This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, May, 2019
Those of us entrenched in the bowling industry easily can get jaded to the many quirks of bowling, which is unfortunate. When we’re world-weary, we treat such quirks as normal and can’t properly appreciate the player eccentricities and absurd details of the game itself that confound new audiences and should captivate us as well. This month, we’ll discuss a few of the most mind-boggling peculiarities in the great game of bowling.
Yielding to Dead Pairs
All major professional tours use the one-pair courtesy rule. It’s not your turn until someone on the pair to your left and then someone on the pair to your right bowls. The best feature of the system is it unequivocally determines whose turn it is. You’re up or you’re not.
However, when cuts are made and fields get smaller, occasionally the tournament director will take every other pair out of play. That is, 3-4 will be vacant, 5-6 will have bowling, 7-8 will be vacant, 9-10 will have bowling, etc. The idea is to speed up the pace of the game as now there is no requirement to yield to anyone. One pair left of all bowlers is vacant, as is one pair right. On your pair, it is always your turn or your opponent’s turn, regardless of what else is happening in the building.
This isn’t the way it works in real life. Bowlers instinctively change the yielding rule from one-pair courtesy to next-pair-that-has-bowling-on-it-even-if-it’s-at-a-venue-down-the-street courtesy.
The only difference between having dead pairs in between active pairs is there’s less activity peripherally. When there are bowlers on the adjacent pair, they’re milling about awaiting their turns, but the closest bowling is always one pair away. With dead pairs, the bowling is just as far away but there is less potentially distracting activity in the immediate vicinity.
Paradoxically, the fewer distractions left and right actually lead to greater potential for distractions in the bowlers’ minds, causing them to yield past the pairs on which nothing is happening, all the way to the next pair where something might be happening.
Bowlers, when yielding to dead pairs, are yielding to nothing.
Wild Prognostication
It’s the third frame of the second game of the first round of what will eventually be 60 games of qualifying. Someone walks up to someone else and utters, “What’s the cut going to be?”
Wild prognostication is one of the most fun aspects of bowling in all cases. That’s why we project cuts with 58 games to play, discuss the Player of the Year race two weeks into a 12-month season and anoint The Next One based on a shaky cell-phone video of a three-year-old getting the ball all the way to the arrows before it drops into the gutter.
It doesn’t take a soothsayer to know this type of discussion will last as long as bowling does. It has to—what else are we going to talk about during game two of qualifying?
PA Announcers Talking to the Players
At the beginning of a day of bowling, the PA announcer—usually also the tournament director—gets on the mic and welcomes fans to the event. Then, he directly addresses the players.
“Bowlers, when your lanes come up, you’re ready to start your practice.”
This is completely normal in our sport. But imagine this scenario: at a baseball game, the PA announcer comes on and says, “Players, when the team at bat makes three outs, it’s time for that team to take the field while the team in the field returns to the dugout for their time at bat.”
Put that way, it sounds utterly ludicrous, and yet it’s as normal as can be on the lanes.
We shouldn’t get rid of any of these things (except yielding to nothing). We should, however, welcome absurdity for absurdity sake, revel in it and appreciate the fact our game is entirely unique from all others.