Lockleys Bowling Club’s Vern Butler still going strong aged 88

AT almost 90 he’s six times older than some of his competitors but still skip Vern Butler is playing at the top-level of local competition in Adelaide. Here’s his secret ...

Adelaide's oldest top or second-tier lawn bowler Vern Butler

VERN Butler is adamant lawn bowls is played mostly above the shoulders.

This is why despite creaking limbs and slower movement across the greens, he still holds his own for Lockleys Bowling Club at the ripe age of 88.

“It’s the head that matters,” he says.

Bowls SA believes the octogenarian is the oldest player in either of its top two competitions.

Butler skips a rink in the second-tier Major League South and has teammates who are still at school.

“I say every year I think this one will be my last.

“But it’s the company, the camaraderie and the people from other clubs — mind you they’re all dying on me — which is just fantastic.

“I’m rather fortunate I have pretty good health.”

It begs the question: is Butler still bowling as well as his younger years?

“No, no. Age shall not weary them?

“It wearies them all right.

“I find now that I need to stretch a lot before I start to play because the muscles are wasting away a bit.

“Every now and then you put down one that’s just not good enough but that makes you all the more determined to do something with the next one.”

Butler, a navy signalman in Papua New Guinea during World War II, has been playing bowls since 1959 when he joined Lockleys.

“A lot of ex-servicemen were moving into bowls, but at 33 I thought ‘I don’t know if I want to play with all these old bastards’.”

In 1966, Butler became a bank manager in Port Augusta, where he played country bowls for six years.

A stint bowling for Hurlstone Park in New South Wales followed before he returned to Lockleys in 1978.

“We won’t tell the wife, but when we were looking for a house when I came back I was concentrating on a reasonable radius (to Lockleys Bowling Club).”

Butler regards winning about a dozen premierships, including the third-tier competition last season, as the highlights of his journey.

The Eagles made him a life member in 2012 — the same year he wrote a book, Times Have Changed: celebrating 100 years at the Lockleys Bowling Club 1912-2012.

Butler jokes he will continue playing until his 120th birthday.

“As long as I’m able to bowl competitively, I’m happy to bowl.

“Bowls is a wonderful game.”