Post by earl on May 13, 2008 14:41:16 GMT
1 The Beautiful Game
Most people who've driven the roads of rural Cork will have encountered a large group of pedestrians who either shove in to the side of the road or caution you to wait for a second while the next shot is played.
These men, and an odd woman too, are part of the road bowling fraternity, following a game whose object is to cover a course of a couple of miles or so in the lowest possible number of throws of a steel ball. The reaction of most motorists is to feel good that something so uniquely Irish is being preserved in Cork and, at the other end of the country, Armagh.
Because bowling is uniquely Irish, right? If I tell you that this day last week a bowler called Tim Pat O'Donovan was competing on the road between Bandon and Dunmanway, you'd expect that. But you wouldn't expect his opponents to have been Loris Fiorelli, Coen Kuipers, Uwe Stademann and Henning Feyen. Welcome to the European bowling championships.
2 Flor's Article
It all began in 1967 when Flor Crowley, bowling aficionado and Fianna Fáil TD for Mid Cork, later Cork South West, sent an article on the sport to an American magazine. A young Dutchman happened to see the article and was struck by the fact that a similar game was played in his native area, near the German border. When he brought the news home, the Dutch bowlers made contact with their Irish counterparts who visited Holland to take part in a score.
This international encounter caught the attention of the bowlers of two German regions, Ostfriesland on the Dutch border and Schleswig-Holstein, between the North and Baltic seas. The games played by the three countries involved were not identical but they had enough in common for a first European Championships to be held in 1969.
They have been held every four years since and these days the Italian bowlers, from Pesaro on the Adriatic coast, have joined the fray. Once the bowl starts rolling, it has a tendency to gather momentum.
3 German Lofting
The championships take place over three days, getting under way with the German Loft. This is the speciality of the German teams, particularly the mighty FKV which of course stands for Friesischer Klootschiefer Verband.
These Ostfrieslanders are a tall, powerful bunch whose top bowlers resemble decathletes and they have dominated the championships in recent years, largely because there are 42,000 players in the region, around ten times more than any of the opposition.
At the Nemo Rangers sports complex, they fly off the edge of the small platform which they use and propel the projectile well over 200 feet. As the FKV juggernaut pulverises all opposition, their fans chant, 'Hurrah, hurrah, das FKV ist ja'. The first Irish competitor finishes 19th.
Among the FKV stars is the legendary Hans Georg Bohlken, a revered figure in Irish bowling for his feat in lofting a bowl over the Chetwynd Railway Viaduct just outside Cork city. A champion as far back as 1984, Bohlken leads all the way with a total of 241 metres for three throws before he is overhauled at the death by his team-mates Frank Goldenstein and Thore Frollje. The FKV look invincible.
4 Dutch Moors
Half-way through the Dutch Moors competition, which takes place on a 2,000-metre long straight grass track at Rathcoole airfield between Millstreet and Mallow, it becomes clear that a mighty struggle is going on between BCE (Bol Chumann na hÉireann) and the FKV for team gold. And as news starts coming up the course that the Irish are up in three, down in three and level in another two, it's a bit like the Ryder Cup.
It's a dirty day at the airfield and by the time the competitors are on their final stretch, the going is sticky and the windy conditions increasingly arduous. Unfazed by the team tussle between the Irish and the Ostfrieslanders, the Dutch look set for a one-two in the individual competition, Marc Oude Lutkhuis and Robert Meijer leading with just one pair left out on the course.
The pair in question are reigning champion Dirk Taddings of the FKV and Ireland's Philip O'Donovan and the thickening mud lends a primordial air to a truly epic struggle.
Because, in a competition of 500 bowls, it all hangs on the final two. Taddings has looked slightly the stronger all the way up but O'Donovan takes the lead with his second last shot and holds his nerve to win.
The 36-year-old winner from Churchtown South near Cloyne has been bowling since he was eight years old.
"I won the All-Ireland Junior B in 1993 and the Junior A in 1994. In 2000, I won the Munster title and got beaten in the All-Ireland final and in 2005 I won the Munster and All-Ireland titles."
It is an exemplary tale of progression, all those previous championship winning bowls meaning that when O'Donovan has a shot to win his first European title, he keeps his nerve and sends the Irish into raptures. They win the team title too and there is a sense of a tide turning.
5 How It Works
Flor Crowley once described the great Dutch bowler Martin Seifkin as having "the strength of a lion and the style of a Corkman." It's important this style element. There is far more to bowling than simply heaving the bowl up the road.
