September 26, 2009

To say that Yokine's Dave Lyle was a keen bowler would be an understatement. His pennant record of forty seven seasons and nine games without missing a single bowl or rollup, a tally of 855 games, only brought to an end when he lost his legs, is testament to the bloke's love of the game and the club.

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There's no doubt that if BowlsWA would let his gopher onto the green he'd still be out there calling the shots. “My daughter booked a wedding for a Saturday afternoon,” he recalled. “I told her to put it back a few hours to 6 PM, after pennants were finished.”

Eighty six years old in January, Dave Lyle's bowling career goes back half a century, to when he was a member of the Returned Soldiers League, who would meet in a small building at Dogswamp. “It had water running through it, with a septic tank adding to the mess, it was a dangerous place to be,”he said. “Eventually the Shire condemned it. We were offered six hundred pounds for it, and as it would have cost us that much to do anything with it ourselves, we sold it.”

“Osborne Park Bowling Club had just got going, so we approached the Shire and asked for some land to build a new club of our own. We were allocated five and a quarter acres where the Yokine Bowling Club now stands. It was levelled in 1960. Bayswater lent us a green for a season and a bit, until eventually we were able to use our own greens in 1961.”

Dave's first set of bowls were a size five and a sixteenth Henselite. “I bought them for eight pounds five shillings,”he said.

Dave Lyle is a true legend at Yokine Bowling Club. He has served the club in every position possible, including President from 1989 to 1992. His bowling prowess was such that he won every possible club championship event at Yokine, stretching over the entirety of his career, the most recent as runner up to Peter Maynard in the club singles six years ago. He has represented Western Australia at twelve RSL carnivals, and was a member of the winning fours combination in the inaugural State Fifty Five and Over Championships.

Wife Betty is no stay at home bowls wife either.

She started playing two years after Dave, and is still a topline player, and as with her husband, has served the club in every capacity, as well as won all club championship events. A State player, she has also won a State Singles.

Dave and Betty Lyle are life members at Yokine, and are highly respected and popular figures, not only at Yokine, but throughout the bowling fraternity. David has become a familiar figure in the Tuart Hill/Yokine area, zooming around on his gopher.

He nominated Bert Sharp as the best bowler he'd seen.

Dave Lyle is an institution at Yokine, as much part of the building as the bricks and mortar. “It's been my life and Betty's for fifty years,” he said.

It would be fair to say that the Yokine Bowling Club is all the richer for Dave and Betty Lyle being part of it.


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RON HEAD