Shayna Ng and the New PWBA Season

Hearty congratulations to Singapore's Shayna Ng for capturing the first title of the 2018 PWBA season at Las Vegas' South Point Bowling Plaza in the PWBA Las Vegas Open on April 28. As a paragon of consistency, she was in first place after the first and second rounds, third place after the third, and the second seed for the stepladder finals in which she defeated Hall-of-Famer Leanne Hulsenberg 193-167 and top seed Diana Zavjalova 231-211 for her first PWBA title.

After watching most of the action live on the webcasting service PBA Xtra Frame, all I can say is that players not on Team Singapore's 9-player juggernaut are fortunate that the Singapore Slingers, as I fondly call them, are scheduled to compete in only the first two tournaments of the season due to commitments back home. If not for that, they could very well crowd out many of their competitors for cash and titles. For in the Las Vegas Open, they held 7 of the top 32 spots above the cash line after the first round of eight games, six of the top 32 after the second round with two more players just out of the cut for the Cashers round of 32, and 3 spots in the final round of 12. Given the depth and quality of the field, I think that's pretty impressive.

I plan to drive to Rohnert Park, CA to watch the PWBA Sonoma County Open this Friday and Saturday, May 4 and 5, and blog about my experience there. I was very disappointed to learn that the PWBA wouldn't be stopping at my home (and much closer) house of Steve Cook's Fireside Lanes just outside Sacramento, CA this season as they did the past three seasons. But if the PWBA won't come to me, I guess I'll have to go to them at least once this season, because I love watching these awesome lady bowlers that much. And the fabulous Singapore ladies will garner a considerable share of my attention because they're THAT good.

If you can, I heartily recommend that you join me there. If you can't, please watch the livestreaming on PBA Xtra Frame. You'll be glad you did.

New Hui Fen: Bowling's Rising Superstar

I haven’t published a new blogpost here in ages. It’s not that I’ve lost that loving feeling for elite level bowling. I love it as much as ever. But I confess to having lost enthusiasm for writing pieces about it that hardly anyone but me will read when I could be doing more constructive things with my time.

Until now that is. For something has happened that has me feeling so excited and joyful that I couldn’t stop myself from writing this post no matter how hard I tried. There is a new star in the bowling firmament, and it burns with a wondrous brightness unlike almost any other I’ve ever witnessed.

I grew up watching professional bowling on TV and, whenever I could, in person. As a boy, I idolized the immortals such as Dick Weber, Don Carter, Ray Bluth, Carmen Salvino, and Billy Hardwick. A little later, Dave Soutar and Don Johnson were my inspiration. Later still, Earl Anthony, Mark Roth, and Marshall Holman. Then along came Wayne Webb, Pete Weber, Walter Ray Williams, Norm Duke, Parker Bohn, and Robert Smith. And now there are Sean Rash, Tommy Jones, Bill O’Neill, Mike Fagan, Wes Malott, and the awe-inspiring Jason Belmonte, with hordes of tremendously talented younger players such as Dominic Barrett, EJ Tackett, and Jesper Svensson nipping at their heels.

But as you may have noticed, I’ve named only male bowlers despite the fact that I’ve also respected female greats such as Betty Morris, Tish Johnson, Lisa Wagner, Leanne Barrette Hulsenberg, Liz Johnson, and, of course, Kelly Kulick. Yet, I always had more respect for the top male bowlers and enjoyed watching them more than I did the ladies. Until four months ago.

Then I saw a young lady I’d never seen bowl before. She was a member of the Singapore national women’s bowling team that had come to the USA to compete in a few PWBA tournaments and to test their mettle against Kelly, Liz, Shannon, Danielle, Rocio, Clara, Diana, and many of the other best professional female bowlers this nation and the world had to offer.

