What? We’re counting columns now? Didn’t we, as recently as July of last year, write about how we should stop counting televised 300 games and yet here we are counting brief missives on the delightful absurdities of the great game of bowling for the second consecutive month?
Yes. As with all conversations surrounding bowling, all we care about is our own game. We will recount every shot, every excuse (be it humidity or urethane or the field starting too far left or the ever-impressive “on me”), every bad break and every unfortunate failure to double, only pausing when you interrupt to tell us the same about your game, allowing us to store up our next sentence as we await you to take a breath long enough for us to resume detailing how we had difficulty finding our towel during frame six of game four of round two and how that should’ve negatively impacted our routine but miraculously led to us striking out for 257 that put us inside the cut until we hit a bad pair (never mind that it is actually the highest-scoring pair for the field as a whole) in the next game and shot 170 which really put us in jeopardy until the last game of the block in which we needed a double in the 10th to sneak into cashers round but stoned 8 on the best shot anyone threw during the entire event and it’s not fair but we don’t have time to dwell because there’s a sweeper three hours away we need to go fleece.
In college, as so many bowlers know, an introductory course is labeled 101. The basics. The prerequisite for anything else you need to study to earn your degree in between bowling practices and competing in 65 different national championships in the same season. And what better time to introduce The One Board to people than with its 101st edition?
Logically, it makes sense. The One Board only ran for eight years and one surprise month in a print publication, which is not quite enough time for anybody to find it and read it. Now located on the internet, many bewildered humans, intrusive ads and devious bots are bound to stumble upon this trove of bowling ruminating, so perhaps we should explain what it is we do here. Dare we be more honest and forthcoming than ever?
Maybe.
The One Board, which has somehow won multiple awards, celebrates bowling’s endearing farcicalities, skewering the seemingly illogical and outrageous, all from a place of reverence. We Trust The Process, take it one column at a time and believe strongly in the mantra of NEED MORE GAMES but we are deathly afraid to mention ball hardness. Well, no, we are not afraid to mention ball hardness, but that’s a longer story for another time filled with wild speculation, another hallmark of bowling we lovingly embrace.
We jest. We opine. We digress. We speak with the royal we, not because we think we’re royalty, but because we’re all in this thing together. We all know bowling deserves the respect other sports get and we also know bowling shuns many of the things that give those other sports respect and make other pro athletes rich (to name three examples: charging money to enter the building; encouraging fans to eat, drink and be merry; requiring fewer than 10 hours of endurance to watch competition that concludes with no sporting resolution but does invite us to come back tomorrow for 10 more hours).
And yet, as we’ve exposited several times before, there is no sport better than bowling. We’re all here for it. As the great “Weird Al” Yankovic once told this very writer for a story in a print publication, “Most of the things I lampoon and parody are things I actually love,” including bowling among those loved things.
That’s why The One Board exists. Bowling can simultaneously be revered and satirized. And, upon the extinction of qualifying, bowling can be loved.
Next month, we can stop counting.