A half dozen Milwaukee area athletes are heading down to Arizona today. They’re competing in the 2008 US National Lawn Bowls Championships. WUWM’s Susan Bence pedaled over to Lake Park to meet some of the athletes who are keeping the centurys’ old sport alive.
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Max Cavender calls it a gentleman’s game. The Shorewood resident is gazing serenely at the greens where bowlers have played for almost 90 years. Cavender’s dad got him interested in playing. He tells me he was 11 or 12 when he started.
Now seasoned at 16, Cavender is competing in a sea of men several times his age. A few of them are warming up for the afternoon match. The three top players will head to nationals.
“If you take a look at the people out here, I mean, they’re athletes, they’re as good as it gets,” Cavender says.
As he munches on his sub sandwich and chips, Cavender explains the lawn bowl basics. It begins with a flip of a coin. That determines who “wins the mat”. There’s literally a small rubber mat that’s placed on the ground. The player who wins the flip, stands on the mat and rolls out a little white ball…..
“Called the jack,” Cavender says.
….some distance out onto the green. The jack becomes the target. Players take turns, rolling one their bowls, that’s b-o-w-l-s. Each orb weighs about four pounds.
“And it’s not perfectly spherical. And you try to get as close as you can...,” Cavender says.
…..to the little white jack. That’s how points are earned. Earn 21 points and you’re the winner.
Cavender says you have to learn to “read the green” in order to play well.
“There’s moisture, there’s the length of the grass, there’s whether or not you’ve rolled it, like on a golf course, so that it’s flatter and harder surface,” Cavender says.
But there’s also a strong mental component to the game. Cavender says bowlers often try to psyche out their rival.
“My opponent went to the bathroom twice. That’s sort of, it’s distracting and it sort of keeps the game on hold,” Cavender says.
There’s another trap bowlers can easily fall into, overconfidence. John Devine says you’re never too old to make that mistake. The Rockford Illinois bowler remembers a competition just like this one; the winners would go on to nationals.
“I had him down ten to nothing and I got cocky. I lost it by that much. Not an inch, three-quarters of an inch! If I’d just played my normal bowl, I would have taken it away from him,” Devine says.
I meet the man who beat Devine, and a lot of other bowlers over the years. In fact, Ken Degenhardt even won several national titles. The 77-year-old wishes he were still out bowling, but has to have his shoulder fixed first. So he settles for pulling dandelions from the green.
You can feel Degenhardt’s love of the game, but he’d never even heard of it until he delivered a refrigerator to the clubhouse. He was a working-class guy. Bowling to him meant knocking down pins.
“It was all business people doctors, lawyers, attorneys. And after I helped the guy move the refrigerator in here, he said, come on, you’ve got to join the club. But they said, oh no. Well he and about four or five other guys went to the board meeting and said, hey, you either leave the guy in, or we’re going to drop out. So things started turning then a little bit. That was in ’66,” Degenhardt says.
Degenhardt wants me to see the clubhouse. It’s lined with bowls, mats and lots of trophies. The refrigerator Degenhardt delivered still stands against the east wall. It’s become the official club beer tapper. You feel more than the thrill of the bowl here. It’s generations of camaraderie and the memories that come with it.
Degenhardt remembers a particular bus trip with his old friend Nealie. They were heading to a tournament in Chicago.
“Someone would start having a snort. Hey Nealie, you’ve got to have a snort, so they’d pour him one. His hand would be so dang shaky, you’d wonder how he’d….He never spilled a drop,” Degenhardt says.
Degenhardt’s memories are ancient history to 16-year-old Max Cavender. He doesn’t win today. In fact, the bowler who psyched him out earlier in the day with a couple of well-timed bathroom breaks, qualifies for nationals. Cavender is undaunted. He plans to keep on playing his way.
“If you’re going to win, if it’s meant to be, then you’re going to win. I mean, I’m not going to try and…I always play a fair game,” Cavender says.
Only time will tell how Cavender’s spirit will weave its way into the character of the Lake Park Lawn Bowls Club.
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