Witness what happens every time a player faces up to a shot. There are several observations from his followers that he is taking the wrong angle and suggestions that he send the bowl along a different route to what he appears to be considering. One man 'shows' for the bowler by standing on the road at the point where he reckons the bowl should pitch. Sometimes this point is marked by a 'sop', a lump of grass placed on the road. When a score is over, the sops lie along the course, like the spoor of some mysterious green beast. The best bowlers read and utilise the turn and camber of the road like a great golfer reading the breaks of the green.
Yet Irish belief in the superiority of their style has taken a battering for the last couple of decades. Not since 1988 has an Irishman or the Irish team won the road title. At the last championships, in Ostfriesland, the FKV filled the first seven places on the road.
Pride has been shaken. BCE treasurer James O'Driscoll tells me that the Irish team have bowled the championship course 11 times in recent weeks, getting up at dawn to avoid the early morning traffic. All is set for a showdown on the R586.
6 Kelly's Heroines
Realistically, the Irish women shouldn't have a chance against the women of the FKV. There are thousands of female bowlers in Germany and the FKV have held months of eliminatory contests to find a team. The relatively small numbers of women playing the game here means there was no necessity for BCE to do anything similar.
Yet the Irish women set Day Three going with a clean sweep of the medal positions. A small blonde 18-year-old, Kelly Mallon, from Madden just outside Armagh City, takes the gold just metres ahead of Catriona O'Farrell Kidney, member of a well known East Cork hurling family, (brother Seán was a talented forward for the county senior team in the late 1990s.)
Mallon's success is a fillip for the Northern members of the Irish bowling family. Fiercely competitive on the road, she is engagingly shy afterwards. It's left to her grandfather Seamus to tell me that the Mallon house is on the bowling road in Madden. "We call the game 'bullets' in Armagh," he says.
This is O'Farrell Kidney's second silver medal in two days but she is unabashed and as the men's competition heats up, can be seen dashing up and down the road, sharing every shot with her team-mates. That they are a minority renders the bowling women no less dedicated.
7 The Champion
If the Moors competition was like the Ryder Cup, the road bowling reminds me of the Tour De France as several thousand fans line the road, the mounting cheers from back the road telling of home triumph. The bowl itself is in the position of the cyclist in the Pyrenees as inquisitive spectators gather in its path before pulling expertly aside to let it through.
It's clear from early on that the Irish have regained the upper hand for the first time in two decades. At the end of the day, they will fill the first nine places. Yet the overall winner will be a surprise to most of the supporters.
David Murphy points at a bush a couple of hundred metres back: "All the time we trained on this road, I never bowled beyond that." We are standing beyond the magical 2,000-metre mark which a few of the Irish team were rumoured to have surpassed with their ten shots in the previous few weeks. Yet this 24-year-old carpenter from Brinny, near Alice Taylor's home village of Inishannon, wasn't one of them.
When Murphy bowls, there is a rare intensity about him. It is as though he is putting all his personality into his shots, as if there is some integral quality within himself he wishes to express by his efforts. His seventh, eighth and ninth shots drew gasps from the crowd. "I've never seen three bowls in a row as good," one man says to me.
The Murphys are a bowling family. David's father and uncle were senior players and his younger brother Aidan is also on the Irish team. When I ask him how often he bowls, he says, "two or three times a week training. But we carry a bowl in the car with us and any time we see a good stretch of road we get out and bowl on it."
No-one else gets over the magic mark. Young Murphy is the champion in the big one.
8 And The Point
Of It All Is
The Italians have struggled all weekend. They are relative newcomers and are further hampered by the fact that the Pesarans seem to generally be small people. Yet they have cheered their team's shots to the echo from the beginning and on Sunday afternoon the shouts of "bravo" still resound along the road.
And when Francesco Boiani concludes his score with a shot that gives him an excellent 17th place out of 50, the crowd break into spontaneous warm applause.
"It is so good to have them here," says a towering German at my elbow. This is the spirit of bowling and it is a remarkable thing.
We hear a lot of stuff about European integration and most of the time its proponents seem to be positing some kind of homogenised vanilla entity where national differences have been ironed out. Yet I've never seen the concept so perfectly epitomised as it was over those three days in Cork when the four countries involved showed that integration is all about cherishing both what is distinct as well as what we have in common.
Ever since the Dutchman happened across the magazine article, Europe's bowlers have been creating and cementing friendships. They are remarkable people who play a remarkable sport. The amount of voluntary effort put in last week was truly humbling.
And as one old timer said to me: "You see people walking to get fit and going nowhere. Wouldn't they be better off bringing a bowl with them and having a score while they're at it?"
