This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, November, 2023
In 1988, professional wrestler Curt Hennig, known as Mr. Perfect, performed in a series of vignettes to show fans he was absolutely perfect. In perhaps his most famous bit, he bowled a perfect game. It was the perfect way to show how perfect Mr. Perfect was, but a quarter century later, it’s even more: the perfect example of how bowling is filmed, viewed and understood outside the bowling industry.
As we know, there is a huge difference between a runaway Brooklyn and a high-flush explosion, even if they count exactly the same on the scoreboard, but outside the bowling industry, one strike is the same as any other. Did the pins fall? Great. Use it.
Mr. Perfect’s first perfect shot shows the sinewy one-handed righty in a dry shirt and nice bowling slacks making a passable four-step approach to the line, rolling the ball straight at the head pin, connecting with the 1-3 and knocking everything down, the 5 pin going last. The perfect first impression. We can instantly see he’s not a Bowler, but he’s also not an incompetent slouch. If he were in a group of friends that bowls once a year, he’d be the star.
This may have legitimately been Mr. Perfect’s first shot of the video shoot. If so, he and the crew were likely ecstatic, thinking it was going to require much less time to get 12 perfect shots on camera than they’d originally anticipated.
As of the second frame, however, Mr. Perfect’s shirt is completely drenched in sweat, indicating a lot of unusable non-strikes had been thrown after that first one. Still, Mr. Perfect’s second frame again hits the 1-3 although he is far more upright and even hops at the line, appearing to have been at this for a while. The perspiring behemoth turns around with a cocky flourish as the ball obliterates the pins, making us want to see the outtakes of his many cocky flourishes that were presumably accompanied by picking off corner pins.
His third strike is a Brooklyn with the 9 falling late, but he appears to be regaining his balance. He also goes Brooklyn in the fourth, this time with the 5-10 being tripped late. This is an important frame because, to anybody reading this column, that’s an extremely lucky shot for which a bowler should forever be ashamed. For a non-bowling video crew, that’s some slick-looking pinfall that needs to be maximized. And it will be.
The fifth frame is his third straight Brooklyn, but we must respect the integrity of the piece in that it’s evident Mr. Perfect is actually rolling all these shots. There is no stunt bowler being spliced together with Mr. Perfect’s perfect reactions.
In the sixth, he returns to the 1-3 side of the rack to crack open a six pack. By the seventh, he’s feeling it, again confidently turning away from the pins and hammering his hands in triumph as the pins go flying behind him.
This is where Mr. Perfect truly gets arrogant. His next four strikes, which get him to the front 11, are quick cuts of the pinfall followed by quick cuts of strikes being added to the score sheet. This was vlog-style editing before there were vlogs. All four are exact copies of his fourth frame in which he tripped the 5-10. Mr. Perfect is either more perfect than we thought, which is impossible, or the video crew got sick of waiting for the man to roll 12 strikes and said, “We can throw in that fun pinfall from earlier four more times.”
The final shot has to be new footage to prove this was real. The footage is so new that Mr. Perfect’s shirt is drier than it was in the second frame. The ball nearly goes through the face but technically hits the “correct” side of the headpin, with eight pins falling immediately and the dramatic-for-TV-sloppy-for-bowling late crumbling of the 7 and then 4 pin complete Mr. Perfect’s perfect game as he saunters back from the line with his incomparable swagger.
Twelve strikes featuring eight unique shots of pinfall from a man whose shirt’s sweat saturation fluctuates throughout might make a bowling fan skeptical of whether or not Mr. Perfect actually bowled a perfect game. But it was perfect. In mass media, all strikes are equal. Chronology doesn’t matter. Lucky pinfall is actually compelling pinfall. It told the story it wanted to tell.
Most important: it was 12 strikes in a row, proving the late Mr. Perfect was who he said he was: perfect.