I bowl at Fireside Lanes in Citrus Heights, California. It's about 15 miles east of my home in Sacramento. There are plenty of bowling centers closer to me than Fireside, but I doubt that any of them offer the value that Fireside does. Part of that value is monetary. I bowl two scratch leagues at Fireside.
In one of them, I pay only $15 dollars a week to bowl six games--three of singles and three of doubles. Granted, the prize fund isn't all that big, but this league offers an affordable way to get some good practice in a competitive format without breaking the piggy bank. And the people who bowl are a nice, friendly group. Not only that, but the guy who runs it is one of the nicest persons I've ever met in my life. I think the world of him. And, by the way, he bowled a 900 series in tournament play many years ago, before Glenn Allison famously bowled his perfect series. The format wasn't sanctioned, and you won't see his name on the USBC list of 900 series bowlers. But he was in the Guiness Book of Records for awhile for his accomplishment. I really enjoy this league. I just wish we had more bowlers in it.
My other league is a PBA Experience league with adult and junior participants. Bowlers Journal International's 2009 Junior Coach of the Year Debbie Haggerty runs it. We bowl four games of singles for $14 per week and bowl on each pattern for three straight weeks. There are some excellent adult and junior players in this league. Of course, this kind of league tends to draw bowlers who are interested in more than just high scores and averages. They want to improve their skills on the more challenging PBA patterns.
One of the most noteworthy of these players is a young man named Caleb Nakata. I am very impressed with the progress I've seen him make since I first watched him bowl three or so years ago. He used to come watch the PBA Experience League. Now, at the relatively tender age of 19, he's kicking butt and taking no names in it. Last week he bowled a sizzling, league-leading 299 game and 997 series on the Scorpion pattern. Nobody else was even close. This week, he bowled 850 on the Shark pattern. I know because I was on his pair and he destroyed my sorry posterior. It's true that I'm struggling right now to change my approach and release to generate more power and am failing miserably. But it's also true that Caleb Nakata is bowling very well and is clearly dedicated enough to get better and better. What's more, he's one of the nicest kids you'll ever meet.
One of the real pleasures I get out of bowling is watching guys like Caleb start out as beginners and blossom into fine players. Another fine junior bowler in the league is young Amanda Fry. She won the girl's division of the California state tournament last year. The first time I saw her bowl several years ago, I knew she'd be good. Her smooth, left-handed style is very reminiscent of Tish Johnson's, even though I'm not sure she's ever even seen Tish bowl.
I feel blessed to bowl in these kinds of leagues and be surrounded by these skilled and dedicated bowlers and fine human beings.
I blogged recently about bowling last weekend in a tournament employing the Shark pattern. I wrote that even though I struggled like mad to make my ball hook, hit the pocket, and carry and averaged under 180 for six games, I wanted to bowl only in sport pattern tournaments and leagues if I could, because I thought that if I upped my game some, I could actually be more competitive on a sport condition than I could on a house shot against young crankers.
I have also reached the point of being bored with booking relatively high averages and shooting high games and series on house patterns where I have area of five boards or more to get the ball to the pocket and strike despite glaring mistakes. When I score well or average 200 on a sport condition, I feel so much more gratified, because I feel like I earned what I got. I love the challenge of bowling on conditions at least remotely similar to what the pros face instead of striking on the adult equivalent of bumper lanes. And if I average only 176, the way I did last weekend, that's okay with me. It just motivates me to get better.
Now if I didn't know better, I'd think that virtually every bowler at or above my level of proficiency would feel the same way. Yet, clearly they don't, as two people really made clear to me this week.
I was practicing with one of the top bowlers in the Steve Cook Classic league last Sunday. The Steve Cook Classic is one of the best, if not the best, leagues in the Sacramento area. Featuring such luminaries as Steve Cook and Leanne Barrette Hulsenberg (yes, THAT Steve Cook and THAT Leanne Barrette), it makes up in talent and skill for what it lacks in size.
You'd think that the bowlers in that league would want to bowl only on sport conditions, but the guy I practiced with said that while he and some of the others would like that, most wouldn't like it and would probably quit the league if it became a sport league. When I asked why, he said that most don't have the time to practice as much as they think they'd need to in order to score decently on sport patterns, and so they want to bowl on an easier house shot where they can score well.
Later, I bowled with a young woman who seems quite serious about the sport. She bowls in a scratch league and participates in many tournaments where she's enjoyed considerable success over the past few years. But when I urged her to bowl in the PBA Experience league this summer, she declined. She said she doesn't have the right equipment for it. I remember thinking that her reactive resin equipment was plenty good enough and, besides, strategy and execution mattered a lot more than equipment anyway. It seemed to me that she may have been worried about bowling lower scores than she was accustomed to and of being emotionally deflated by this. If so, I think this is unfortunate.
What about you? Would you rather bowl in a sport or house shot league or tournament?
Today I begin a new feature of this blog. I'll be providing links and citations to bowling news and information that I think you may find interesting or useful. I'll be looking at blogs, websites, journals, and other online and offline publications related to bowling and pointing you to the best of what they have to offer. I'm going to try to do this every day, but I may or may not be able to do that. Yet, I should be able to do it most days. So please be sure to stop by and check it out.
