My Bowling Background

Now before we get started, let me say a little about myself. I'm a guy who's closer to sixty than he is to fifty. I've been bowling regularly in leagues and tournaments since I was twelve. But I'm not a pro or even close to being one. I've averaged well over 200 on most house conditions for most of the time I've been bowling. I average around 220 on the regular league condition in the house where I bowl now, and I averaged 204 last summer (2009) in a "PBA Experience" league where we faced the Cheetah, Viper, Scorpion, Shark, and U.S. Open patterns. That's nothing to crow with pride about but also nothing to be ashamed of for a relatively old geezer like myself. I throw right-handed , and I guess you could call me an old-school stroker who uses medium speed and throws the ball pretty straight with low revs and, if possible, an outside line to the pocket. However, I also spent several years throwing my strike ball without my thumb and did pretty well that way. and my ideal is to be able to move seamlessly from the thumbed to the thumbless strike ball release depending on what works best at the time and place I'm bowling.

I have three sanctioned 300 games and three sanctioned 800 series, having bowled one of the latter just a few months ago. I used to bowl a lot of scratch tournaments and often cashed but didn't win any of them. I was mediocre at best at that level, but then I was bowling regularly in those tournaments in the San Francisco Bay Area against the likes of Jeff Frankos, one of the finest Western regional pro bowlers around, and Tony Reyes, a successful national tour bowler with a national championship and televised 300 game to this credit.

But I don't believe that the quality of my competition was the only reason why I didn't do better. I believe that an unwillingness to improve my bowling knowledge and skill also played a huge role in my bowling mediocrity. It's an extremely rare person who's talented enough to excel at bowling against good competition on raw physical ability alone. And I'm not anywhere close to being that talented. The overwhelming majority of us need to study the game thoroughly and practice diligently and smartly to get good enough to bowl and compete at a high level. I think I resisted studying the game for two major reasons. First, I have a nonverbal learning disorder that makes it difficult for me to visualize and understand technical principles of bio-mechanics, oil patterns, ball layouts, and so forth, and it's increasingly important to learn about these things in order to be a successful bowler. Second, I've had a regrettable tendency to be lazy and to coast on what modest raw ability I have rather than work hard to refine it with study and practice.

Now I may be a pretty old dog to be learning new bowling tricks. But one reason why I've started this blog is to fuel my enthusiasm for the game and channel it into gaining new knowledge and better bowling skills and becoming as good as I can be at this stage in my life. And my other reason for this blog is to share what I've learned already and what I'm learning now with you so that you can use it to enjoy bowling more and to learn as much about the game as you wish and be as good at it as you care to be.

I hope you like what you see and that you'll stick around and tell your friends about this blog. Let's work together to make it as good as it can be.

In case you're interested, below is a YouTube video of yours truly bowling that my wife took of me several months ago with her cellphone camera.