Match Play at the Earl Anthony Memorial

If you love bowling like I do and you have Xtra Frame, you find your eyes glued to your computer monitor, especially when live match play is in progress. So, it was with great reluctance that I left to attend a party last night with my wife and miss the exciting action that took place in the men's Round of 8 and the women's semifinal match play.

However, I did get home and tune in just in time to see Stafanie Nation finish with nine strikes in a row to defeat Shannon Pluhowsky 259-244 in the seventh and final game of their great match after Pluhowsky began by winning the first three games and appeared to have the match all but locked up. That just goes to reinforce the trite but true saying, "It ain't over till it's over." I try to remember that whenever I'm bowling in competition and my opposition has a big lead. I keep on trying.

I was disappointed that PJ Haggerty lost to Steve Weber in the Round of 16, and I wish Jason Belmonte had made it to the TV finals instead of losing to Sean Rash in the Round of 8, but the men's and women's field for Sunday's ESPN's live telecast looks like a solid one with Sean Rash facing Mike Machuga, and Anthony LaCaze taking on Mike Wolfe in the men's semifinal matches, and Lynda Barnes matching up with Stefanie Nation in the women's final.

I have a few comments about what I observed yesterday watching match play on Xtra Frame.

First of all, I'm very impressed by the way Sean Rash is throwing the ball. He generates so much speed and turnl, but he's controlling it extremely well on the demanding condition they put out this week for the Anthony Memorial. Xtra Frame commentator Jeff Mark said that some people may not like Rash on the lanes where he can act like a bit of a jerk with his super-competitive demeanor and frequent balks on the approach, but he's a very nice guy off the lanes and recently organized and hosted a fundraising "Bowl for Wishes" Super Regional in Wichita Kansas.

Second, Xtra Frame takes questions from viewers while matches are underway, and one viewer wrote in with a question that's often occurred to me: When the oil on the lanes breaks down and the balls hook as much as they have in Dublin, why do bowlers keep moving so deep inside and throwing such big hooks with their relatively aggressive balls instead of switching to far less aggressive equipment and playing farther outside and straighter. "Bowling Doctor" Jeff Mark replied that as the bowlers keep throwing their oil sapping reactive resin balls and progressively move farther and farther inside as the oil breaks down, they create a V-shaped pattern where just about any kind of ball you throw in that area is going to hook too early and lose too much of its energy to carry well at the pocket if it even hits the pocket, which is hard to do when the ball hooks right off your hand. So the bowlers pretty much have to keep moving inside.

I still don't understand this oil pattern and oil breakdown business as well as I'd like, because I see people like Walter Ray Williams continue to play far to the right of the other bowlers even after the lanes have gotten very dry, and I've seen him score very well doing this, making the Round of 28 this week where he lost to a blistering hot Patrick Allen in six games. I guess guys like Walter Ray tend to play outside the V-shaped oil burnout pattern that the other players create, and he keeps his ball more controllable with his end-over-end roll. But I still wonder if the best way to bowl on really dry lanes is to keep moving inside even as far as having to stand in front of the ball return and take a three step approach and/or loft the ball five or ten feet out onto the lane, or if one wouldn't be better off using some combination of equipment, speed, and release that allows one to stay further outside and play straighter with a more controllable ball reaction.

Jeff Mark also commented that, as a former Ebonite ball rep, he used to work with Walter Ray and try to get him to use equipment with more exotic layouts, but Walter liked to have a "certain look" with his ball and preferred to stick to the simpler, more basic layouts that consistently gave him that look. Given his incredible success, I wonder if simpler isn't generally better than the widespread push to increasing technical complexity in bowling equipment. Or would guys like Walter Ray do even better if they listened to the ball reps and tried more complex combinations of coverstocks and layouts?

Finally, someone asked about the difference between European and American bowlers, and Jeff Mark replied that he thought European bowlers tended to be much more sound in their fundamentals and especially their spare shooting because they grow up on more demanding lane conditions and learn to make their spares and grind it out with solid fundamentals instead of relying as much on power and being as sloppy in their execution and spare shooting as American bowlers even at the professional level tend to do and be.

I thought this was a very interesting observation that supports my belief that bowling centers in this country need to start putting out more difficult conditions , especially for their junior bowlers, and encourage them to become better in their fundamentals. I, for one, would love to see more difficult house shots such as the Red, White, and Blue patterns of the Pepsi tournament that aired last week and, of course, the animal patterns of the PBA Experience leagues. But I can understand why bowling centers would be reluctant to do this. They're afraid they'd lose business to the centers that keep their conditions easy and their scoring inflated.

First Round Match Play in Dublin

I've spent a couple of hours this morning watching live match play at the Earl Anthony Memorial Open in Dublin, California on Xtra Frame on the PBA website. As I type this, the video coverage has concluded until 2 PM PST, but game seven of a best-of-seven game match between Eugene McCune and PJ Haggerty is still unfolding, and I'm following the frame by frame scoring of it on the PBA website.

I know PJ's mom, Debbie. In fact, we just won the doubles championship of a small fall league a few weeks ago, and this is actually the second time we've done this since I moved to Sacramento and started bowling league where I do now. Debbie has been voted by Bowlers Journal as one of the top 100 bowling coaches in the USA, and she was also voted by the USBC as the top junior bowling coach in the country last year. She runs a marvelous junior program at Fireside Lanes, and she's a good person.

Her son PJ was two time collegiate bowler of the year at Fresno State and is now an exempt player and Columbia 300 staff member on the PBA tour. He hasn't been on the national tour long and hasn't made it to the TV finals yet, but maybe this week will be his week as I see that he's just defeated Eugene McCune in the round of 28 and will next face Steve Weber in a best-of-seven match in the round of 16 to be bowled later today.

One of the things I enjoyed about this morning's Xtra Frame coverage was a guy named Rob Allen who sat in with Xtra Frame commentators Mike Jakubowski and Jeff Mark and displayed his unbelievably encyclopedic knowledge of PBA tournament results over the past forty-five years. He could list every Tournament of Champions winner from the beginning in 1965, and he seemed to know who won just about every PBA tournament, where it was held, whom he beat, and what score he shot to win since that time. People watching Xtra Frame could write in and challenge Allen with trivia questions, and he was up to the challenge an overwhelming majority of the time. It was a nice trip down bowling memory lane and an amazing display of a prodigious memory.