This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, October, 2018
As I’ve stated on record many times, bowling vernacular is one of the most fascinating, engrossing and enthralling subsets of speech in existence. Being able to combine sign language that isn’t sign language with English that isn’t English and somehow be understood by another bowler is astonishing.
Thus, I’m not suggesting we rid our language of absurd terms like “skid-flippy” or “bouncy,” as those are crucial to being able to talk over the heads of laymen, which is part of the fun of having a vernacular.
However, there are certain terms we use too often in bowling that need to go away. Here are three:
“Regular Tour”
When people say “regular tour,” they’re referring to the PBA Tour, but it is one of the worst possible ways to refer to the absolute pinnacle of the sport. There is nothing regular about the most exclusive, talent-laden, lucrative and entertaining bowling tour in the world.
Calling the highest level of the game “regular” condemns it to being normal, when it is as far from normal as possible. A normal bowler doesn’t average 220 on a flat pattern, or have companies paying him to wear their logos, or get to compete on national television for a five-figure payday on multiple occasions. A normal bowler doesn’t get a private bathroom. Fine, so that part’s the same.
Maybe we call it the regular tour to distinguish between the PBA50 Tour and the PBA Regional Tour, but that’s a redundant distinction, as the “50” and “Regional” designations already exist to differentiate those tours from the PBA Tour, which stands on its own as the best in all of bowling. It is anything but regular.
“Unfair”
Yes, everything is unfair. That’s a fact. But maybe if we stop acknowledging it, it’ll go away? Yeah, that guy got a better cross, and the lefties have the berries this week (unless you’re a lefty, in which case the lanes are walled for the righties), and one more game (or one fewer game) would’ve hurt the guy ahead of you and helped you, and you hit all the tough lanes while everyone else hit all the easy ones, and the other squad was stacked and yours was loaded with donks, and it rained before you bowled, and the temperature fluctuated wildly, and so on.
These are all indisputable facts. But, since they’re true for everyone, and because nothing in life is fair—for proof, consider magicians, who exploit this truth to the extent that they ask the audience if something is fair, only to use that distraction to be devilishly deceitful—let’s accept the odds are always against us, no matter what, and any semblance of success we can find deserves to be lauded forever. Or turned into a rabbit.
“One Shot at a Time”
The winner won because he “took it one shot at a time,” but when asked to elaborate on what specifically the bowler focused on in those several dozen one shots, he’ll tell you he stayed in the moment and trusted the process, further confusing the issue.
Yes, we understand it means the bowlers aren’t dwelling on what already happened and aren’t thinking ahead to what might happen, and this is probably good advice for young bowlers. But we’re not at a coaching clinic; we’re on the approach with the winner after a major championship and we want to hear what about those one shots, or those moments, or that process, made that player so much better than the rest of the field, most of whom were also taking it one shot at a time while staying in the moment and trusting the process.
The strategy itself is fine, and I’m not saying bowlers should give it up. However, we should henceforth assume everyone knows about the one-shot-at-a-time strategy, and skip past it into the compelling part. It’s much more enthralling to hear about even one of those shots than to hear that each one of them was, in fact, an individual shot.
I know I’m not The Process, but trust me.