Graham Dalik

Friends of Eva Markvoort (above), an aspiring actor who died in March after a brave fight against cystic fibrosis, took up lawn bowling to raise funds for charity and honour her memory. Graham Dalik photo.

It was a simpler time. An age when you could enjoy a frothy beverage outdoors while laughing in grand company. When the right social occasion saw men don bowler hats and women sport their finest summer dresses. And when a few hours spent bowling the lawns of the local country club would never be scoffed at as a distraction from ambition.

That was last summer. And this year, 130 beautiful people are planning to do it all over again.

“It’s classic cocktails, classic leisure wear, classic sport,” Andrew Dalik, a founding director of the Vancouver Leisure Society, told the Georgia Straight. “People get off work and come down, have a bite to eat, have a drink, chat, catch up with old friends, make new friends, and then have some fun throwing lawn bowls around.”

In a separate phone interview, Kim Bowie, the VLS’s social-media guru, picked up where Dalik left off. “It looked like a scene straight out of The Great Gatsby,” she remarked. “When I first rolled in and saw 120 kids all dressed up with their whites and big hats and all their finest, it was just really cool.”

In a third conversation with the Straight, Duncan Gillespie, another founding director of the VLS, laughed as he described older lawn bowlers’ reactions when an “onslaught of people whose age the clubs had never seen” rolled up, sweater vests and high heels aplenty, sound system and liquor sponsorships in tow.

“It was new to them, having young people around,” Gillespie said.

But the city’s lawn bowlers—largely of the baby-boomer generation—may have to get used to sharing their greens with a, shall we say, more festive crowd.

Last July, a boisterous group of 20-somethings congregated for the VLS’s first annual lawn-bowling tournament. And while good times were definitely had by all, the group was doing more than sparking a fad that now threatens to storm country clubs across the Lower Mainland.

“We got to write an $11,000 check to CCFF [the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation],” Gillespie boasted.

All of that money came from registration fees for the four-week-long tournament and alcohol sales, he said. This year, Gillespie continued, the tournament—which is scheduled to run for four consecutive Thursday evenings, beginning July 8—is also open to pledges.

Through the VLS’s Web site, anybody will be able to go on-line and donate money to the CCFF in the name of the tournament or their favourite team. The group that earns the most in pledges will win a prize, as will the best-dressed group and, of course, the team that wins the tournament.

“It was really fun last year and was a really good size, and it went extremely well,” Dalik said. “So we just want to do that again, but find ways to do everything a little bit better”¦or find new ways—like the pledges—to build on our donations from last year.”

The story of how this all came about begins with a few beers at a lawn-bowling club in Sydney, Australia. It was December 2008, and in attendance were Gillespie, Dalik, Dalik’s brother Graham (the third founding director of the VLS), and Vancouver-based film director Philip Lyall.

“We were having a few pitchers and thought that it [lawn bowling] would be a great thing to bring back to Vancouver,” Gillespie said. “And we wanted to do it as an event, but none of us felt like we wanted to make money off of our friends, unless it was for a good cause.”

Coincidentally, Lyall, an old friend of Gillespie’s, had just finished work on 65_Red Roses, a documentary about Eva Markvoort, a young Vancouver woman with cystic fibrosis.

Sterling Aurel, a fundraising coordinator for the CCFF’s Vancouver chapter, told the Straight that cystic fibrosis causes more child deaths than any other genetic disorder in Canada. It is a chronic and degenerative disease, he said, that affects the lungs and digestive system, causing a buildup of mucus and bacteria that can lead to death.

According to the CCFF’s Web site, one in every 3,600 Canadian children has cystic fibrosis, and many do not live past their 30th birthday.

When Lyall showed the boys a rough cut of 65_Red Roses, the CCFF immediately became the obvious choice as the VLS’s beneficiary.

A couple of months later and back in Vancouver, Gillespie and the Daliks got to work on bringing lawn bowling to the city’s young and hip.

“We found out that we needed to incorporate some sort of entity,” Gillespie said, a nonprofit organization that could have a bank account, obtain liquor licences for special events, and donate to charities.