On the Radar
The Bocce Generation
Bocce is taking over the world, it seems.
Sure, the Super Bowl attracts more than 100 million viewers every winter. Baseball has for generations been known as our national pastime. Golf courses speckle the local landscape from the beaches to interior farmland and countless parcels in between.
Unless you are a resident of a Southwest Florida gated community, however, you may not realize the immense popularity of bocce. In this ancient Italian form of bowling, players roll a small red or green bocce ball down a long, narrow court toward the white pallino, or target ball.
The Southwest Florida Bocce League was founded in 2008 with eight teams and has tripled in size since then. Today it consists of teams from 24 gated communities stretching from South Fort Myers to Naples.
League president Steve Spring resides in one of those communities, Village Walk, off Bonita Beach Road about 4 miles east of I-75. About 300 Village Walk residents play bocce on the community’s three bocce courts, says Spring. Other communities have as many as 600 or 700 players, he adds.
As the baby-boomer generation ages, it may become known as the bocce generation.
Why has bocce taken off in such spectacular fashion? “I think because it doesn’t take a lot of talent,” says Spring, a retired attorney from Albany, New York. “It’s not a humongous exercise thing. But you are out moving around, and it’s a real nice social thing because you can be there. You can be talking with other people even while you’re playing, unlike maybe tennis or pickleball or something like that.”
The bocce ball boom, though, may have peaked for the local league, constrained by limited space and time. Spring explains there are only about 12 weeks at the height of snowbird season to schedule matches with all 24 teams on a limited number of courts.
Bocce’s Italian roots appeal to league secretary/treasurer Richard Curreri, who is of Italian ancestry. He first encountered bocce as a young boy in Quincy, Massachusetts, where his uncle played in a bocce league. Although intrigued by the game his uncle played, Curreri did not play as a boy. For starters, the league was based in a bar. “My mother said, ‘Stay out of that bar!’ ” Curreri says with a laugh. Decades later, after retiring from a career as an engineer with Polaroid, Curreri moved to Florida and picked up the game Uncle Frank played so long ago. Curreri, who now plays on the bocce team for Carlton Lakes in Naples, explains why the sport is so enticing to so many. “The game itself,” says Curreri. “I get a thrill out of it, meeting a lot of people, the camaraderie of it. We get to see and meet a lot of new people and see these communities.”
As with every sport, bocce has nuances and subtleties that outsiders don’t know.
“There’s a lot of strategy,” Curreri says. “You play offensively. You play defensively. You bounce off of walls, off of other balls, knock opponents’ balls out of the way. It really gets involved
once you learn the game.”
One thing he noticed as a boy in that bar was that only men played bocce. That’s not the case in the Southwest Florida Bocce League. About 25 percent of the players are female.
On a breezy morning, informal matches are being held at Village Walk when one of its players, Jim Bridges, is asked who the best player at the courts that day is. He immediately points across the courts to 85-year-old Phyllis Auman, wearing a white Terraces shirt, a white cap, slacks and sunglasses. One of her teammates, Del Booker, 81, a retired OB/GYN, concurs, “She’s our best player.”
Auman says shoulder trouble doesn’t allow her to ski, golf or play tennis now as she did when she was younger. So her sport of choice now is bocce. “Well, it’s something that gets you up in the morning,” Auman says.
It’s a reason thousands of others throughout Southwest Florida now get up in the morning.