Author: internetbowlingpersonality

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, December, 2018

Recently, while bowling in a late-night, non-sanctioned, alcohol-free misfit league, a group of four nicely dressed individuals—two women, two men, all probably in their late 20s—walked into the bowling center. My teammates and I observed them, then wondered, “Who walks into a bowling alley at 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday?”

It’s a fair question, but we’ll get back to that.

The foursome, I would further speculate, were out for a nice dinner on what appeared to be a double date in which they were all happy to partake. They seemed to all be friends and possibly enjoyed each other’s company. In all likelihood, they were having such a good time at dinner, they didn’t want it to end, and one of them said, “Let’s go bowling.”

Then, presumably after laughing for a moment, they actually did go bowling.

Sure, they were terrible and yes, the one drunk guy clad in ill-fitting khakis mocked the league bowlers and yes, the other guy and his ladyfriend spent the entire evening making out in the settee area, but they paid their money, traded their 18-inch heels for bowling shoes and became customers.

They also complained about alcohol not being served in the center, which is completely acceptable as the mere fact they complained about something means they are well suited to become lifelong bowlers.

Getting back to the initial speculation: who walks into a bowling alley at 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday? The worst part about that question is it’s a legitimate question. It’s strange enough to see random humans want to bowl on Tuesday night that their presence is considered odd.

What else would they be doing? Watching 47 consecutive episodes of some great show on Netflix that I’d certainly love if only I’d give it a chance by watching the first three seasons? Texting their friends, presumably about some great show I’d certainly love if only I’d give it a chance? Sleeping?

None of those alternate activities are nearly as wonderful as late-night bowling. We shouldn’t be wondering why they walked in. Rather, we should simultaneously be glad they walked in and full of resentment because they’re still making out. Still, we should be happy they chose to do so in a bowling center rather than at home, where the slightest peck on the cheek can cause an important whispered line from some great show I’m sure I’d love if I’d give it a chance to go unheard, requiring a complete re-watch of the episode.

Why aren’t there more people who, even if they went out for a different reason, come up with the legitimately brilliant idea to go bowling? Since anybody reading this sentence is passionate enough about bowling to subscribe to a niche publication, obviously we’re not the problem. However, we can be the solution.

I don’t know which of the four people from my tale uttered the crucial “Let’s go bowling” words, but that person is a hero. The other three were smart enough to agree. All we need to do now is be that hero. Suggest bowling as the evening’s main activity or as a nightcap and watch everyone agree. You will have come up with the best idea of the evening, and as long as you don’t make a big deal about not having all your equipment with you and thus won’t perform as well as normal, everyone will have fun.

This is all assuming you’re not in the middle of some great show I’m sure I’d love if I’d just give it a chance. After the series finale, though, step out of the house and onto the approaches.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, November, 2018

When I last wrote about pace of play, in the August 2017 issue of Bowlers Journal International, I suggested we bring the pace-of-play discussion to bowling, as it has been prevalent in every other sport for years.

Now, more than a year later, that discussion is still standing on the approach, yielding to another discussion three pairs down, then dabbing its rosin bag, then wiping its shoe, stepping up to the dots, standing statuesquely for a minute or two, finally taking one-and-a-half steps, then turning around, setting the ball on the ball return and restarting the entire process all over again.

Why do people complain about a three-hour baseball game, a four-hour football game or a six-hour final minute of a basketball game, but three five-hour blocks of bowling in a single day are treated as normal? What fan has 15 hours available to watch all that? And then watch it again the next day and the day after that?

In order to fix the problem, we first need to identify the problem. Having spoken with several current and former PBA players, a few common causes of unbelievably slow play come up:

Players Don’t Know the Cross

This is probably the most frequent explanation, particularly when inexperienced players are in the field. Bowlers who aren’t accustomed to yielding an entire pair in each direction sometimes get confused and don’t bowl when it’s their turn, which can then throw off the rotation several pairs left and right.

This kills a few seconds each time it happens, plus another few seconds when the guy on the adjacent pair takes time to yell at the offending bowler. For every 10 times this happens, we add about an extra minute to the block. A convenient concept to blame, but not the worst offender.

Players Know the Cross but Yield Anyway

Some players aren’t content with yielding one pair left and one pair right. Some will yield two or three pairs in either direction. Or, when tournament directors place dead pairs in between competition pairs in an effort to speed things up, players will still yield to the pairs beyond the dead pairs, rendering all efforts useless, and technically putting everyone into violation of the shot clock.

