Winning pair emerge unbeaten

Jean McKenzie and Mary Jordan remained unbeaten to win the Golden Bay-Motueka 2-4-2 Lew Inglis Memorial open pairs indoor bowls tournament in Motueka on Sunday.

Teams played four games each with a minimum of 2.5 wins from four games to qualify for post section play.

Club Waimea’s McKenzie and Jordan qualified with 3.5 wins from their four games of section play.

The dominated post section play to comfortably make the final against the father and son combination of Nathan and Lewis DellaBosca, also from Club Waimea.

McKenzie and Jordan proved too strong and ran out 10-2 winners to preserve their unbeaten record over eight games.

Earlier in the week, both players had teamed up with their husbands, Kevin McKenzie and Phil Jordan, to finish runners-up in the Honest Lawyer sponsored open fours.

They lost a tight final 5-3 to a Stoke Club team skipped by Ray Dyson with Ed Dolejs, Ester Dyson and Dot Tinker who had finished runners-up in the same tournament last year.

The Golden Bay-Motueka open singles was also played on Saturday with a field of 26 players.

Thirteen players, including five from Nelson, qualified for sudden death although Giovanni Persico was the only Nelson player to reach the semifinals where he was beaten 11-9 in a very tight arm wrestle with Golden Bay-Motueka’s seasoned campaigner Ron Inglis.

Stoke’s Kaleb Johnston was also beaten 11-10 in a close game in the plate event final by Golden BayMotueka’s Rae Inglis.

Not content with making two tournament finals in a week, McKenzie and Jordan again combined with their respective husbands in Tuesday’s Honest Lawyer-sponsored Anzac Day open fours involving 14 teams.

Teams played four games each and needed to score 2.5 wins or more to qualify for post section play.

The McKenzie-skipped team continued on their winning way to qualify with three wins, and then went on to make the final against the Graeme Webb-skipped team of Bev Boucher, Bryan Ramsey and Mary Stewart.

In an absorbing final, McKenzie’s team led 6-3 after six of the nine ends. Webb then played a great draw shot on the seventh end to score a four for a 7-6 lead.

McKenzie replied with a single on the penultimate end to tie up the game 7-7 before scoring two on the final end for a 9-7 win.

The next tournament on the calendar this week is the Made For Mensponsored open pairs on Saturday at 1pm at the Bowls Stadium in Stoke.