It’s 3 o’clock on a Monday afternoon and Phil Ferrari and I are drinking sweet Vermouth and talking about sports. Not just any sport – one in particular. It’s a sport that 25 million Americans have heard of or played at least once, and two million have played competitively. It’s the world’s second most popular participatory sport, behind soccer.
It’s bocce, an Italian lawn bowling game with ancient roots and, for Ferrari and many others in the U.S., the friendly backyard games are morphing into regulated championships on expensive courts with thousands of dollars of prize money at stake