This offense is way more prevalent than players not knowing the cross, and also more egregious, as it’s intentional, whether conscious or not.

Players Chastise Players for Adhering to the Rules

On occasion, a player won’t yield do a dead pair and will bowl regardless of whether someone is bowling two pairs left or right. This is well within the rules, but somehow offends another player, who then takes time to yell at the non-offending offender, probably adding even more time to the block than if the original player would’ve played by the unwritten rules rather than the real rules, ultimately slowing the pace despite good intentions.

Thumb Grips

This idea has been finding hold of late, but I’m not convinced. The ability to remove a thumb grip from one ball and put it in another is tremendous for players, allowing them to keep the same feel on every ball they throw. Unfortunately, if a player doesn’t strike, he has to wait for his ball to come back so he can get the thumb grip, remove it and place it into his spare ball. The actual switching of the interchangeable grips doesn’t take long at all, but waiting for the ball can.

However, we can’t blame that wait period, because the ball almost always returns to the player before the bowlers left and right have yielded, stalled, reset and yielded again. Thus, as long as the player removes and replaces his grip immediately upon receiving the ball, the time it takes to do so is inconsequential. Thumb grips will only become the issue if we can eliminate all the other simultaneous delays that currently cover for the grips’ culpability.

So, what’s the overall cause? All these things and more. Thankfully, there’s an easy solution: more games.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, October, 2018

As I’ve stated on record many times, bowling vernacular is one of the most fascinating, engrossing and enthralling subsets of speech in existence. Being able to combine sign language that isn’t sign language with English that isn’t English and somehow be understood by another bowler is astonishing.

Thus, I’m not suggesting we rid our language of absurd terms like “skid-flippy” or “bouncy,” as those are crucial to being able to talk over the heads of laymen, which is part of the fun of having a vernacular.

However, there are certain terms we use too often in bowling that need to go away. Here are three:

“Regular Tour”

When people say “regular tour,” they’re referring to the PBA Tour, but it is one of the worst possible ways to refer to the absolute pinnacle of the sport. There is nothing regular about the most exclusive, talent-laden, lucrative and entertaining bowling tour in the world.

Calling the highest level of the game “regular” condemns it to being normal, when it is as far from normal as possible. A normal bowler doesn’t average 220 on a flat pattern, or have companies paying him to wear their logos, or get to compete on national television for a five-figure payday on multiple occasions. A normal bowler doesn’t get a private bathroom. Fine, so that part’s the same.

Maybe we call it the regular tour to distinguish between the PBA50 Tour and the PBA Regional Tour, but that’s a redundant distinction, as the “50” and “Regional” designations already exist to differentiate those tours from the PBA Tour, which stands on its own as the best in all of bowling. It is anything but regular.

“Unfair”

Yes, everything is unfair. That’s a fact. But maybe if we stop acknowledging it, it’ll go away? Yeah, that guy got a better cross, and the lefties have the berries this week (unless you’re a lefty, in which case the lanes are walled for the righties), and one more game (or one fewer game) would’ve hurt the guy ahead of you and helped you, and you hit all the tough lanes while everyone else hit all the easy ones, and the other squad was stacked and yours was loaded with donks, and it rained before you bowled, and the temperature fluctuated wildly, and so on.

These are all indisputable facts. But, since they’re true for everyone, and because nothing in life is fair—for proof, consider magicians, who exploit this truth to the extent that they ask the audience if something is fair, only to use that distraction to be devilishly deceitful—let’s accept the odds are always against us, no matter what, and any semblance of success we can find deserves to be lauded forever. Or turned into a rabbit.

“One Shot at a Time”

The winner won because he “took it one shot at a time,” but when asked to elaborate on what specifically the bowler focused on in those several dozen one shots, he’ll tell you he stayed in the moment and trusted the process, further confusing the issue.

Yes, we understand it means the bowlers aren’t dwelling on what already happened and aren’t thinking ahead to what might happen, and this is probably good advice for young bowlers. But we’re not at a coaching clinic; we’re on the approach with the winner after a major championship and we want to hear what about those one shots, or those moments, or that process, made that player so much better than the rest of the field, most of whom were also taking it one shot at a time while staying in the moment and trusting the process.

The strategy itself is fine, and I’m not saying bowlers should give it up. However, we should henceforth assume everyone knows about the one-shot-at-a-time strategy, and skip past it into the compelling part. It’s much more enthralling to hear about even one of those shots than to hear that each one of them was, in fact, an individual shot.

