This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, July, 2016
To cover the stepladder finals for an Xtra Frame event, I needed to put a camera two lanes to the right of the championship pair. The lane man stripped the lane in question and I strolled 45 feet of the synthetic with oil-free confidence. After setting up the camera, I sauntered back, only to be greeted by an irate fan on the approach. “You’re tracking oil all over these approaches! Someone could get hurt!” That fan shouldn’t have been on the approach in his street shoes.
If the if-people-only-understood-how-complicated-and-difficult-bowling-is argument had any validity, wouldn’t there be droves of fans lined up to watch accountants do taxes?
“It’s not a sport if you can drink while playing it.” – I.G. Norant
If you’re feeling like a winner winner, you might want to make a chicken dinner. Can’t find the meat tenderizer? Don’t fret. You have three dozen bowling pins in your basement for some reason. Put the chicken in a bag and whack it with a bowling pin. The best meat tenderizer you’ll ever use.
This is the first sentence in the history of writing. In an officially sanctioned magazine. With 43 letters in it. Following the sentence, “The best meat tenderizer you’ll ever use.”
“That’s a bad rack” is insulting and crude in certain company.
High-school students: when taking college entrance exams, use a freshly sharpened 2H pencil for essays. When you need to make check marks, make a pencil change to a 3H, sharpened a little farther up, to give you a more crisp look into the box. For bubbles, go back to the 2H, but put a tad more surface on it to help read the paper a little earlier. If you’re ever unsure of an answer, pencil down to a 6H and mark your second guess just enough to make a case for your intent if necessary.
I wonder what kind of racket Roger Federer is using.
The TSA will let you carry a bowling ball onto a plane, but they will not allow a bowling pin. Unsure whether they will allow a bowling anecdote.
I travel to Las Vegas often. The worst day to fly there is Friday, because the flight is full of irresponsible vacationers drinking heavily in preparation for a weekend of drinking heavily. Their rowdiness really detracts from my heavy drinking.
If you meet a pro bowler and tell him you loved his performance in a specific event, I guarantee he will know what he scored (and what ball he threw and how many pieces of thumb tape he used and whether or not it rained the night before) in the fourth frame of the third game of the second round of qualifying.
What if Dan MacLelland’s parents had named him Bruce? Would we call him Bruce “The Man” MacLelland?
Because you’re a hoarder, you still have every bowling-ball box that ever housed a glorious new rock. You also still have every VHS recording of MacGyver you diligently catalogued over the years. Good news: a standard bowling-ball box is the perfect size to fit 16 VHS tapes, which, if you recorded in EP, contain a total of 96 MacGyver episodes. Your movers will be so impressed with your incredible packing efficiency, they might even forgive you for the trip hazard you created by leaving a hundred bowling balls loose on the floor when you had those perfectly good boxes you could’ve used.
I don’t watch in-flight safety videos because they’re not live.
In summary, Kenny Waters’ dog, Maddie, is debatably the most popular living thing among fans on the PBA50 Tour. Sorry, myriad of Hall of Famers.