Well worth the travel

Paddy Stewart, left, stands with teammate Kerry Becks after winning the Rawleigh’s Stewart Buttar Invitation Burnside Pairs tournament in Christchurch.Picture supplied

Paddy Stewart travelled all the way from Gisborne to Christchurch to take part in an invitational tournament . . . and won it.

He teamed up with an old Canterbury bowling mate, Kerry Becks, to win the Rawleigh’s Stewart Buttar Invitation Burnside Pairs last weekend.

This event is held in memory of former New Zealand representative player and coach Stewart Buttar (1954-2006), who died of cancer. He was a member of the Burnside Bowling Club in Christchurch and won three national titles — one in singles and two in pairs. Buttar was a member of the New Zealand team who won bronze in the fours at the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

The Stewart Buttar pairs event is one of the major invitational tournaments in the South Island. A field of 48 pairs was divided into eight sections of six, with the top two teams from each section going into Division 1, the next two going into Division 2 and fifth and sixth going into Division 3.

Each division had four sections, each with four teams. After round-robin play, the winners of each section went into the semifinals of their division.

Stewart and Becks won their section of six, and then their Division 1 section. In the semifinal, they beat Australian internationals Carl Healey and Aaron Teys 15-12.

In the final they faced married couple Bronwyn and Roger Stevens, of Dunedin. In a match that lived up to its billing, Stewart and Becks won a pulsating final 16-15.

Bronwyn Stevens had won the Millie Khan Memorial as the Bowls Dunedin top female bowler of the year in 2022, and Roger had played lead to skip Keanu Darby when they won the national champion of champions pairs finals in Dunedin last July.

But Stewart and Becks have an impressive pedigree themselves. In 2016, Stewart was the youngest member of skip Becks’s composite team who won the fours title at the national championships in Christchurch. Stewart, Becks and Tony Andrews were clubmates at Kaiapoi, and the fourth player, Darren Redway, was recruited from Papanui, where he was a member after a long association with Rangiora.

Stewart had started bowling as a schoolboy in Waikari, North Canterbury, in 1999, but then had eight years off.

He was in his seventh season back on the greens when the 2016 national champs came around.

Redway had won a national club singles title in 2009, but for the Kaiapoi men it was a first national title . . . for them and the club, the year before its 100th birthday. And Redway’s success was a first gold medal for Papanui.

The Stewart Buttar invitational tourney at Burnside last weekend had two more pairs with Gisborne links. Former Gisborne bowler and greenkeeper Jamey Ferris and Bowls Gisborne-East Coast president Steve Goldsbury advanced to Division 1 post-section play by finishing second in their section, with three wins, a draw and a loss (11-8 to Nelson’s Jo Edwards and Val Smith). In Division 1 play, they had three losses.

Gisborne’s Shaun Goldsbury and North Harbour’s Skye Renes finished fourth in their section of six to qualify for Division 2 post-section play, where they had three losses.