This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, October, 2022
In another effort to add kindness to the world, it’s time to stand up for the poor, overly criticized, means-well-but-is-treated-as-evil house oil pattern. With its 6,000,000:1 ratio, underwhelming and varying volume and design intent to minimize mistakes and make people strike, it’s only natural we’d hate it. What kind of fool wants to strike while bowling?
Yes, the house pattern is forgiving. Miss outside and there’s plenty of friction to entice the ball to the pocket. Miss inside and there’s plenty of oil to keep the ball skidding toward the pocket. This leads to one of the main points of its detractors: schlubs can bowl scores that look a lot like the scores the professionals bowl on television, all while failing to understand the pros are bowling on much more difficult conditions.
This is true and everyone at the elite level, sub-elite level and even sub-sub-elite level knows this. Everyone reading this publication knows this. So, when we denigrate the house oil pattern or the league bowlers who participate on it, we’re complaining to no one.
As difficult as it may be to comprehend among the relatively small elite bowling community, not everyone who bowls has aspirations of winning the PBA Tournament of Champions. A lot of people who bowl (the overwhelming majority, in fact), enjoy having a fun activity to get away from working all day, mowing the lawn or shoveling the driveway depending on the season, cooking yet another meal for who knows how many people, tossing out the junk mail, sweeping the glass shards from last night’s broken dishes and whatever other mundane life task that awaits. These people want to order some food, maybe have a beverage, see their friends and roll some shots. If those shots are on the house pattern, there is nothing wrong with that. Why should they have to frustrate themselves on a flat pattern during their one night out that is supposed to alleviate frustration?
How often are recreational softball players heckled by elite baseball players? How dare you start with a 1-1 count? Why are the bases so close together? Why are the fences so far in? Why is the ball so big? Why is it pitched so slowly? This is a disgrace to the game. How can anyone ever respect professional baseball if all these fun-loving real-estate agents and orthodontists are going to spend an hour a week exercising and socializing with their friends?
Flag football? You mean the accountant who has to go to work in the morning doesn’t consider it a worthwhile risk to let untrained behemoths maul him all night? No one will ever watch the NFL as long as recreational flag football is a thing.
Recreational indoor soccer? What a disgrace that is. These former high-school players who enjoy getting together to reap cardiovascular benefits while relishing their favorite sport can’t even play on a full-sized pitch? Hideous. Soccer will never gain any traction around the world.
Beer-league hockey? Any sport you can play while drinking beer isn’t a sport (hey, that sounds familiar). The NHL is doomed as long as these lawyers, plumbers and restaurant managers huff their way through a running-clock hockey game with lenient icing and disinterested referees for the promise of a Pabst at the end.
If recreational softball leagues started requiring 400-foot fences, flag-football leagues introduced tackling, indoor-soccer leagues went outside and hockey leagues banned beer, they would lose players, teams and desperately needed revenue. The MLB, NFL, NHL and all international soccer organizations would be unaffected. So why should anyone expect all recreational bowling leagues to get rid of the house shot and irritate all their league players to the point of quitting?
(This excludes sandbaggers, of course. They need to be punished and this column has addressed that in the past. Currently, we’re focusing on the general sentiment and undeserved hate the house pattern gets.)
To personify the house oil pattern, we’d call it forgiving, inviting, encouraging and familiar. Friendly, even. Reliable. Trustworthy. What a ghastly set of attributes those are. We definitely wouldn’t want those qualities in a friend, so most certainly we don’t want those attributes on our bowling lanes.
Wait. We’re being told “ghastly” is the wrong word. We meant “magnificent.”