I know I’m not The Process, but trust me.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, September, 2018

Since the dawn of spheres, people have been debating about how best to put on a bowling tournament. Should the focus be on fairness to the competitors? Entertainment for the fans? Some kind of science-defying solution that is both fair and entertaining?

Yes, let’s try that last thing.

First, we need to exclude the good players so everyone else has a chance. Except no fans want to watch lesser players bowl, and we need fans to generate sponsorships, and advertisers don’t spend money on fairness. Maybe, instead, we need to exclude the lesser players, because they “play the lanes wrong” and get in the way of the good players. But, without the lesser players, whose bank accounts are the good players going to raid?

Of course, we can’t separate the two groups, because that would put a clear line between professionals and amateurs, which would ruin bowling’s storied tradition of the infinitely blurred line we all cherish so much.

Looks like we need to open the field to everyone, but make sure all players—from the greatest player who ever lived to the lowliest schlub—have an exactly equal chance to win.

That may not seem fair to the best players, but their ability—which is already unfairly higher than that of the lesser players—should balance out any issues.

To maintain integrity, we need to start with a lot of qualifying games. Let’s go with 10 eight-game blocks, totaling 80 qualifying games. If we’re truly being fair, it should be an infinite number of games, because there will always be someone a thousand pins out of the cut who is sure he could’ve made it if only given eight more games, but if we stop at 80, we’re going to almost always guarantee the best players will be at the top and still have a little bit of hand flesh remaining.

Now that we’ve separated the best players from the rest of the field, we need to make sure everyone makes the cut anyway, because it would be unfair if someone who bowled worse than someone else didn’t advance.

In order to give everyone a chance, we either need to give the players down in the field an opportunity to add pins artificially, or we need to strip the top players of the impressive pinfalls they earned during qualifying, rendering all 80 games utterly meaningless.

Unfortunately, if we make all the players drop their totals and start over in a shorter block, we’ve given a player who trailed by 35,000 pins a chance to defeat a guy who set the all-time 80-game pinfall record. Even an Epsilon-Plus can see that’s not fair. Instead, maybe we should add a match-play round and give players a reward (in the form of 30 pins, perhaps) for winning a match. This adds importance to head-to-head competition, turning the players into competitive athletes and instantly adding entertainment value. Unfortunately, this may reduce fairness as the match-play matrix might randomly determine a slightly more favorable schedule for one player over another.

At the professional level, reduced fairness is necessary, as ongoing high-dollar bowling can’t exist without the coveted added money from advertisers. At the non-professional level in which little, if any, added money is involved, we can weight the format entirely toward fairness, as it doesn’t matter if the event is contested in front of an audience of zero or six billion.

Of course, this means the best bowlers are subject to the least fairness, but have a chance at the most money, whereas the rest of the bowlers get more fairness and less money, but at least they have a nice way to spend a weekend and don’t have to wear slacks.

And that, bowling fans, is the perfect bowling format.

“But,” interrupts a reader, “your alleged perfect bowling format is incomprehensible, incomplete and hasn’t even been fully explained due to multiple tangents and contingencies.”

That’s a fair point.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, August, 2018

Early in the morning, as the dew still glistens atop the surrounding farm land, pins are already crashing inside the bowling center. Professional bowlers move from lane to lane within a designated range, trying every bowling ball in their armoire-sized roller bags, hurling shots in all directions without care for the actual pinfall, as scores won’t matter for another 40 minutes or so. This is pre-practice practice. Fans settle in behind their favorite bowlers, excited for the full day of bowling ahead of them.

Meanwhile, the competition pairs outside the designated range have been oiled but remain vacant, settling themselves for the competition to come. The calm before the Storm, Roto Grip, 900 Global, Motiv, Brunswick, DV8, Ebonite, Columbia 300, Hammer and Track.

Over a crackling PA system, we hear the golden tones of the tournament director: “Players, hold up on your practice; it’s time to start practice.”

The players carefully pack their rolling closets with bowling balls and wheel everything to the competition pairs.

Fans, who had already settled in, had their breakfast sandwiches delivered to their spots and taken one bite, meaning their hands are greasy enough for any movement to be inconvenient, wonder why their once-prime seats are now completely useless. Frantically, they pack up their programs, purses, coffees, sandwiches and napkins, then bolt to the previously vacant pairs, clamoring to get a great seat for the second time prior to 8 a.m. that day.

Pre-practice practice was nice for the players, allowing them to warm up, test a couple strategic options, and get ready to play, but now, it counts.