He might have a point.
Most people who've driven the roads of rural Cork will have encountered a large group of pedestrians who either shove in to the side of the road or caution you to wait for a second while the next shot is played.
These men, and an odd woman too, are part of the road bowling fraternity, following a game whose object is to cover a course of a couple of miles or so in the lowest possible number of throws of a steel ball. The reaction of most motorists is to feel good that something so uniquely Irish is being preserved in Cork and, at the other end of the country, Armagh.
Because bowling is uniquely Irish, right? If I tell you that this day last week a bowler called Tim Pat O'Donovan was competing on the road between Bandon and Dunmanway, you'd expect that. But you wouldn't expect his opponents to have been Loris Fiorelli, Coen Kuipers, Uwe Stademann and Henning Feyen. Welcome to the European bowling championships.
2 Flor's Article
It all began in 1967 when Flor Crowley, bowling aficionado and Fianna Fáil TD for Mid Cork, later Cork South West, sent an article on the sport to an American magazine. A young Dutchman happened to see the article and was struck by the fact that a similar game was played in his native area, near the German border. When he brought the news home, the Dutch bowlers made contact with their Irish counterparts who visited Holland to take part in a score.
This international encounter caught the attention of the bowlers of two German regions, Ostfriesland on the Dutch border and Schleswig-Holstein, between the North and Baltic seas. The games played by the three countries involved were not identical but they had enough in common for a first European Championships to be held in 1969.
They have been held every four years since and these days the Italian bowlers, from Pesaro on the Adriatic coast, have joined the fray. Once the bowl starts rolling, it has a tendency to gather momentum.
3 German Lofting
The championships take place over three days, getting under way with the German Loft. This is the speciality of the German teams, particularly the mighty FKV which of course stands for Friesischer Klootschiefer Verband.
These Ostfrieslanders are a tall, powerful bunch whose top bowlers resemble decathletes and they have dominated the championships in recent years, largely because there are 42,000 players in the region, around ten times more than any of the opposition.
At the Nemo Rangers sports complex, they fly off the edge of the small platform which they use and propel the projectile well over 200 feet. As the FKV juggernaut pulverises all opposition, their fans chant, 'Hurrah, hurrah, das FKV ist ja'. The first Irish competitor finishes 19th.
Among the FKV stars is the legendary Hans Georg Bohlken, a revered figure in Irish bowling for his feat in lofting a bowl over the Chetwynd Railway Viaduct just outside Cork city. A champion as far back as 1984, Bohlken leads all the way with a total of 241 metres for three throws before he is overhauled at the death by his team-mates Frank Goldenstein and Thore Frollje. The FKV look invincible.
4 Dutch Moors
Half-way through the Dutch Moors competition, which takes place on a 2,000-metre long straight grass track at Rathcoole airfield between Millstreet and Mallow, it becomes clear that a mighty struggle is going on between BCE (Bol Chumann na hÉireann) and the FKV for team gold. And as news starts coming up the course that the Irish are up in three, down in three and level in another two, it's a bit like the Ryder Cup.
It's a dirty day at the airfield and by the time the competitors are on their final stretch, the going is sticky and the windy conditions increasingly arduous. Unfazed by the team tussle between the Irish and the Ostfrieslanders, the Dutch look set for a one-two in the individual competition, Marc Oude Lutkhuis and Robert Meijer leading with just one pair left out on the course.
The pair in question are reigning champion Dirk Taddings of the FKV and Ireland's Philip O'Donovan and the thickening mud lends a primordial air to a truly epic struggle.
Because, in a competition of 500 bowls, it all hangs on the final two. Taddings has looked slightly the stronger all the way up but O'Donovan takes the lead with his second last shot and holds his nerve to win.
The 36-year-old winner from Churchtown South near Cloyne has been bowling since he was eight years old.
"I won the All-Ireland Junior B in 1993 and the Junior A in 1994. In 2000, I won the Munster title and got beaten in the All-Ireland final and in 2005 I won the Munster and All-Ireland titles."
It is an exemplary tale of progression, all those previous championship winning bowls meaning that when O'Donovan has a shot to win his first European title, he keeps his nerve and sends the Irish into raptures. They win the team title too and there is a sense of a tide turning.
5 How It Works
Flor Crowley once described the great Dutch bowler Martin Seifkin as having "the strength of a lion and the style of a Corkman." It's important this style element. There is far more to bowling than simply heaving the bowl up the road.
