At the moment I am the champion of our local bowling league, it is going on 3 weeks now but this Thursday (my tomorrow) I face the toughest challenge that I have had to face in my most recent run with the belt. The guy I am up against is the only person in our league that has held the belt for a longer period of time than I have. I've had the belt more times than he has, but this is because I normally win the championship and then lost it a few weeks later.
This guy tends to hang onto it for a longer period of time and has a higher average than I do. He is consistently a 150 bowler, so am I, but since I am subjected to the oil conditions of the lane and he, as someone who uses no curve at all, isn't affected by this.
On Tuesdays it is a bit customary for the people that want to go and practice to do so. We don't really have any rules about practice, but if you are in the top 5 in our league it is frowned upon if you practice more than outside of this officially sanctioned time period. The reasoning being that if you are good enough to be in the top tier, you are only going to make it less fun by getting better. We call this the "Stanley Clause" because of a guy that was in our league named Stanley who was much better than the rest of us and despite this he practiced every single day. We eventually asked him to stop coming because the championship was no longer fun.
Anyway, before I make this too long I want to showcase my 2 scores from my practice day on Tuesday.
Aside from the first 2 frames, which were trash and this is normally how long it takes me to figure out the oil patterns on a lane, I was right on the money with how I positioned my first ball. Since I bowl with a curve I have a lot more opportunity to be slightly off target and still get most or all of the pins down. Every time that I didn't get a strike, I got a 9 and this can only happen with regularity if you are striking the 1 pin. As you may know, striking the 1 pin dead on as a straight bowler is a bad thing because: physics. You are going to likely end up with a nasty and near impossible split. As a curve bowler, the likelihood of this happening is much lower because even if I do hit the 1 head on, my ball is moving across the lane and is going to hit the ones behind it as well.
I couldn't take a photo of the final score because our lanes are strange like that and it immediately erases your frames after you bowl the last ball. I got a 9 on the last ball and ended with a 212.
This is much higher than my average of around 145. Good game!
The next game was a really strange one
I was bowling and hitting in basically the exact same place as I was in game one, but for some reason that I do not understand the pins just refused to fall. In every single frame except 1 of them I got 9 pins only. In the last frame, which I couldn't take a photo of because of the aforementioned strange functionality of their system. I cleaned up the 1 remaining pin and guess what I got on the last ball?
It was another 9. So i ended with a frustrating score of 149. This is still slightly above my average and I guess I am kind of happy about the fact that all of my first balls were right where I needed them to be and I have no idea what changed between game 1 and 2 because I was using the same ball on the same lane with the same oil immediately after the 1st game.
I'm hopeful that I can perform at this level come tomorrow because the guy I am up against bowls very consistently with occasional breakout games that are above 200, just like me. We are likely the most evenly matched opponents in the league and a lot of what happens tomorrow is going to depend on how long it takes me to find my mark.
This is a big issue with a curve bowler that is dealing with cheap lanes that don't have any real system as far as their oil patters are concerned but then again, if they were to develop these standards it would probably start to be significantly more expensive than $1.50 a game. I'll take the diminished quality in exchange for low prices in bowling any day. :)