One Tuesday afternoon last May, Team Singapore walked into my home house, Steve Cook’s Fireside Lanes just outside Sacramento, CA, while I was bowling in my senior league. They had arrived, I think, the day before to begin meticulous preparations for the PWBA Storm Sacramento Open commencing there later that week. They had their national coach and also Storm Pro Tour Consultant Jim Callahan with them as they powered through an extended warmup period of stretching, jumping jacks, and the like that I’d never seen other players go through to that degree if at all. It was immediately obvious that these young women approached the game with a special kind of refined dedication. They then began playing low ball, where the object is not to throw strikes but to hone accuracy by leaving as many pins on the deck and shooting as low a score as possible after throwing two balls each frame but without guttering. In low ball, a gutter ball counts as a strike, and the last thing you want to do is strike.

These young ladies all looked plenty capable. I had already seen Jazreel and Daphne Tan compete in tournaments on TV and in YouTube videos, and I was well aware of the Singapore team’s reputation for formidability in international competitions, but I hadn’t seen the other women on their team bowl before, or I hadn’t remembered seeing them.

It was difficult to tell how good they were when they were throwing plastic balls at ten pins and seven pins in low ball, so I had to wait till Friday to see them throwing for strikes in tournament play. And as soon as I saw one of them throw a ball, my jaw dropped. And with each successive ball she threw, it dropped more and more, and I felt an awed thrill I’d never felt watching any woman and very few men bowl before.

That bowler’s name was New Hui Fen.

Have you ever heard a music group that radically transformed your taste in music? I did many years ago when I saw the original Mahavishnu Orchestra open for Emerson, Lake & Palmer in a concert in San Francisco. Have you ever heard anyone speak who utterly changed your view of the world? That happened to me decades ago after I heard an Alan Watts lecture on the radio. And then there was that Ken Wilber book that transfigured the way I understood human consciousness.

Well, watching New Hui Fen had that magnitude of impact on me. Until then, I was most impressed by bowlers with scorching speed and ridiculously high rev rates. Now don’t get me wrong. The Belmos and Palermaas and Tacketts and Smiths and Svenssons still set my heart to racing. But there’s a disconnect between what they do on the lanes and what we mere mortals can do. No woman or older man I’ve ever seen can throw the ball like Osku. But New Hui Fen is different. She does something that is theoretically possible for many women and normal men to do to some degree that could significantly enhance their games without requiring prodigious strength and/or transcendent technique and without destroying their bodies.

I don’t really know how to describe what New does except to say that she has a kind of remarkable, relaxed fluidity and efficiency to her style that manages to generate effortless power that is more than adequate to the task of knocking down all ten pins. There are other women on the PWBA Tour who throw powerful balls, and controllable power to a point is a big plus at all levels of the game, but they do it with a noticeable degree of muscular effort. New Hui Fen is different. She looks like gravity is doing almost all of the work and she’s just along for the smoothest of rides. In Chinese Taoist philosophy, New’s game epitomizes a prized quality known as wu wei.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the beginning of this video should be worth a lot more than that. But what the whole video and other videos of her bowling reveal better than the most masterful use of words ever could is not just the exceptional efficacy of New’s physical game, but also the preternatural strength and equanimity of her mental one. Even when she makes a rare mistake, she looks completely unruffled and usually bounces right back with the right adjustment and with flawless execution on her next shot. This would be unusual and highly impressive in the most seasoned and successful of veterans. But New is only 24-years-old, and this, despite her extensive experience in international competition with Team Singapore, was her rookie season on the PWBA Tour.

And what a rookie season it was!

It auspiciously began at the Las Vegas Open where New made the group stepladder semifinal and narrowly missed the televised stepladder finals, finishing sixth overall.

New bowled her way into her first televised stepladder finals the following week in Rohnert Park, CA and won her first match, recorded in Las Vegas two weeks later, before narrowly succumbing to the eventual tournament champion in the next match. She finished third overall.

Then it was on to the Storm Sacramento Open where she, once again, qualified for the televised stepladder finals, recorded in Las Vegas the following week, and made the lanes look easy in her first match and for most of her second until a missed 2-8 conversion and solid effort from her outstanding opponent Shannon Pluhowsky prevented New from advancing to the title match. She finished third again and was the only righthander in the stepladder. Her teammate Cherie Tan won the title.

