perfection. The little boy’s got it. And the less he realises he’s got it the more innocent pleasure he will have from it.
No comments yet.