It has been a long time since I was in the championship picture because the level of talent has grown quite a lot in 2024. Also, even if you do bowl really well and are in the premiere league, you still have the finish with a top 4 score to even be considered for the championship and then you have to get lucky because the person who is going to face the champ is chosen at random by a wheel app that one of us has on our phones. Therefore, it is really unlikely that you get many chances at playing for the championship.
The above picture was taken at a strange but interesting bar called "The Dude" and if you have seen the Big Lebowski, you know the connection between bowling and that film. I will have to go back to that bar in the future to see if it has a bowling theme because that would be awesome if it did.
Going back to the championship, it was a good showdown between me and one of the Norwegian bowlers and both of us were competing for the championship only because the actual champion had to vacate the belt in order to make a trip back to the United States.
When I take these photos I think it always looks like there is barely anyone attending but in reality we are at damn near capacity every single week. Since we refuse to put more than 3 people on a lane it is always going to look like there aren't many of us there but we can only accommodate around 30 people anyway. This week we had 22 and for us, that is a lot. The bowling alley reserves the entire bowling alley just for us from 11am to 1pm every Thursday and it is a mutually beneficial situation since we have been filling the place up for 2 hours every single week for 4 years.
Now let's get back to my rather disappointing performance in the championship. It wasn't really that disappointing it was just a case of me really choking when it matters the most and my opponent, who was slipping just as much as I was in game three, all of a sudden getting 2 strikes in a row at the very last possible moment that he could have done so.
Game one was pretty good for both of us and my opponent started out with a lead that I closed right at the end by bowling 2 strikes in a row myself. We finished game one and two with very close scores - he got 145 and I got 141. The first game started out very badly for me because my opponent got a strike on the very first ball and on my first roll I ended up with a split that no one in our league has ever picked up for a spare.
More often than not, even professional bowlers will fail to pick up this spare. The technique for getting it is to just roll at any two of them while trying to just "clip" the inside pin and praying that it flies across the lane just perfectly. There is too much dumb luck involved in this for anyone to actually excel at it and even machines that bowl with absolute precision can only pick this up about 40% of the time.
I got two of the pins but no love from the pin action. The rest of the first game went on how you would expect at the top of the DUMBO leagues and our scores were nearly even. The second game is where both of us really shined and because of another 2 strikes in a row late in the game, I actually won game 2 by 25 points with 140-165.
At this point it appeared as though I was on fire and was definitely going to win but it may have been a combination of fatigue and also a bit of arrogance that lead to me slipping. Still, I was 21 points ahead at this point so I still had a comfortable lead. My opponent has a cracking end to his otherwise not great game when he got 2 spares and 2 strikes in frames 7-10. I still could have won it because of my previous lead if I had just picked up the spare in the 10th frame. This spare pickup was a relatively easy one, and one that I had knocked down many times in previous frames on this day. It is the 3-6-10 leave and you can basically hit this one anywhere on the left-most 2 pins and they are all going to go down unless you are really unlucky.
I missed the 3 pin entirely and only knocked down 2 of them. Still though, at this point my opponent really needed to shine in frame 10 in order to win and man did he ever. He got 2 strikes in a row as well as 8 pins on the last ball giving him 28 points in one frame. I managed to leave the 10th frame open despite getting 9 pins on my first ball. This was all that he needed to comfortably win game 3 with finishing scores of 157-121.
The total score was 442-427. A mere 15 points difference. Now perhaps you can understand how absolutely crucial that missed spare pickup in frame 9 was for me because had i picked that up, it would have added another 19 points to my overall score thus giving me the win. You can't really point at one particular frame though because there were a lot of chances for me to pull ahead earlier in game 3 and I failed at those as well. Game 3 was not like games 1 and 2 for me whereas my opponent remained pretty consistent in all three games.
Therefore he is the new champion and I will not get another shot at it for at least another couple of weeks. A good time was had by all though anyway and for the most part, championship games are not as close as the one was for me and my Norwegian opponent. I congratulated him because I am not a sore loser and we all went off to party at a local restaurant and pub.
If you are in Da Nang on a Thursday I strongly encourage you to join us at Speed Bowl on the top floor of the LOTTE Mart at 10:30 AM. It doesn't matter to us if you are a good bowler or not so just come along and meet some new friends and have a good time!