Keith Jackson
If bowls is a metaphor for life – and for Cooroibah-based Ian ‘Shoey’ Schuback OAM, four times world bowls champion and high performance coach, bowls is at least that – then ‘Bowls Biased + Uncensored’ is its handbook.
‘Shoey’ came to bowls young, or young by the standards of the time, after an Aussie Rules football injury forced his relocation to a sport where his head wouldn’t be so much of a target.
By chance, he found himself playing a sport for which he was well equipped with strategic skill, an adaptive technique, a desire to work hard and an eagerness to learn from role models.
As a writer, he proves himself up to the task of floodlighting this ancient game with passion, humour, good sense and an ability to portray it as more than just a leisure activity. Bowls emerges as an entire philosophy of life.
From the get-go, ‘Bowls Biased + Uncensored’ is readable and it brims with knowledge, insight and marvellous anecdote. It’s not your normal handbook to improved technique such as retired sportsmen belabour us with – although the technical side is presented with clarity and skill.
With Shoey as guide, the book takes the reader on a rollicking tour of what it takes to be in command of a sport at the highest level while enjoying the benefits that success at the top has to offer.
Shoey had no hubris or vanity about his achievements, he was always too much of a larrikin and too well grounded for fantasy.
The great thing about ‘Bowls Biased + Uncensored’ is that Shoey captures the difficult art of making the reader an insider, guiding us both within the sport – pointing out tricks and traps – and inside our own head.
Desire, mental toughness and self-confidence all play a big part in success and Shoey believes they exist in us all if we just know where to find them.
How-to books have to tell us to ‘do it this way’ and Shoey does the ‘how to’ with clarity and readability. But he also tells us the why and what happens if you don’t (or won’t) get the ‘how’ right.
He relates stories of how he and other top bowlers do it. And sometimes, with great candour, how and why they didn’t do it. And what happened then.
There is much good advice and good sense in ‘Bowls Biased + Uncensored’. And, scattered throughout the book, are break-out boxes of top tips and locker room antics.
There are also wonderful stories from life off the grass and beyond the club house which make the book a treasury of lore, knowledge and anecdote.
There’s also a useful glossary for those of us not embedded in the sport and a good index.
Slattery Media has done a fine job of presentation and produced a book that’ll look good on any shelf.
But the stand-out, as it should be, is Shoey’s crafting.
Before I finish, there a short chapter near the end which is a must read.
It tells of Shoey’s contest with cancer and it bears faithful witness to the philosophy and attitudes that pervade the entire book: coolness under pressure, good humour, a sense of proportion and a love of life.
Shoey also credits his long-standing partner, Noosa State MP Sandy Bolton, with drawing him to a recognition that to ‘put on the mask’, that is, to play your part and play it well and with honesty, is one of the most important things you can ever do.
Bowls Biased + Uncensored by Ian Schuback, Slattery Media Group, 2015, 240 pp, ISBN: 9780992379179. Available from Booktopia for $23.95
https://www.booktopia.com.au/bowls-ian-schuback/prod9780992379179.html
