Bossy Ben keeps Dad on his toes

Steve Glasson, long regarded as Australia's best lawn bowler, enjoyed his South Pacific Bowls Carnival debut yesterday, although his pairs team-mate, 13-year-old son Ben, revealed a disturbing trait as the duo won all three of their sectional matches."This is fantastic, we've only ever played together once before ... but I did pick up during our second game that he was starting to sound like his mother Kelly," Glasson said, tongue-in-cheek."Ben was getting a bit bossy and his arms were starting to wave around a little bit and he had a little bit of a frown, so the mother was coming out in him."We had a team talk about it."All joking aside, Glasson snr was full of praise about his team-mate's performance after the St Johns Park duo swept through section 23 at Fairy Meadow Bowling Club."Ben's bowling very well and I'm enjoying his company," Glasson said. "It's great to be out here with my son. I'm reasonably happy (with my form) but I can always push myself to play better."Glasson and son opened their sectional campaign with a 25-19 win over Keith Squires and Neil Gilmore and followed that up with a 24-5 victory over Mark Allen and Dave Reilly, before a commanding 14-3 triumph over rival father-and-son duo Les and Wayne Smith.And what if Glasson and son combined to win the pairs competition at the 50th South Pacific? "It would be one of the best achievements of my career, there's no doubt about that," Glasson snr said. "Each game we can win is a bonus. If something drastic happens and we went all the way, it would be an even bigger bonus."Glasson hadn't bowled since the start of the month, but said yesterday's hit-out was a good lead-up to the singles competition, which starts today. "This is a good warm-up to get me back into the swing of things and hopefully I can find a bit of form," Glasson said. "The singles competition will be great, it will be serious competition and when you look across the field there's the big names that you know will be tough and then the unknown quantity as well - and its wide open."For his part, Ben said he was trying to treat teaming with his dad "as just another tournament"."It's really good, it doesn't happen often. The last time we played together was a major-minor pairs three or four years ago at Alexandria-Erskineville Bowling Club when I was nine years old," Ben said. "We didn't do as well as we did today."