I was out of action and away from bowling other than being a cheerleader for about a month, then I sheepishly and very carefully played a few games, poorly because moving "wrong" hurt, but then over the next 3 weeks I just kept getting better and well, now I don't think anyone in our group is going to allow me to use any sort of injury excuse at all at any point moving forward.
My apologies for the shockingly bad image quality here. I actually have quite a good mid-range phone but I had accidentally done something to the brightness settings and all of my pictures have been trash lately. It's since been repaired.
This is the first game we played yesterday and I was not in any competition head-to-head, I was just bowling to do as well as I can like most of the other people there. Each week we only have 2 official head-to-head competitions and I was not in either one of them.
I am the score on the top there. I started off with a bang as my roll hit in exactly the perfect spot with a decent right to left curve that would have impressed many professional bowlers.
It's often quite unlikely that I am going to get a strike on my first roll because since I bowl with a curve and our local lanes isn't exactly professional standard - hence the $4 for 2 hours of bowling price - I normally have to spend the fist few frames figuring out how the oil patters on the lane are that day. Today though, I guess the guy who operates the oil machine had a great morning and it was exactly perfect.
It varies wildly depending on the type of ball you are using and how much rotation you put on the ball, but generally speaking this is how a curve roller should be aiming and that is exactly what I did and well, it friggin worked.
My next two frames were good and I also hit the sweet spot but not with enough momentum or something, I dunno but i cleaned them up with spares. Frames 4 and 5 were trash and I honestly should have gotten both the the remaining pins in frame 5 but didn't. It happens. If it HAD happened though, my score would have perhaps broken the all time high score of our league.
Magic just seriously hit my game in frame 6 though, and getting a strike isn't actually that big of a deal for me, it happens all the time. But then i got another one, and another one, and then the 4th, by the time i got the 5th strike in a row people who are not part of our league started to gather to watch.
On the 2nd ball of frame 10 I honestly hit in exactly the same place as the previous 5 balls and it very well could have been 6 strikes in a row, which has never happened in our league, the record is 5. The pin didn't fall though and at that point it just kind of seemed like I was showing off.
I ended up missing the last pin at well, badly, but one more pin doesn't really matter if it is the last one of the last frame.
When I looked up at the scoreboard as I walked away and saw 211 points, I was of course delighted, but then the statistician that is in our group did some numbers later and informed me that this is The highest score that I have ever gotten since I moved to Vietnam in 2020.
it is not the highest score that has ever been done by our group, that honor is to my best friend and nemesis, who got a 234 midway through last year. When he got that score, he was disappointed a bit, even though it was one hell of an accomplishment, because my all time highest score that I got when I was 15 years old, was 235.
I think that when I was killing it that he was a little concerned that I was going to topple the all time high score of our league but if you are somewhat decent at math, even if I had "Striked out" by getting two more strikes in frame 10, the score would have been 232.
I am delighted to have gotten such a high score but just like anyone who has ever done this well, you start to look back at the little things that could have seriously changed the overall score. If I had cleaned up and spared in frames 4 and 5 for example, and both of these were rather east spare pickups, my score could have been around 250 or so, which is a remarkable score even for people that do this professionally.
IN the bowling world getting 4 strikes in a row is called a hambone, but since our bowling group is called DUMBO, we call it a Hambo. But I got 5 strikes in a row and this is simply called either a 5 bagger or a double hambone. We have an award for this accomplishment and it doesn't get doled out very often.
There's Nadi with our Hambo award and just like most things that make noise when you squeeze them, she hates it.
In the history of our organization, the Hambo has only been won a total of 5 times and well, yesterday was one of them. With the highest score of the day I was a high contender for the title match next week and the randomizer did in fact choose me. We'll see if I can match the performance next week but since I am pessimistic by nature, I'm not very hopeful that will be the case. The guy who has the belt now is consistently good whereas I am more like a guy that has extraordinary games every now and then but for the most part bowls 140 average.
It will be exciting nontheless though and now nobody is going to allow me to claim injury as an excuse from this point forward. Who knows, maybe the broken ribs knocked something into place that was missing from my game before.