~ Former Junior Team USA members take doubles lead at USBC Open Championships-- "Erik Vermilyea of Mansfield, Texas, and Jeffrey Mersch of Orlando, Fla., are former Junior Team USA teammates and have bowled doubles together at the USBC Open Championships for five of the last six years...Their familiarity with each other's games has helped them to continued success on the tournament lanes, including a 25th-place doubles finish in 2007. This year, everything came together for them again as they turned in their best effort yet and took the Regular Doubles lead with a 1,507 total at the National Bowling Stadium on Sunday."
~PBA.com's Xtra Frame to Continue Live Event Coverage This Spring -- "PBA.com’s subscription video service Xtra Frame hits the road again later this month to give bowling fans first-ever comprehensive coverage of several PBA Senior Tour and PBA regional events...Xtra Frame co-host and expert analyst “The Bowling Doctor” Jeff Mark will be travelling the country and calling the action for the final rounds of at least eight tournament stops beginning with the PBA Senior Dayton Classic April 20."
~ Andy Morton: PoY Comes Down to Year's Final Game...Again -- "In very few professional sports does Player of the Year boil down to one game. However, for two consecutive years on the PBA Tour, Player of the Year has come down to the final game of the final tournament...This season-ending tournament also brought to an end one of the most disappointing years for number one seeds heading into the stepladder final. The top seeds this year went an astonishing two for eight...over those 53 games, we saw the cream of the crop rise to the top. Five of the top seven players were former Players of the Year. Your number one seed was vying for his first POY award and your number two seed is remarkably the only player among the top 10 of the 50 greatest players of all time not to have a POY award. No matchplay, no bonus pins, no gimmicks. Just bowling for 53 games on seven conditions."
~ Ohio bowler records sixth perfect game of 2010 USBC Open Championships-- "Most bowlers dream of achieving perfection at the USBC Open Championships, but after a 133 start to singles, things were far from perfect for Mark Frazier of Lorain, Ohio, at the National Bowling Stadium on Tuesday...With a few adjustments and a ball change, the 36-year-old right-hander turned his dismal start into a dream come true as he closed out his 10th Open Championships appearance with 20 consecutive strikes for games of 253 and 300 for a 686 series. Frazier's 300 was the sixth of this year's event. Terrence Syring of Bay City, Mich., leads Regular Singles with 833."
~ Get More Length -- "How do you get the ball to skid farther down the lane without moving your line or changing bowling balls?"
~ Mental Game: Inside Your Head -- "Want to become a PBA champion? Take responsibility. Want to raise your average? Take responsibility. Want to become a better person? The onus is on you, and you only, to succeed or fail, win or lose, rise or fall."
~ Analyzing the Player of the Year Award -- "Every year, no matter what the sport, there is debate about who actually should've won the MVP award, or how skewed the system is, or any of a number of other arguments fans and critics throw at the governing bodies of sports...Is it best to vote, as in most sports? Is it best to make a pre-determined points system ahead of time and let the participants go for it, as in bowling?"
~ 2009-10 PBA Tour: The Season of WOW -- "This 2009-10 season was a season that lived on and off of every conceivable brink you can imagine and we all came out remembering something about what bowling fans just witnessed."
~ Attacking the sport patterns in Reno -- "The biggest difference on this pattern will be that when you use more angle in the front part of the lane (swinging the ball greatly away from the headpin), you won’t see the guaranteed hook most house shots provide. What you are going to have to do is throw the ball straighter up the lane and less away from the headpin. This isn’t to say that you have to play one exact part of the lane to have success. One of the best things about the Open Championships oil pattern is that it provides many different ways to get to the pocket, but simply throwing the ball toward the gutter and waiting for it to hook back isn’t one of them...We always try to play as straight as we can during practice, and then we try to stay as far to the outside part of the lane as we can for as long as we can. This gives us a chance to get the oil to transition down the lane where it can give us a little help later on. You also need to use equipment with some surface, but not too much. We also all play as close to the same breakpoint as possible the entire set. That way, when one of us starts to see oil transition, we can communicate it to the rest of the team so that all of us can adjust. This helps minimize the amount we have to move, since there is hopefully no one playing deeper than we are. So, whenever we move deeper, we move into fresh oil."
The Earl Anthony Memorial Classic is underway now in Dublin, California, and I 'll be posting about it later. But right now, let me say a few words about last week's Pepsi Red, White, and Blue Open. If you didn't see it, I urge you to subscribe to PBA Xtra Frame and watch it there whenever you wish, or you can read about it here. But I want to comment less on who won and what scores they shot than on some other matters pertaining to the tournament and telecast.
