The players will be matching up with the 2009-2010 Chameleon pattern, and I expect to spend the afternoon enjoying some fine bowling. I hope that you who can will come join me. Some may disagree, but I can hardly think of a better way to spend part of my 4th of July weekend.
Showing posts with label Jeff Frankos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeff Frankos. Show all posts
Friday, July 2, 2010
PBA Western Regional Tomorrow in Modesto
Tomorrow, I'll be driving from Sacramento to Modesto, CA to watch the qualifying round of the PBA Western Region Venessa Brown Homes Open at Yosemite Lanes. It will feature such nationally well-known names as Michael Haugen Jr., Wayne Garber, P.J. Haggerty, Dave Arnold, and Chris Warren as well as a veritable Who's Who of local luminaries including the ageless Ross Packard and perennial powerhouse Jeff Frankos.
Monday, April 26, 2010
On Watching Mike Flynn and the Outlaw Doubles Tournament in Stockton
Last weekend I bowled in a tournament. This weekend I just watched one. But what a good one it was. 54 doubles teams of some of the finest bowlers in Northern California descended on West Lane Bowl in Stockton, CA to compete in an eight game scratch tournament. Among the participants were two-time Collegiate Bowler of the Year and exempt PBA player PJ Haggerty teamed with PBA Western region standout Jeff Frankos, exempt PBA player and two-time TV finalist this season Wayne Garber, and a guy you may have never heard of named Mike Flynn.
If you ever see Mike bowl (check out the brief video below, even though it doesn't begin to do justice to his incredible physical game), he should make a big impression on you. He throws one of the most effortlessly powerful balls I've ever seen at any level. He bowls in the Steve Cook Classic league at Fireside Lanes in Citrus Heights, CA near Sacramento. I'm guessing that he also bowls leagues in other houses in the area. He used to tear up Wayne Webb's league at another house in Sacramento.
He bowls sanctioned 300 games and 800 series like they are nothing, and he had a pin ripping 300 game in Stockton on Saturday. I understand that Steve Cook is so impressed with Mike that he offered to sponsor him on tour a few years ago but Mike declined. Anyway, I love to watch Mike bowl as much as I do anyone on or off the PBA Tour, which is another way of saying that I would watch him as readily as I would any bowler in the world. That is how much his physical game impresses me.
I also saw two people shoot 300's in the same game on the same pair, one right after the other. In all the tournaments and leagues I've watched over decades and decades, I've never seen this before. Yes, there was a relatively easy house shot out there. There's no way people would have shot those kinds of scores on the new Shark pattern I bowled on recently. But these were still good bowlers, and they put on a very entertaining show.
I'll post the final results of the tournament when they become available. And if there's any way I can, I plan to bowl in that tournament next year. Anybody want to be my doubles partner?
If you ever see Mike bowl (check out the brief video below, even though it doesn't begin to do justice to his incredible physical game), he should make a big impression on you. He throws one of the most effortlessly powerful balls I've ever seen at any level. He bowls in the Steve Cook Classic league at Fireside Lanes in Citrus Heights, CA near Sacramento. I'm guessing that he also bowls leagues in other houses in the area. He used to tear up Wayne Webb's league at another house in Sacramento.
He bowls sanctioned 300 games and 800 series like they are nothing, and he had a pin ripping 300 game in Stockton on Saturday. I understand that Steve Cook is so impressed with Mike that he offered to sponsor him on tour a few years ago but Mike declined. Anyway, I love to watch Mike bowl as much as I do anyone on or off the PBA Tour, which is another way of saying that I would watch him as readily as I would any bowler in the world. That is how much his physical game impresses me.
I also saw two people shoot 300's in the same game on the same pair, one right after the other. In all the tournaments and leagues I've watched over decades and decades, I've never seen this before. Yes, there was a relatively easy house shot out there. There's no way people would have shot those kinds of scores on the new Shark pattern I bowled on recently. But these were still good bowlers, and they put on a very entertaining show.
I'll post the final results of the tournament when they become available. And if there's any way I can, I plan to bowl in that tournament next year. Anybody want to be my doubles partner?
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
A Tale of Three Bowlers
I lived my first 51 years in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Sacramento a few years ago. I began bowling at the long-gone Camino Bowl in Mountain View as a young boy, later became enamored with the "wall" at the defunct 19th Avenue Bowl in San Mateo, and then took up a virtual 30 year residence at Mels Bowl in Redwood City.