Well, no, it still doesn’t count, but it means a little more as they get an additional 15 minutes of practice on what will be their starting lanes. The practice shots they roll now can actually have an impact on the real shots they might eventually roll in the first game of competition.

With eight full games of qualifying ahead of them (followed by a quick break and then eight more games), it’s amazing to witness the endurance of these human beings who have voluntarily added an entire hour of bowling to their already-scheduled 10 hours for the day.

“Players, you have two minutes of practice remaining,” announces the tournament director, who adds, “except for those of you on 19 and 20, who will get an additional five minutes due to a breakdown.”

Of all the practice, perhaps the best practice is the our-lanes-broke-down-during-practice practice.

For the uninitiated, there’s no skipping procedure during pre-practice practice nor during real practice. Bowlers don’t have to yield to anything or anyone, don’t even require full racks and can all bowl at exactly the same time if they want. Once competition starts, though, the one-pair courtesy rule comes into play. Yield one pair left, one pair right, bowl.

Thus, the players on 19 and 20, who have been pre-practice practicing for a half hour, plus an additional 10 minutes of real practice, going as quickly as they want (or can) to get as many shots in as possible, suddenly have to yield to the competition while continuing to practice, convoluting the timing of both the competitors and the practicers.

Everyone is thrown off, especially Barry, the fan who, in a well-meaning gesture, inevitably spilled his ketchup-smothered hash browns all over his clean white shirt when he ran to the front counter to inform someone the scores weren’t working on 19 and 20.

After all this, we get to another staple at every bowling tournament: the fifth-frame conversation between the announcers, talking about how they’re surprised the scores are so low after the players got 15 minutes of practice on their pairs. And if that doesn’t make you want to stick around for game two (when the players score better every time for some reason), nothing will.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, July, 2018

Recently, the incomparable Aaron Smith, who spends a significant amount of his life living in strange cities for the benefit of the thousands of people who bowl the USBC Open Championships every year, posted a photo to Instagram of a bowling ball in a trash can at the Oncenter in Syracuse, this year’s strange city.

Presumably, someone didn’t bowl well, blamed the ball, and left it in the garbage. Aaron (he’s letting me call him Aaron for the purposes of this column he doesn’t know I’m writing) captured this particular moment, but we all know it’s just one of many moments like it. Discarding equipment—often in hilarious ways—is a large part of bowling’s storied history.

A ball in the trash is relatively tame. Bowling equipment has been chucked in large bodies of water, heaved off buildings, kicked into oblivion with disdain, sawed into pieces and rendered utterly useless in any number of other drastic and elaborate ways.

When these things happen (if you’re not the one doing them), the first instinct is to feel sympathy for the ball. Why is it being so unceremoniously cast aside? Being an inanimate object, it certainly didn’t maliciously decide to change its axis tilt or fabricate friction where there wasn’t any. It simply rolled where and as the bowler rolled it. How can it be the ball’s fault?

That should be the end of the argument, as it is absolutely correct with no fallacies.

However, taking that side of the debate implies a bad performance is the player’s fault rather than the ball’s fault, which is a direct contradiction of where we place the credit when a player performs well.

When someone wins a tournament, the first question asked of that person is, invariably, “What ball did you throw?”

Never mind the fact we don’t like the word “throw” when we should be saying “roll,” except in the case of this very specific question that applies directly to the object being propelled.

What we almost never consider is this: the answer to that question is often the same for the champion as it is for the red leader. The person who won used the same ball as the person who was 14,000,000 pins behind. So how can the ball possibly get all the credit for one person’s win and avoid all the blame for the other guy’s loss? And what about the dozens of people who also used that ball and finished between first and last?

Either the ball needs all the credit and all the blame, or none of the credit and none of the blame.

We need to be careful, though, because evidence like this implies that skill, experience, perseverance and execution factor in to who defeats whom in a bowling tournament; that one person might be better at bowling than another.

It is entirely possible the trashed ball wasn’t working as the bowler hoped. Maybe it wasn’t clean through the heads, failed to pick up in the midlane and didn’t hit at all in the back end. Maybe it didn’t want to get off the hand smoothly, creating inconsistency and reliability. Maybe it simply didn’t match up well.

Those are all legitimate possibilities, but the best players figure out what isn’t working and do something to change it. And, since this awful ball might be the perfect ball in a different bowling center on a different oil pattern next week, wouldn’t it make more sense to put the ball back in one’s bag rather than send it to the dump? Maybe. Or, maybe there is some validity to throwing (rolling?) a ball in the rubbish. If such an act brings any sort of calm to a bowler, his mental state conceivably improves, at which point he can roll his next ball with more precision. That, or his next ball will meet a far nastier fate than the one now smothered in nacho cheese.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, June, 2018

Bruce just opened in the ninth, leaving a 204 on the board, giving him a maximum of 234 if he strikes out in the 10^th.

