Finally pulling the bowling back together

I started the bowling league for foreigners here in Da Nang and from the beginning I have been one of the better bowlers in the league. This doesn't mean I was always the best but I was one of the people that could be counted on to always do better than most.

When we introduced a championship belt into our group, I was the first person who won it. I will admit that I "sandbagged" only a single week because at that point I had the belt for 13 weeks in a row and it was getting kind of old having the same person dominate. I dropped it like a WWE scripted wrestling match to a guy that we had nicknamed "Dangerous Dave" who unfortunately is no longer with us or anyone else on earth because he died.

I'll get into that story another day because it is a cautionary tale, but instead of dragging down the mood lets stick with the bowling and how in the past month, I think I have finally gotten my swing figured out and now I am regularly bowling over 150 and rarely miss spare pickups.

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I bowl with a left to right curve. If I roll the ball faster the hook is less profound, if I roll it softer the curve is going to be more extreme. I don't actively TRY to curve the ball because that is a fantastic way to always miss the mark and isn't controllable. The curve that I have is just the natural way in which I release the ball with the movement of my hand and I do not use the thumb hole. I think it was actually one of you here that used the term "shaking hands with the big man" and basically that is what I do (I think it was @bozz that gave me that term) in that I turn my hand slightly at release of the ball.

Anyway, I had a problem in the past with figuring out my release and this was holding me back and even sometimes having the ball fly kind of out of control and very off target at times. I seem, through having gone to our practice days on Tuesdays the last 4 weeks, to have figured out hot to make it simply happen instead of forcing it.

I have been doing this style of release for so long that I honestly cannot roll a bowling ball without curving it, and this can sometimes be a problem when I have a single pin remaining on the right hand side of the lane.

The only way I can get one of these is to cross the entire lane from a far left position and know how it is that my spin that moves the ball from the right to the left is going to interact with the oil and make my ball start to go straight right at the end and move forward hitting the last remaining pin. If you throw it too hard it gutters on the right, throw it too soft and the spin causes the ball to curve and miss the pin. While it might not seem this way to an onlooker, getting the single 10 pin is one of the most difficult things that I do while I am out there and this is due to my inability to roll a ball straight. Most bowlers would just try to go really straight on the right gutter along the side but I cannot do that. If I start the ball over there my ball is going to end up somewhere in the middle of the lane by the time it gets down there.

Confused yet? Well then

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yesterday during practice bowling I had an absolutely outstanding day. I kind of screwed up in the first frame, knocking down 3 and then 4 on my first two balls but from that point forward I was basically unstoppable. I closed every single frame from 2-10 and ended up with a 187, which was the highest score of anyone in our 5-person practice group.

My other two games were not as great but I did get over 150 on all 3 games. I am very happy with that because even though I have been doing this for many years I still only have around a 130 average. I think I may have finally figured out how to do this game.

Something I always struggle with is if I have leftover pins that are two in the same zone. a 1/5, 2/8, 3/9 both being leftover at the same time is something I normally have a tough time cleaning up because I can't bowl straight at the pins. The only way I can get them is if my curve just hits the headpin perfectly on my "drive by" and pushes the head pin back to knock down the one behind it. Thankfully, when you bowl with a curve and thanks to just normal physics, people that bowl with a curve will not often have these two pins leftover because of the ball moving from right to left as well as forward. Straight bowlers end up with this sort of leftovers on a regular basis.

This is called a "toofer" or "hard wood" and it is actually very common with straight bowlers. I almost never have one of these left over and my pickup percentage is probably less than 20% success. I only had one of those yesterday but I picked it up as well.

I only missed a single, single-pin pickup across 30 frames. This is a very good day for me and I had the best scores out of all of us even though I was there with 2 people that have recently been the overall champion. I haven't had "the strap" in probably a year.

I think if I can continue along this path that I will soon be the champion though. I just need to not get arrogant.

I was gloating about this to my friend who used to live in SE Asia and was a good friend of mine and then he showed me his son's league scores where he scores around 220 for his average. Little punk.