During that time, I saw a lot of talented local bowlers. One of them was a kid named Dave Razzari who bowled at 19th Avenue. When I first met him, he had just set the national record as the youngest person in America at that time to roll a sanctioned 300 game. I believe that he was either twelve or thirteen. He threw an incredible ball for someone his age or any age. He had a smooth, effortless release that turned the three dots on his AMF rubber ball into a dizzying blur, and he averaged close to 230 in junior leagues at a time, the late 60's and early 70's, when such lofty averages were a lot rarer than they are now.
Of course, 19th Avenue was a "ditch," as we called easy house shots back then. But Dave Razzari was still an exceptional young bowler. Yet, when he got older, he more or less gave up the game. I don't know if he burned out or what, but I think he could have gone on to greater things in the bowling world had he stayed in it.
Many years later, I met a junior bowler at Mels by the name of Gary Harm. He didn't seem like anything special at first. But something happened in a very short time that transformed this young converted lefthander from just a typical young bowler into something extraordinary.
To this day, I've never seen anyone else get so good so fast. He went from averaging in the 170's to "sandbagging" a 239 average in just two or three years. He booked that 239 average bowling with my grandfather and me in an adult scratch trios league. One night he shot a 279 triplicate that is still as good a 3 game stretch of bowling as I've ever seen. Every ball was solid in the pocket. And only one ringing 7 pin in each game separated him from a 900 series. But there were times when he would deliberately miss spares or miss the pocket because he didn't want his stratospheric average to climb above 240.
Mels Bowl used to host an 8-gamer one Saturday night each month, and it regularly drew over a hundred bowlers, many of them pros. The best bowlers from throughout the Bay Area would show up. Gary Harm was one of them. Rusty Greiner was another.
Gary and Rusty used to stage some epic battles during these tournaments. Rusty was a hard throwing lefty with a style reminiscent of Ryan Ciminelli's. He was accurate and consistent and threw a devastating ball. I once saw him bowl back-to-back 300's and then start with the first six or more strikes the next game on the pair next to me. I felt like I was bowling in the wrong tournament. Gary was also a lefty, but his smooth-rolling style was more of a cross between Mike Aulby and Parker Bohn. He and Rusty would routinely average in the 250's and 260's over the 8 games of these tournaments. Usually no one else came close.
And lest you think that Gary Harm was just a typical, albeit unusually high averaging, house bowler, he also did very well outside the softer conditions of Mels Bowl. In his first year with the PCCB (Professional Central California Bowlers), he was Rookie of the Year. He won and placed high in good scratch tournaments all over the Bay Area and beyond. He was a magnificent young bowler for whom the sky was the limit until he suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again.
There were stories about him. I won't go into the details. I don't know if they were true or not. However, I will say that one of those stories had him meeting with a very bad end. I hope that story is false and that Gary Harm, under whatever pseudonym he might be using, is still out there somewhere blessing the game of bowling with his exceptional talent and graceful style.
A few years later, I bowled in a scratch league at the dearly departed (have you noticed a sadly recurring theme here?) San Carlos Bowl. It was a pretty decent scratch league for some of the finer bowlers, myself excepted, on the San Francisco Peninsula. There was this kid making his adult league debut fresh out of juniors. He proceeded to dominate his elders. Everyone could see that he was destined for bowling stardom. His name was Jeff Frankos.
Unlike the aforementioned Dave and Gary, Jeff Frankos didn't burn out or worse. He kept polishing his game and, for most of the succeeding fifteen years or so, has been one of the best, if not the best, bowlers in the San Francisco Bay area and entire state of California. Indeed, if I'm not mistaken, he even led the PBA Western region in points last year, and he's running away with the points race this year.
Jeff Frankos is a very, very good bowler. If you enter a tournament and see him walk in the door, you know he's going to win or be in solid contention virtually every time. He can throw hard or soft. He can play wherever he has to with whatever he needs to in order to score well. He's smooth, deadly accurate, and he repeats shots with the best of them.
I've always thought that he could compete with the "big boys" on tour if he gave himself the chance. But I suspect that he does better financially and otherwise staying home with his family and bowling mostly local tournaments than he would taking on the grueling, peripatetic life of the PBA Tour. Still, I hope, now that he's eligible, that he takes his best shot at the TOC next year.
Why do some bowlers of outstanding promise throw it all away while others, like Jeff Frankos, rise and shine in the bowling firmament? I can't answer that, but I sure enjoy watching those who fulfill their bowling potential sparkle.