Then it was time for the prestigious USBC Queens tournament in Las Vegas featuring a Who’s Who of great female bowlers from all over the world, and New bowled her way to a very impressive seventh place finish among a huge and outstanding field of competitors via a double-elimination format. Her Singapore teammate Bernice Lim won the coveted title.

After that, and much to my disappointment, New and her teammates went back to Singapore and missed eight tournaments before returning for the U.S. Women’s Open in Addison, IL. Who knows how well she and they might have done had they remained in the States to compete in all the tournaments?

And if anyone thought that New fared so well in her other appearances because the lanes weren’t that hard and that her unusually powerful release gave her a sizable edge on easier conditions over her less powerful competitors, she proved them wrong by sitting near the top in the standings during most of qualifying and match play and even leading the stellar international field at times in match play on a brutally challenging oil pattern. She made the televised stepladder finals, qualifying third, and bowled a strong, close match against the perennially great Liz Johnson who went on to beat fellow Singaporean Shayna Ng and then Shannon Pluhowsky for her third consecutive U.S. Open title. New finished fourth in the most prestigious and difficult women’s tournament of the season.

After that, it was back to Singapore for three weeks before returning to the U.S. to compete in the single-elimination Smithfield PWBA Tour Championship. This tournament was open only to the season’s previous champions and top point earners who hadn’t won a title during the season, and New qualified on the basis of the accumulated points she earned from her previous tournaments even though she bowled in only five out of thirteen of them.

If you’re one of the handful (or fewer) of people reading this blogpost, you probably already know who won this third of the season’s three major titles. Here's how it all went down. In qualifying for and winning this prestigious tournament, New was crowned the PWBA Rookie of the Year, which is amazing given that she competed in only six of the season’s fourteen tournaments.

But beyond that, New Hui Fen served notice to the bowling world that she’s an up and coming superstar in the sport, and she corroborated the praises I’ve been tirelessly singing to my friends and bowling buddies ever since I first saw her compete.

And beyond even that, as I alluded to earlier, she’s transfigured my own approach to the game. While I’m an old man with a thumbless strikeball delivery and could never hope to physically throw the ball like New no matter how hard I worked at it, there are two qualities in her extraordinary game that I’ve taken to heart.

First of all, I’ve gone from trying to force and rev up the ball with muscular effort to relaxing my arm and hand and letting gravity and a smooth release do the work. And it’s been working fabulously the last few weeks in league. My accuracy and carry both have improved markedly, and I’m able to throw the ball just as fast or faster by relaxing than when I strained to throw it fast and rev it up.

Second, when I make mistakes or get a bad break, I visualize New’s relaxed, impassive face under the crushing pressure of competition and worldwide television exposure, and I strive to manifest that focused equanimity in myself instead of getting tense, impatient, or angry. This too has had a big, positive effect on my game. I call her relaxed, fluid physical game and concentrated impassivity being in a “New state of mind.” And I think that if more men and women were to closely watch New bowl and adapt what they see in her physical and mental game to their own games, they could benefit just as I have.

New says she hopes to return to the States next year to compete again, and I hope for this probably almost as much as she does. What’s more, I pray that she and the entire Singapore team can and will stay here for the whole season and compete in all the PWBA tournaments instead of in fewer than half of them. But no matter what she does, New Hui Fen has already enriched my bowling and, consequently, my life immeasurably, and I’m grateful for this and wish this sweet and amazingly talented young lady the very best with her bowling career and life.

Celebrating Leanne Barrette Hulsenberg's Victory in 2011 U.S. Women's Open

A belated congratulations to Leanne Barrette Hulsenberg for winning what is arguably the biggest women's bowling tournament in history--the 2011 U.S. Women's Open. Of course, my congratulations wouldn't have been "belated" if the finals had been shown live on ESPN2 on Thursday night instead of delayed to Saturday afternoon and I hadn't decided to wait until after the broadcast to write about it so that I wouldn't risk spoiling the results for anyone.

