Many moons ago, I was deemed good enough to be chosen for Billy Ibadulla's legendary schoolboy coaching classes - I bowled legspinners which resembled Shane Warne's ''ball of the century'' when they pitched in the right place (which was seldom).
However, anyone reading the Otago Boys' High School magazine 3rd XI report of 1981 would have perhaps questioned my cricketing prowess. The phrase that summed things up most succinctly was: ''However, after [the previous batsman] went out, the rot set in. That rot was Allan Blackman.''
I never did get the call from the New Zealand selectors after that.
So, in the hope of making at least some little impact on the sporting world in my dotage, I've taken up lawn bowls. Actually, that's not true at all. I've taken up lawn bowls because of the influence of a young lady. Regardless, it's a fun game and I'm not completely rubbish at it. And, as an added bonus, there's chemistry involved.
Revolutionising the game of lawn bowls was probably the furthest thing from Leo Baekeland's mind in 1907 when he was trying to make a synthetic substitute for shellac. This was a hot area of research at the time, as production of the natural product required the co-operation of a veritable plethora of female bugs in India and Thailand.
Baekeland found that a mixture of two very common chemicals, phenol (otherwise known as carbolic acid) and formaldehyde (a major constituent of embalming fluid), when heated under pressure, gave a product that was both hard and mouldable. Baekeland didn't realise it at the time, but he had just changed the world; he had made the first plastic.
Bakelite, as it was known, was patented in 1909, and was soon used in everything from aeroplane propellers to electrical insulation. Bakelite made Baekeland very wealthy, and he sold his company for the equivalent of about $US300 million before his death.
And how is this relevant to lawn bowls? Well, before the 1930s, lawn bowls were made of lignum vitae (Latin for ''the tree of life''), a very hard and dense wood native to the West Indies. However, an enterprising Australian named William Hensell, who had served an apprenticeship in turning billiard balls, began investigating the use of new materials for the manufacture of lawn bowls.
In 1918, he developed a method for making hard rubber lawn bowls, and this was so successful that importation of wooden bowls into Australia ceased over the following decade. In 1931, he found that a phenol-formaldehyde mix, essentially Bakelite, could be moulded into bowls, and the rest was history.
Henselite bowls, as they came to be known, quickly superseded all other types of bowls because of their superior properties, and became the leading brand of bowls in the world. Nowadays, essentially all lawn bowls are made from some type of plastic.
I would have hoped that some knowledge of the chemistry of lawn bowls would have given me an advantage on the green. However, I've yet to see it. Maybe this weekend ...
- Allan Blackman.
