Lawn bowls or bowls is essentially an indoor/outdoor game played on perfectly manicured grass or an artificial turf with biased wooden bowls. The game can be played by individuals or in teams of twos, threes or fours by rolling the biased ball towards the centre ball which is also called ‘jack’ or ‘kitty’. Lawn bowls is a strategy game where the game aims to have more of a participants’ Lawn bowls closer to the 'jack' (target) than their opposition’s.
Lawn bowls history can be traced back to as early as 13th century in the European regions where men played this game as a summer sport besides wrestling, shooting, leaping etc.
The current state of lawn bowls in New Zealand suggests that club memberships are decreasing which has led to a number of clubs across Auckland and New Zealand to either merge or close.
The sport is played by a minority of players from the Indian community.
Parmesh Raman, a tennis player by profession, came across lawn bowls once and since has been hooked with the game.
“Started bowls one year ago at Mt Eden Bowls after watching some people playing there and at that time. I used to play tennis four to five times a week at Point Chev Tennis Club, was the vice-captain of the club and also played twilight competitions,” Parmesh Raman told The Indian Weekender.
Mr Raman eventually stopped playing tennis for some time and learned lawn bowls and participated at different tournaments and reached the quarterfinals at the Auckland Juniors Tournament.
“I started encouraging other people of Indian background to come and play bowls. It is an easy game to learn, and one enjoys a lot. I take small groups of people to New Lynn Bowling Club to try bowls and encourage them to join clubs if they like it,” Raman said.
“I use to think it was old man's game but it is not true as you can see how young people are taking part and they were playing for their countries,” he added.
Auckland Bowls and New Zealand Bowls is encouraging Sport Waitakere to help West Auckland Lawn Bowls to increase the number of Indian participants in their club.
This initiative is targeting people from the Indian community taking the help of other community organisations such as Waitakere Indian Association, New Zealand Muslim Association, Shri Ram Mandir, etc.
“As the leader of the project, I aimed to campaign the sport to our community. Giving them an opportunity to try the sport and create an affinity towards it. Through the course of this initiative, we have had almost 50 new Indian participants playing lawn bowls now,” Javeed Ali, Community Sport Coordinator for Lawn Bowls at Sport Waitakere told The Indian Weekender.
Veterans of this sport are encouraging more players to join, especially people from the Indian community with no age restrictions. Lawn bowls is also played at the Commonwealth Games.
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