Lawn bowlers have been playing this ancient game in Oakland for a century now, and Sunday marked the day in 1903, when a group of Scots immigrants launched the Oakland Scottish Lawn Bowling Club. To celebrate, lawn bowlers, came from around the Bay Area to cast their "bowls" in Oakland. A ball is a bowl in this challenging, quirky game.

Of course, in lawn bowling terms the club's a newcomer to Lakeside Park. It opened in 1911, paid for by a $300,000 city bond issue, after the U.S. Army Cavalry appropriated the club's original site at East 14th Street and 22nd Avenue in 1906 as a staging area for San Francisco Earthquake relief.

In 1915, something radical happened: Lawn bowling on Sunday began, angering the Scots founders -- devout Christians who kept the Sabbath holy.

"But the club had a lot of members who worked six days a week and Sunday was the only day they could play," a current member explains.

Eras have dawned and set since then, but the game continues. It happens every Sunday.

The object is to roll your bowl down the green, getting it as close as possible to a small, white ball, called a jack. That's it -- but there are enough twists and turns in the process to make lawn bowling popular around the world.

For one thing -- the ball, which evolved out of a game played by Roman soldiers, who apparently picked it up in Egypt before the time of Christ -- is not perfectly round. It's lopsided, so it always rolls in a curve. Controlling the curve precisely, so it lands next to a tiny object 75 feet away, takes skill.

However, it probably would never be seen on prime-time television -- and lawn bowlers like it that way.

In an era of mega-entertainment, rock'n' roll to NFL football -- this is a scene in a time warp. Dozens of bowlers dressed in uniform, pristine white shirts, white pants and flat, white sneakers -- no treads please -- filled the bowling greens -- just as they have here in Oakland for 100 years.

Songwriter Randy Newman got it right in "Dayton, Ohio, 1903." "Let's sing a song of long ago/When things were green and movin' slow/And people'd stop and say hello/On a lazy Sunday afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, in 1903."

Oakland Lawn Bowling Club President Wyman Chen's description mirrors that. "People are friendly; it gives all of us a chance to get out in the fresh air. We have fun here."

Chen, who grew up in Oakland, remembers walking by the bowling greens as a child. "It took me 65 years, but I got here and I love it."

Now a resident of Alameda, Chen said that when he was a kid, lawn bowlers were mostly white. No more. The club's nearly 80 members mirror the Bay Area, with whites, Asians, Hispanics, African Americans. The real commonality, besides a love for this ancient game, is gray hair. A large percentage of its members are of retirement age.

There is a network of clubs in the Bay Area -- in Berkeley, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz -- and everyone knows most everyone else.

To celebrate their centennial Sunday, lawn bowlers came from around the Bay Area -- everyone in whites, of course. "Whites make sense," says former Oakland president John Chinn. "They're cool; they reflect the heat."

Forget elitism, he adds. This is not elite. The only thing you have to do to participate is show up. Dues, if one decides to join, are $100 a year, he said. Much of the money goes to Oakland for upkeep on the three greens and the clubhouse.

Back on the green, the ball doesn't do what it's supposed to do -- and Anne Knopf shrugs in frustration. "I've been athletic my entire life. I play tennis, but I just can't get it right."

Knopf, who belongs to the Palo Alto Club, has played in Oakland before. She likes the greens, but the game -- its enthusiasts call "lawn bowls" -- frustrates her. It's worse than bridge, she says.

It is a real challenge, says Jerry Knott of Oakland, who is one of the club's champions.

"It's a lot like billiards," Knott says. "You can knock other bowls with yours."

In tournament play, team members of two to four compete against another team and each ball that lands in fair territory around the jack stays there until the end of the game -- or until someone else smashes their ball into it. "This gets very psychological; there can be 18 balls out there," Knott explains. Your own team members can try to nudge your ball closer; opponents can bank their shots off yours, he said.

Then, there's the green. Brown is good, ex-president Chinn explains. "Berkeley's greens are very green and pretty," he said, but they also can be damp, which changes the nature of bowls. A tinge of brown is good, members of the Oakland club think.

Berkeley, Members Cautioned, Might Not Agree
While there is competition between clubs, which belong to a national association with 130 clubs, it's mostly friendly. The last serious controversy was settled a decade ago, when club members conceded to croquet players and allowed them use of the back green -- on days the club doesn't use it.

After a lunch, prepared by a member who also is a chef, play continued. And so the day wound down. Another lazy day in Oakland in 2003.

William Brand can be reached at## bbrand@angnewspapers.com.

The Oakland Tribune: Cityside
Leanne McLaughlin, Managing Editor
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