This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, July, 2018
Recently, the incomparable Aaron Smith, who spends a significant amount of his life living in strange cities for the benefit of the thousands of people who bowl the USBC Open Championships every year, posted a photo to Instagram of a bowling ball in a trash can at the Oncenter in Syracuse, this year’s strange city.
Presumably, someone didn’t bowl well, blamed the ball, and left it in the garbage. Aaron (he’s letting me call him Aaron for the purposes of this column he doesn’t know I’m writing) captured this particular moment, but we all know it’s just one of many moments like it. Discarding equipment—often in hilarious ways—is a large part of bowling’s storied history.
A ball in the trash is relatively tame. Bowling equipment has been chucked in large bodies of water, heaved off buildings, kicked into oblivion with disdain, sawed into pieces and rendered utterly useless in any number of other drastic and elaborate ways.
When these things happen (if you’re not the one doing them), the first instinct is to feel sympathy for the ball. Why is it being so unceremoniously cast aside? Being an inanimate object, it certainly didn’t maliciously decide to change its axis tilt or fabricate friction where there wasn’t any. It simply rolled where and as the bowler rolled it. How can it be the ball’s fault?
That should be the end of the argument, as it is absolutely correct with no fallacies.
However, taking that side of the debate implies a bad performance is the player’s fault rather than the ball’s fault, which is a direct contradiction of where we place the credit when a player performs well.
When someone wins a tournament, the first question asked of that person is, invariably, “What ball did you throw?”
Never mind the fact we don’t like the word “throw” when we should be saying “roll,” except in the case of this very specific question that applies directly to the object being propelled.
What we almost never consider is this: the answer to that question is often the same for the champion as it is for the red leader. The person who won used the same ball as the person who was 14,000,000 pins behind. So how can the ball possibly get all the credit for one person’s win and avoid all the blame for the other guy’s loss? And what about the dozens of people who also used that ball and finished between first and last?
Either the ball needs all the credit and all the blame, or none of the credit and none of the blame.
We need to be careful, though, because evidence like this implies that skill, experience, perseverance and execution factor in to who defeats whom in a bowling tournament; that one person might be better at bowling than another.
It is entirely possible the trashed ball wasn’t working as the bowler hoped. Maybe it wasn’t clean through the heads, failed to pick up in the midlane and didn’t hit at all in the back end. Maybe it didn’t want to get off the hand smoothly, creating inconsistency and reliability. Maybe it simply didn’t match up well.
Those are all legitimate possibilities, but the best players figure out what isn’t working and do something to change it. And, since this awful ball might be the perfect ball in a different bowling center on a different oil pattern next week, wouldn’t it make more sense to put the ball back in one’s bag rather than send it to the dump? Maybe. Or, maybe there is some validity to throwing (rolling?) a ball in the rubbish. If such an act brings any sort of calm to a bowler, his mental state conceivably improves, at which point he can roll his next ball with more precision. That, or his next ball will meet a far nastier fate than the one now smothered in nacho cheese.