I was part of a team that was always hunting titles
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- May 5, 2018
- 2036
Very little compares to the utter quiet in a bowling alley when only two teams are there and a league championship is on the line.
Ten guys. Two lanes. Thirty-six frames to fill.
I know it’s a cliché, but the silence is deafening.
Speaking of overused phrases, I’ve heard it said over and over that bowling is not a sport.
“It’s a skill,” someone who’s never done it very well always says, “like shooting pool or throwing darts.”
That kind of gibberish, followed to its logical conclusion, results in the conclusion that nothing is a sport.
Now are bowlers athletes? Having been involved with the sport from the late ‘70s until relocating to the Crystal Coast at the turn of the century, I think that debate is a matter of semantics.
If your definition of an athlete is someone in superb physical condition, capable of marvelous accomplishments under the greatest pressure, the answer is a tentative “maybe.”
Bowlers tend to be older. That’s true, but when I started competing in my early 30s, I wasn’t trying to be athletic. I was trying to avoid being pathetic.
It didn’t take me very long to understand that I had a lot of work to do and that, as in most pursuits, the only way to get better was to practice.
In my little town, as perhaps in yours, there was a code, that is, doing it the right way. No shortcuts. No deviation from the tried-and-true method of self-improvement. But I had a problem with that. I wanted immediate results.
If I rolled a 450 series one Wednesday night, I wanted to be 100 pins better the next week. It just doesn’t work like that. Bowling rewards patience.
Back when I started, along about the time of Iranian hostage crisis and the “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates, I didn’t have any equipment, just an idea of competing with a group of friends and having some fun. I used a house ball, wore rented shoes and spent more time in the lounge afterward than was probably prudent. And I was a terrible bowler, barely averaging 130 after six weeks.
One night before closing time, a guy I knew from fast-pitch softball sat down next to me and said, “You could be good.”
I laughed.
He said, “No, I’m serious.”
I stopped laughing. “OK,” I said, taking the bait. “What makes you say that?”
“Because,” he said, “you’re competitive.”
Which was quite true. We talked for a few minutes about how wanting to win was different than needing to win and that I knew the difference.
“You don’t just want it,” he said. “You need it.”
I’d like to say that at that very moment the Rolling Stones blasted out of the jukebox, Mick Jagger riffing on how if you try sometime, life can be better.
But it was quiet in there. And that’s the thing about bowling alleys. When it’s packed on weeknights, cars parked like jackstraws with snow slanting sideways and you’re almost late, walking from the icy parking lot into the warmth of — to rip off Hemmingway — a clean, well-lighted place, it’s a maelstrom of sound.
You stomp your feet on the rubber mat inside the door and stay away from the carpeted areas as you make your way toward your assigned lanes. You greet friends, you take in the chaos of the crashing pins as players get in their warm-up frames, and you understand that for the next couple of hours, you’re where you belong.
Not only because you’ve gotten better over the years, but because you’re almost good.
When you stand 6-5, you have a lot of moving parts in your setup, your approach and your delivery. Picture a praying mantis folding itself almost in half or Lurch bending at the waist.
The ideal bowler stands almost a foot shorter, has more arm strength and owns a follow-through that is as balanced as it is pretty.
But — and this is crucial — when you’re tall with long arms and legs, you can generally offset your gravitational limitations with dead-on accuracy.
It’s a matter of taking advantage of what skills you do possess, blocking out the distractions and adjusting on the fly.
By the time there was a Democrat in the White House and the Yankees had won their first World Series in 15 years, I was a 180 bowler. Five years later I was 10 pins better.
It took time, but as I’ve said, it’s a sport that requires patience.
As far as winning goes, as you might have guessed, I was part of a team that was always hunting titles. And when it came down to the championship match — two teams, 10 guys and a pair of well-dressed lanes — we were used to the quiet of an important moment.
I remember standing there, drying my fingers over that little fan in the ball-return carousel, thinking not so much about how it would end, but on how it all started.
Did we win every spring, capping off seasons that had begun when the leaves began to change? Nope. Life is rarely that predictable. But we won our fair share of the time, which is saying something.
I miss those Wednesday nights, the competition, the camaraderie, the cacophony of it all. And then my memory goes silent, the beating of my heart the only sound I can hear.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com.