First of all, even though I prefer the traditional televised stepladder format that the PBA seems to have all but abandoned, I enjoyed the format of last week's final in which there were two simultaneous matches in the first game, followed by two simultaneous matches in the second game, followed by the winners of the previous two matches bowling each other for the championship. But there are some other aspects of the tournament and telecast that I found intriguing:
The New Red, White, and Blue Patterns
The USBC devised these three oil patterns to be more challenging than typical "house" patterns but less challenging than the daunting "animal" PBA patterns featured in "PBA Experience" leagues throughout the country and increasingly abroad. The typical "house" pattern has ten times as much or more oil deposited on the lane surface in the middle area of the lane than on the areas to the right and left of the middle, and this allows bowlers to miss their targets left or right or be inconsistent with their releases and ball speeds and still get the ball to the pocket instead of missing the pocket to one side or the other. Some house patterns are so easy in this way that bowling on them is derisively referred to as "adult bumper bowling."
However, typical professional patterns are far "flatter" in that they have much less of a discrepancy between the concentration of oil on the right and left sides of the lane and the concentration of oil in the middle. This requires the bowler to be much more accurate and consistent in order to hit the pocket and strike. The Red, White, and Blue patterns lie between the animal and house patterns in their ratios of outside (left and right of center) oil concentrations and inside (middle) oil concentrations, with the Blue pattern designed to be the most difficult because it has the lowest ratio (approximately 5:1) of oil between outside and inside. Interestingly, Mike Scroggins, who won the championship on the Blue pattern laid down for Sunday's finals, thought the Blue pattern was the easiest for him because it favored his "A" game of throwing the ball down and in instead of having to throw the ball away from the pocket and make it hook back to the pocket.
There is a move by the PBA, USBC, and international bowling organizations to standardize lane conditions into distinct oil patterns so that, as Chris Barnes explained in a special feature during the telecast, bowling can gain more respect as a challenging sport and perhaps eventually make its way into the Olympics.
Woody Austin's Commentary
Woody Austin is a professional golf champion who bowled with the pros during the tournament, threw the ceremonial "first ball" of the televised firnals, and offered some incisive commentary during the finals. He bowls league for a couple of months each year while the PGA tour is on hiatus and averages around 215. But, he says, the PBA Tour shot requires a far higher degree of accuracy and consistency than does a typical house league pattern. With the typical league pattern, he can miss five or even ten boards (inches) to the right or left of his target and still hit the pocket. On pro conditions, he not only can't miss more than an inch or so to the right or left. but he also needs to be much more consistent with his release and ball speed.
Furthermore, he highlighted the importance of using the newer and right equipment on today's lane conditions, likening the use of older bowling balls to using older kinds of golf balls or clubs against guys using the newest and much more powerful golfing equipment. He said that bowling, like golf, is a very technical game pitting the professional against many variables that he or she must control for with his bio-mechanics and by using the newest and best equipment available in order to be competitive.
Wayne Garber's Story
Wayne Garber is a successful Western region pro from Modesto, California who has never done well in national tour events and was coming off an abysmal performance in the inaugural World Series of Bowling in Detroit a few weeks earlier. But what made his story particularly remarkable and, I think, endeared him to the Wichita crowd was the fact that just a couple of years earlier, he had fallen down a flight of stairs in a hotel while carrying luggage and torn the patellar tendons in both knees. His was bedridden for months, and his doctors didn't think he would ever be able to bowl again much less bowl professionally. Not only that, but sometime later, he had to have one of his neck vertebrae replaced by a cadaver vertebrae. Nevertheless, the 42-year-old, 6'2', 250 lb bowler managed to come back, bowl very respectably in his first TV appearance and beat Walter Ray Williams in sudden death in a semi-final match, and end up coming in second in the tournament.
Wayne Garber's Style
One has to see Garber's style to believe that anyone could succeed with it in professional tournaments or even be a good league bowler with it. I won't try to describe it except to say that it begins with a very unusual backwards back bend and then takes eleven steps to the foul line. The YouTube video below shows it in all its strange glory.
Wayne Garber's Controversial Choice
After Garber beat Walter Ray, he had the choice, as the higher seeded bowler, of which pair of lanes on which to bowl the championship match against Mike Scroggins. He chose to bowl it on the pair on which he beat Walter Ray. Some criticized him for this and he admitted in an interview after the tournament that it was a mistake because Scroggins had struggled on the other pair to beat Michael Fagan and Patrick Allen with relatively low scores, and Scroggins was delighted that Garber chose to let him bowl on a different pair with fresh oil on the left side.
However, I understand Garber's decision. Before he made his choice, he threw some practice balls on the other pair and had "no look," whereas he shot a 237 and beat bowling legend Walter Ray on the pair he on which he chose to bowl the championship match. So, he chose that pair and lost. However, he hit the pocket every time, stuck a solid 8-pin in the sixth frame, and got tapped several other times while Scroggins carried everything in sight. Things could have turned out very differently had Sroggins not carried as well and Garber had carried better. If Garber had chosen the other pair and missed the pocket a lot, he would probably have lost anyway and not looked nearly as good doing it.
Walter Ray's Performance
I know he made a really bad shot on the second sudden death shot, missing the pocket well to the right and leaving a seven count, but the fact of the matter is that this fifty-year-old phenom who is, in my opinion, the greatest bowler in PBA history and indubitably the winningest one, made it to the semi-final match on the highest scoring conditions of the season against the young and powerful lions of the tour is just amazing to me and worthy of praise. This guy can get it done just about anywhere, and he's been doing it for thirty years.
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.
