About the World Bola Association

The Accidental Invention of Bola

Bola began with four bowling balls and a simple question: “I wonder if there’s a game we could play with these?”

Around 1988, Wallace Haws was preparing for a three-day campout with a group of Scouts on Arizona’s Black River. While getting ready for the outing, he happened to spot four bowling balls in a second-hand store. He had no idea what he was going to do with them, but something about four bowling balls sitting there suggested that they ought to be good for something.

So he bought them.

The bowling balls made the trip to the Black River, and during the three-day campout Wallace and the Scouts began experimenting. They threw the balls, tried different targets and distances, invented rules, changed them, argued about them, and tried again. Little by little, a game emerged.

They called it Bola.

What started as an attempt to keep a bunch of Scouts entertained turned into a game that has survived for nearly four decades. Although the rules have been refined from time to time, the basic game developed on that first campout has remained remarkably intact.

Since then, Bola has been played by families, friends, Scouts, and other groups looking for something a little different. Its beginnings were hardly formal — no committee, no rulebook, no business plan. Just four bowling balls, a campout, a group of Scouts, and a willingness to see what might happen.

And that may be the best part of the story: Bola wasn’t really invented. It was discovered.