I still don't understand why the finals weren't shown live. As I wrote the other day, after the sponsors of the event went to such lengths to make the tournament an attractive, lucrative, and memorable one, why would they throw water on the fire by televising the event after virtually everyone knew the results? Speaking for myself, I would have reveled in the tension of Leanne's remarkable comeback against Lynda Barnes in the semifinal match had I not already known who was going to win.

Well, Leanne won the match and the title, the 27th of her legendary career. And I can't wait to see the giant replica of that $50,000 check hanging on the wall of Gary and Leanne's pro shop one of these days when I go to practice or bowl league at Fireside Lanes. Perhaps it will even be there this evening when I bowl my sport league.

I can't tell you how happy I am for Leanne and Gary! I've seen Leanne for the past several years at Fireside Lanes, and it seemed to me that she's been pretty disillusioned about bowling for a long time. It must have been a terrible blow to her when the PWBA folded at a time when her game was still strong. She might have gone on to surpass Lisa Wagner's record of 32 national titles. After the PWBA's demise, she just didn't seem to have the spirit to compete at the level she did before, because there just didn't seem to her to be all that much reason to. She still performed quite well at this and last year's Queens and U.S. Women's Open tournaments, but I think she really poured her heart and soul into getting ready for this year's Open. She started bowling more and more tournaments and putting in long hours of serious practice, and it obviously paid off.

What is particularly impressive about her victory this year is that it came against younger players, many of whom had the tremendous advantage of being members of Team USA and other national teams and receiving the advanced coaching that they received in state-of-the-art training centers such as the ITRC. Leanne, so far as I know, had none of that. She did it the old-fashioned, old-school way.

As I wrote previously, I was skeptical when her husband, Gary, told me two weeks ago today that he liked Leanne's chances at the Open. I wonder if even he wasn't a little skeptical too. But after Leanne's performance last week, I don't think either of us will ever doubt that Leanne can still compete with and beat the best female bowlers on the planet.

You can watch video of the entire tournament below and read a recap of the stepladder finals results here.

Leanne Barrete-Hulsenberg Primed for Women's U.S. Open

Leanne Barrette-Hulsenberg is one of the finest female bowlers of all time. She won 26 PWBA titles over a seventeen year period and might well have won many more if not for the demise of the PWBA in 2003. Only three other women in history won over $1 million on tour. She was PWBA Rookie of the Year in 1987, PWBA Player of the Year and BWAA Bowler of the Year in 1991, is a member of the USBC Hall of Fame, and she's appeared over 100 times in televised bowling competition. And while the folding of the PWBA ended her full-time professional bowling career, she hasn't given up the sport by any means.

She and her husband, PBA member and former Ebonite district manager Gary Hulsenberg, own The Strike Shop, a bowling pro shop at Fireside Lanes in Citrus Heights, CA, and Leanne has continued to make her mark in recent national bowling competition, having completed a USBC women's Open "grand slam" and placed 14th in last years's U.S. Women's Open despite the fact that she doesn't bowl nearly as much as she used to.

Leanne also bowls in Fireside Lanes' Steve Cook Classic league and recently rolled her highest sanctioned series ever, an 855 on games of 289-298-268. That's just three pins shy of the house record held jointly by Steve Cook, P.J. Haggerty, and Dave Seiler.

And now Leanne is preparing for a trip to Texas to compete in this year's U.S. Women's Open. She's been working on some physical aspects of her game, trying out different bowling balls and layouts, and bowling tournaments to get herelf as sharp as possible. I'm sure her many fans, myself included, will be rooting for her to do well and make it to the televised finals to be held in the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

If you'd like to read more about Leanne, check out this article on the Ebonite "In The Spotlight" page, and you can view her 2006 match with Liz Johnson below.

Bowling Video of the Day--Leanne Barrette vs Wendy Macpherson

Yesterday I posted videos of Steve Cook and the Steve Cook Classic league. In that post, I mentioned that Leanne Barrette-Hulsenberg bowls in that league along with Steve Cook and many other fine local bowlers. Leanne appeared in PWBA televised finals over 100 times. Below is one of those appearances. It was the championship match of the 2002 Empire State PWBA Classic against Wendy Macpherson.