His opponent, Karl, has 168 in the seventh with a spare in the eighth. Karl strikes in the ninth, giving him a maximum of 248, a pace of 238 and a current score of 198.

“That one’s over,” says someone. Could be an announcer, a fan, a ball rep, another player, anyone in the building who knows how to keep score. And, in most cases, yes, it’s effectively over as the two bowlers will probably finish their games in such a way that Karl wins.

But if we have to use phrases like “in most cases” and “probably,” how can it be over?

It’s not over. Karl can gutter twice in the 10^th for 198, allowing Bruce to win on the bench. Karl can double, then go through the face for a five count, giving Bruce a chance to strike out and win.

Or, in an even more absurd scenario, Karl can leave—and whiff—a 10-pin, giving him a final score of 216, and then the person who originally said “It’s over” in Karl’s favor can say the same for Bruce, which is also completely false as Bruce still needs a mark. Even in saying he needs a mark, we’re not fully accurate, as Bruce actually needs the mark plus three additional pins (two to tie).

Bowling rules dictate a match isn’t over until each player has bowled 10 complete frames, but bowling scoring is such that the winner can be unequivocally decided prior to the completion of those frames. The problem is too many people declaring winners before the outcome is actually certain. Until the score of one player is completely out of reach of the score of the other, no one in the building should be declaring anything over.

Perhaps this personal pet peeve appears petty, with the only possible harm coming from someone being wrong, but others can be affected by this as well.

False claims of matches being over hurt fans, who may be watching a particular match until they hear someone they perceive to be an expert say it’s over. The fans leave to go watch a different match, assuming the result of the prior match was already decided, and then later are confused when they find out the perceived winner actually lost. And, in the case of an unexpected finish like that, it was almost certainly more compelling than wherever the fans went, cheating them out of quality entertainment.

It can hurt players, either in the match or whose standing in the tournament may be impacted by the match. If a player is behind and assumes it’s over when it really isn’t, will he be as motivated to trust the process and take it one shot at a time for his last frame or two? If a player is ahead and assumes victory, can he lapse and make the immense blunder everyone has already assumed he won’t make?

It can hurt directors and producers for broadcasts and webcasts, who rely on their analysts to discuss scores. Generally, when a match is over, a director will strike it from his mind and focus on the matches still being decided. If an analyst makes the wrong call on something being over and the director trusts the analyst, then the fans at home end up missing the end of a match that was still meaningful.

The only time anyone should proclaim a match is over is when one player’s current score, assuming gutter balls for every remaining shot, is higher than the opponent’s maximum possible score from that point in the game.

By the way, Karl struck out in the 10^th and shut out Bruce. It was over after all.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, May, 2018

There are only a few standby locations for company parties: (1) the office itself, after hours, during which employees awkwardly gravitate toward their own desks, never feeling comfortable as they sip spiked punch in their cubicles with a doubly worrisome confusion of either working at night or drinking during the day, neither of which are actually happening; (2) a restaurant, during which employees wish they were out with their families instead of their bosses; (3) a boss’s house, during which employees resent having to be nice to the boss’s screeching kids, who are a part of the shindig for some reason; (4) a bowling center, where everyone has to participate in an activity at which they’re not good, but at least it’s during business hours.

There aren’t many locations in the world that require specific footwear, let alone require it to those who don’t possess their own. Ski resorts require boots and skis, skating rinks require skates and shoe advertisements require models to wear the shoes being advertised, but none of those activities are as prominent to society as rental shoes in a bowling center.

If you walk onto a ski slope with your own boots and skis, you’re in the majority. When you step onto the ice in your own skates, you’re in the majority (and, if you’re a teen, you’re likely on a date, laughing at your never-skated-before ladyfriend because that’s what you think courting is, not yet figuring out you’ve yet to achieve a second date with anyone). When you walk into a bowling center during open play with your own shoes, all eyes turn to you.

It’s a safe assumption anyone reading this publication possesses his or her own bowling shoes. We’re the people who walk into the company bowling party with a 48-ball roller and handheld shoes, immediately intimidating everyone else, especially the two guys in accounting fighting over the last pair of size-10 rentals.