Witness what happens every time a player faces up to a shot. There are several observations from his followers that he is taking the wrong angle and suggestions that he send the bowl along a different route to what he appears to be considering. One man 'shows' for the bowler by standing on the road at the point where he reckons the bowl should pitch. Sometimes this point is marked by a 'sop', a lump of grass placed on the road. When a score is over, the sops lie along the course, like the spoor of some mysterious green beast. The best bowlers read and utilise the turn and camber of the road like a great golfer reading the breaks of the green.
Yet Irish belief in the superiority of their style has taken a battering for the last couple of decades. Not since 1988 has an Irishman or the Irish team won the road title. At the last championships, in Ostfriesland, the FKV filled the first seven places on the road.
Pride has been shaken. BCE treasurer James O'Driscoll tells me that the Irish team have bowled the championship course 11 times in recent weeks, getting up at dawn to avoid the early morning traffic. All is set for a showdown on the R586.
6 Kelly's Heroines
Realistically, the Irish women shouldn't have a chance against the women of the FKV. There are thousands of female bowlers in Germany and the FKV have held months of eliminatory contests to find a team. The relatively small numbers of women playing the game here means there was no necessity for BCE to do anything similar.
Yet the Irish women set Day Three going with a clean sweep of the medal positions. A small blonde 18-year-old, Kelly Mallon, from Madden just outside Armagh City, takes the gold just metres ahead of Catriona O'Farrell Kidney, member of a well known East Cork hurling family, (brother Seán was a talented forward for the county senior team in the late 1990s.)
Mallon's success is a fillip for the Northern members of the Irish bowling family. Fiercely competitive on the road, she is engagingly shy afterwards. It's left to her grandfather Seamus to tell me that the Mallon house is on the bowling road in Madden. "We call the game 'bullets' in Armagh," he says.
This is O'Farrell Kidney's second silver medal in two days but she is unabashed and as the men's competition heats up, can be seen dashing up and down the road, sharing every shot with her team-mates. That they are a minority renders the bowling women no less dedicated.
7 The Champion
If the Moors competition was like the Ryder Cup, the road bowling reminds me of the Tour De France as several thousand fans line the road, the mounting cheers from back the road telling of home triumph. The bowl itself is in the position of the cyclist in the Pyrenees as inquisitive spectators gather in its path before pulling expertly aside to let it through.
It's clear from early on that the Irish have regained the upper hand for the first time in two decades. At the end of the day, they will fill the first nine places. Yet the overall winner will be a surprise to most of the supporters.
David Murphy points at a bush a couple of hundred metres back: "All the time we trained on this road, I never bowled beyond that." We are standing beyond the magical 2,000-metre mark which a few of the Irish team were rumoured to have surpassed with their ten shots in the previous few weeks. Yet this 24-year-old carpenter from Brinny, near Alice Taylor's home village of Inishannon, wasn't one of them.
When Murphy bowls, there is a rare intensity about him. It is as though he is putting all his personality into his shots, as if there is some integral quality within himself he wishes to express by his efforts. His seventh, eighth and ninth shots drew gasps from the crowd. "I've never seen three bowls in a row as good," one man says to me.
The Murphys are a bowling family. David's father and uncle were senior players and his younger brother Aidan is also on the Irish team. When I ask him how often he bowls, he says, "two or three times a week training. But we carry a bowl in the car with us and any time we see a good stretch of road we get out and bowl on it."
No-one else gets over the magic mark. Young Murphy is the champion in the big one.
8 And The Point
Of It All Is
The Italians have struggled all weekend. They are relative newcomers and are further hampered by the fact that the Pesarans seem to generally be small people. Yet they have cheered their team's shots to the echo from the beginning and on Sunday afternoon the shouts of "bravo" still resound along the road.
And when Francesco Boiani concludes his score with a shot that gives him an excellent 17th place out of 50, the crowd break into spontaneous warm applause.
"It is so good to have them here," says a towering German at my elbow. This is the spirit of bowling and it is a remarkable thing.
We hear a lot of stuff about European integration and most of the time its proponents seem to be positing some kind of homogenised vanilla entity where national differences have been ironed out. Yet I've never seen the concept so perfectly epitomised as it was over those three days in Cork when the four countries involved showed that integration is all about cherishing both what is distinct as well as what we have in common.
Ever since the Dutchman happened across the magazine article, Europe's bowlers have been creating and cementing friendships. They are remarkable people who play a remarkable sport. The amount of voluntary effort put in last week was truly humbling.
And as one old timer said to me: "You see people walking to get fit and going nowhere. Wouldn't they be better off bringing a bowl with them and having a score while they're at it?"
He might have a point.