NO WONDER SOCCER CAN'T COMPETE:

Free-range bowling is right up my alley (Todd R. Nelson, 9/17/03, CS Monitor)

It all started on my weekly trip to the town transfer station, formerly known as the dump. There, languishing by the caretaker's shed, were two perfectly good full-size bowling balls. One was a shiny black, and the other had a red-and-black swirl like 1930s linoleum.

Since I cannot resist the allure of a useful item that someone has put up for grabs, even if I have no present use for it, I loaded the bowling balls into my van, alongside the other treasures: a roll of house wrap, several pressure-treated two-by-sixes, an empty gas can, and an old electric fan.

When I pulled into the driveway, I couldn't wait to give the bowling balls a test spin. The finger holes were a mite tight, but workable. I swung my arm back, aimed, and let 'er roll. Across the gravel and into the clover it went, bumping over sticks and through divots and mini-swales. The dogs tried to chase and fetch it, like curling sweepers guiding a stone to the icy bull's-eye. What fun. Free-range bowling!

This oughta be a sport, I thought.

Little did I know that it already was, complete with an association and a devoted, if quiet, league of players. In fact, at their summer meeting, the Castine Off-neck Free-Range Bowling Association (COFRBA) decided it was time to petition the International Olympic Committee to include their sport in the 2004 Athens Olympiad. I concur. Being the association's newest member, I am not its best spokesman. But I now consider myself an Olympic hopeful. I'm in serious training, thanks to my coach, Tom Curry, the game's master.

Anyone can bowl on a flat floor with perfectly contoured gutters to contain errant rolls. Where's the challenge in that? But try bowling on something called "a course," instead of "an alley," with topography and unpredictable wildlife hazards. I'm talking about a woodland floor with stumps, rotten logs, mole tunnels, and red squirrels scolding from high in the treetops. Try targeting the pins (10 spruce logs arranged in the customary flying-V formation - but that's all that's customary) by planning a banked shot off a fieldstone wall, hoping you've put enough "mojo" on the ball to come out of the pine-needled crater in the lee of a tamarack stump. And try swinging the big free-range ball while swatting the swarming mosquitoes of late-summer Maine. Until then, you just don't know the true meaning of bowling.

It's fair to call free-range bowling a hybrid sport.

Not quite Human Frisbee Golf, but it'll do.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 17, 2003 9:45 AM