During that time, I saw a lot of talented local bowlers. One of them was a kid named Dave Razzari who bowled at 19th Avenue. When I first met him, he had just set the national record as the youngest person in America at that time to roll a sanctioned 300 game. I believe that he was either twelve or thirteen. He threw an incredible ball for someone his age or any age. He had a smooth, effortless release that turned the three dots on his AMF rubber ball into a dizzying blur, and he averaged close to 230 in junior leagues at a time, the late 60's and early 70's, when such lofty averages were a lot rarer than they are now.
Of course, 19th Avenue was a "ditch," as we called easy house shots back then. But Dave Razzari was still an exceptional young bowler. Yet, when he got older, he more or less gave up the game. I don't know if he burned out or what, but I think he could have gone on to greater things in the bowling world had he stayed in it.
Many years later, I met a junior bowler at Mels by the name of Gary Harm. He didn't seem like anything special at first. But something happened in a very short time that transformed this young converted lefthander from just a typical young bowler into something extraordinary.
To this day, I've never seen anyone else get so good so fast. He went from averaging in the 170's to "sandbagging" a 239 average in just two or three years. He booked that 239 average bowling with my grandfather and me in an adult scratch trios league. One night he shot a 279 triplicate that is still as good a 3 game stretch of bowling as I've ever seen. Every ball was solid in the pocket. And only one ringing 7 pin in each game separated him from a 900 series. But there were times when he would deliberately miss spares or miss the pocket because he didn't want his stratospheric average to climb above 240.
Mels Bowl used to host an 8-gamer one Saturday night each month, and it regularly drew over a hundred bowlers, many of them pros. The best bowlers from throughout the Bay Area would show up. Gary Harm was one of them. Rusty Greiner was another.
Gary and Rusty used to stage some epic battles during these tournaments. Rusty was a hard throwing lefty with a style reminiscent of Ryan Ciminelli's. He was accurate and consistent and threw a devastating ball. I once saw him bowl back-to-back 300's and then start with the first six or more strikes the next game on the pair next to me. I felt like I was bowling in the wrong tournament. Gary was also a lefty, but his smooth-rolling style was more of a cross between Mike Aulby and Parker Bohn. He and Rusty would routinely average in the 250's and 260's over the 8 games of these tournaments. Usually no one else came close.
And lest you think that Gary Harm was just a typical, albeit unusually high averaging, house bowler, he also did very well outside the softer conditions of Mels Bowl. In his first year with the PCCB (Professional Central California Bowlers), he was Rookie of the Year. He won and placed high in good scratch tournaments all over the Bay Area and beyond. He was a magnificent young bowler for whom the sky was the limit until he suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again.
There were stories about him. I won't go into the details. I don't know if they were true or not. However, I will say that one of those stories had him meeting with a very bad end. I hope that story is false and that Gary Harm, under whatever pseudonym he might be using, is still out there somewhere blessing the game of bowling with his exceptional talent and graceful style.
A few years later, I bowled in a scratch league at the dearly departed (have you noticed a sadly recurring theme here?) San Carlos Bowl. It was a pretty decent scratch league for some of the finer bowlers, myself excepted, on the San Francisco Peninsula. There was this kid making his adult league debut fresh out of juniors. He proceeded to dominate his elders. Everyone could see that he was destined for bowling stardom. His name was Jeff Frankos.
Unlike the aforementioned Dave and Gary, Jeff Frankos didn't burn out or worse. He kept polishing his game and, for most of the succeeding fifteen years or so, has been one of the best, if not the best, bowlers in the San Francisco Bay area and entire state of California. Indeed, if I'm not mistaken, he even led the PBA Western region in points last year, and he's running away with the points race this year.
Jeff Frankos is a very, very good bowler. If you enter a tournament and see him walk in the door, you know he's going to win or be in solid contention virtually every time. He can throw hard or soft. He can play wherever he has to with whatever he needs to in order to score well. He's smooth, deadly accurate, and he repeats shots with the best of them.
I've always thought that he could compete with the "big boys" on tour if he gave himself the chance. But I suspect that he does better financially and otherwise staying home with his family and bowling mostly local tournaments than he would taking on the grueling, peripatetic life of the PBA Tour. Still, I hope, now that he's eligible, that he takes his best shot at the TOC next year.
Why do some bowlers of outstanding promise throw it all away while others, like Jeff Frankos, rise and shine in the bowling firmament? I can't answer that, but I sure enjoy watching those who fulfill their bowling potential sparkle.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
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.
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.
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