Then, the pressure is on to actually perform up to our aura. These people expect us to strike every time, and that’s the burden we put on ourselves, even if the real truth is all we have to do is hook the ball a little and everyone will think we’re pros, no matter what our score.

To us, though, the score is paramount. This is our chance to be Guy Who Bowled 250 around the office for the rest of time, which is way better than our existing moniker of Guy Who Stole Cheryl’s Cheerios Twice.

If we’re not striking, we have to mitigate the situation. We must corner someone—preferably the office gossip leader—and explain how the lanes haven’t been oiled in weeks (with an inevitable explanation of lane oil and that yes, it does exist), and even a plastic ball is hooking off the lane (throwing in a meticulously detailed sidebar on cover-stock composition, of course), and if only we’d brought our 50-ball roller, we’d have the extra two we needed to combat these abhorrent conditions.

To further make our point, we have to explain our strategy for the rest of the party. Since we only have 48 rocks from which to choose, we’re going to have to ball down, move left, increase our speed and try to keep the ball right enough long enough to hit the appropriate breakpoint, then hope we carry, which is no guarantee because there’s something off about these pins.

No one will understand, especially as they watch Ted from IT alternate between incompetently dropping the ball three feet short of the foul line and inadvertently launching the ball 20 feet through the air, striking every time.

Ted becomes Guy Who Bowled 250, and we become Guy Who Has His Own Shoes But Isn’t as Good as Ted. The next day, we quit our jobs, throw our bowling equipment in the river and move to Switzerland to take up skiing.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, April, 2018

One of the most important homonyms (or homographs, if you want to get extra picky) in bowling is “approach.” It can refer to the actual area in front of the foul line on which bowlers stand prior to rolling their shots, as in, “This squad is three hours behind schedule because everybody is standing on the approach yielding to no one.” Or, it can refer to a bowler’s stride toward the foul line, such as, “Finally, someone took it upon himself to make his approach and get this squad moving again.”

With all that out of the way, let’s approach the issue of humidity affecting the approach to the point it hinders a bowler’s approach.

Invariably, when the weather is particularly nasty outside a bowling tournament, someone will proclaim it as “Great bowling weather.” This is a good statement in that it allows strangers to have a friendly, albeit substance-free, exchange. Even if it only raises their spirits a tiny bit, it’s worth it, as the world needs more friendly moments.

However, taken literally, “Great bowling weather” (and its similar safe supply, “I’m glad bowling is an indoor sport”) implies the game is immune from the elements. Weather does whatever it wants, but while that may impact golf or baseball, bowling is unaffected.

Not true, obviously. What happens outside drastically influences what happens inside. And, when we say “inside,” we not only mean inside the bowling center, but also inside the bowlers’ heads.

A Tacky Approach

Synthetic approaches, with their small, shallow pores, can’t absorb much of anything, which is why you shouldn’t bowl during the day in August when don’t-even-know-what-a-positive-axis-point-is-but-still-fun-loving kids are spilling their soda and candy all over the place. When it rained the night before, or is raining right now, or might rain within a day or two, humidity collects on top of the approach, making it stickier than usual.

In this case, don’t be surprised to see a lot of practice slides (one of the greatly underrated aspects of the sport) stop short. If you’re a bowler, make sure you have your slickest sole pads ready.

A Slick Approach

Has it been remarkably dry? Cold? The opposite will happen. The same way you constantly need to add and remove thumb tape based on how the weather and other conditions affect the size of your thumb, you need to change your approach to your approach on the approach based on what the weather is doing to the slipperiness of the approach, the redundancy of which, I hope, is beyond reproach.

In this case, you may want to wear rubber-soled athletic shoes to prevent yourself from hilariously gliding onto the lane. Obviously, that is an exaggeration, as you should always wear bowling shoes when bowling, unless of course you’re participating in a televised celebrity exhibition.

A Paranoid Approach

We can look at forecasts, but we can’t be certain about the weather until it’s actually happening. We can look at previous lane analysis, topographical maps and oil-pattern graphs, but we can’t be certain about the lane conditions until we actually roll a ball.

The only thing about which a bowler can be certain is the weather outside will change the conditions inside to the advantage of every single person in the building except him. He will be at a distinct disadvantage and face insurmountable odds. Everyone else will have everything exactly as they like it, meaning all they have to do is show up and they’ll make the cut.

When he makes the cut, though, it’s because he overcame all obstacles, battled an unfriendly approach, navigated an oddly changing oil pattern and pured every single shot. Then, the weather changes again overnight, to the advantage of everyone but him, and he finishes 20th.