This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, August, 2023
In almost every sport, the answer to “What’s the score?” is easy. You turn on the hockey game in the middle of the first period and the first thing you do is look at the score bug. What’s the score? 3-2. You’re at a funeral and a friend notices you looking at your phone, knowing you’re checking on the baseball game. What’s the score? 3-2. You’re at a restaurant with as many as 78 TVs in your face (if you’re lucky, as few as 73) and all the TVs are showing teams and sports you don’t even care about, but you can’t help yourself. What’s the score? 3-2 on every TV, except the soccer game, which is 0-0.
It doesn’t work so easily in bowling.
What’s the score? Well, that guy is pacing 230 but the other guy is already in the 240s and their max scores are tied at 260.
For bowlers, that conversation is fine. Compelling, even. But imagine being a regular human being who only bowls a few times a year at the most. For those people, scoring has been automatic their entire lives, they’ve never learned to keep score and, although the automatic scorers can be understood when there are nothing but open frames, they become a confounding mess once a slash or X joins the line.
In the pro game, slashes and exes appear in nearly every frame. In the once-a-year-for-fun game, the scoreboards are nearly inverted, with strikes and spares being so rare they result in highly viewed social media posts like “Schlub Gets Spare,” featuring some guy in white shorts picking up the 3-6 by barely grazing the 3, which then barely grazes the 6. A great moment in that person’s life and there is nothing wrong with someone bowling to have fun and taking pleasure in such an accomplishment.
But now what? It’s his sixth frame, and to that point, his open frames were easy to add. Five plus seven plus four plus zero plus six equals 22. But the spare leaves his sixth-frame score blank. What happened? Has he been disqualified? Why does he still have a 22? Maybe spares are bad? To make matters more confusing, he will invariably roll a gutter ball in the seventh frame, meaning the box in the sixth will plant a 32 there. “Oh,” he’ll think incorrectly, “spares are worth exactly 10.”
Generally, we at The One Board ask knowledgeable bowlers to consider the mindsets and thought processes of those who are less experienced in the game in an effort to encourage those people to become interested in learning the finer details of the game from a helpful veteran rather than run screaming from a know-it-all goon who has no tolerance for a beginner.
Not this time. This time, we are calling for every possible educational outlet to introduce bowling scoring into the curriculum. Elementary schools, after-school activities, church groups, mentorship programs, the checkout line at the grocery store. People need to learn how to keep score. There was a time in which kids would learn to keep score during gym class. College courses in bowling required students to learn to score before they ever hit the lanes. Now, these opportunities are far too rare. Automatic scoring is great for many reasons, but people need to know how to interpret what they’re looking at. When a once-a-year bowler spares and his score changes a frame later by adding 10-20 pins, that person is confused. We’re not asking for everyone to be experts able to track a cut line in a field of 64 in real time, but we should all be able to add 10 to the value of our next shot.
Novices: genuinely seek assistance. Veterans: give judgment-free assistance. This is paramount to our game and, at the risk of approaching hyperbole, society as a whole. And let’s hope the score is not 3-2.