Category: The One Board

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, April, 2021

Of the many disparate dichotomies unique to the bowling industry, perhaps the question of when it’s okay to tell anyone what happened is the most compelling. Specifically, we’re talking about televised stepladder finals that bring ire from all directions. These are live sporting events, airing as they happen on national television, with someone having the gall to announce the winner after the winner wins.

We want bowling to be treated with the same reverence and respect as football and yet we demand bowling results be kept secret until an undetermined time because we may not have seen them yet. If we’re to claim bowling should get as much time on the highlight shows as basketball, how can we also mandate not to be given any information on the bowling?

Sports anchor: “And the Hornets beat the Kings, 127-126. In bowling, the Tournament of Champions happened. Check back with us in a month or so after you’ve had time to watch the DVR.”

The spoiling of sporting events is a classic sitcom plot. Someone, usually the dolt father, has to miss the big game, often because his overbearing wife makes him go to the ballet. The father tapes the game. His kids or the babysitter (often the wacky neighbor or tool-show sidekick) watch the game live. When the father gets home, his only goal in life is not to hear any information about the game. No radio reports, no TV highlights, no accounts from the babysitter. Then, after apologizing to his wife for behaving like an oaf and resolving their conflict, just as the father sits down to watch the game, someone comes out and spoils the result. The father is disappointed but he deserves it due to his loutish behavior.

Most people can relate to such a thing, and it’s similar to what bowling fans feel in a sense. In a more real sense, it’s not the same thing at all. Someone trying to avoid the results of a sporting event knows to avoid the radio, TV, internet and human interaction because those results are going to be out there somewhere. In bowling, we expect bowling itself to hide the results from the world until we’re ready for them. But then we also complain if bowling tapes a show in advance for later airing, because we believe sporting events should air live.

Essentially: “I’ll only watch if it’s live, but if it’s live, I’m going to record it to watch later.”

In fact, FOX is spoiling the event as they’re airing it. Not only are they showing Dick Allen strike in the 10^th yet again, but they’re telling us the score. FOX needs to figure out a way to air the event without telling us what happened until the precise moment we want to know what happened and before we’re upset about not yet knowing what happened.

“That’s disappointing, I was going to watch game seven of the World Series of Baseball but I accidentally saw the score on my Twitter feed,” one might say. One might then follow it with, “The PBA is awful because they announced the results of the World Series of Bowling on their own website that I voluntarily accessed.”

Apparently, there is no right time to share bowling results with the world. Share them as they happen and you are a spoiling scumbag. Share them a week later and it’s old news. Share them in the middle of the week and you look lazy.

This is ludicrous. It’s a professional sport.

If we want bowling to be treated like other sports, we need to put the onus on ourselves. If we have to miss a telecast or the first six hours of a qualifying round, it’s up to us to avoid the results until we can watch our DVR or stare at the archives online. Chastising the media for covering our sport will lead to less media coverage, which will lead to less money, which will lead to more taped shows, which will lead to more demand for live shows so we can tape them. And our ball hasn’t stored enough energy for all that.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, March, 2021

Every so often, something happens that makes an otherwise disinterested general public take notice of a particular niche. This niche is usually known in some sense to all and is beloved and fully understood by a dedicated minority, but seems kind of weird, complicated and even standoffish to regular humans.

Bowling has infiltrated mainstream society on several occasions, but while such an instance may increase broad interest and inspire someone to ask you who you think you are and then assert he is, it rarely translates into an influx of new fans debating which shoe sole they should be using when the humidity is higher than 60%.

In recent days, the niche claiming mainstream fame has been the stock market. In particular, GameStop (GME).

GameStop, whose name itself is an anathema to bowling as we all know there is never a reason to stop a game, rose from around $18 to nearly $500 per share in January alone, despite nothing in the company’s earnings or operations as a brick-and-mortar store in an anti-brick-and-mortar world suggesting it was worth anywhere near that much (or even worth $18; it was barely $2.50 in April of 2020).

Why?

A group of people on the internet challenged hedge fund managers who were shorting GME stock.

If you’re like most, such a premise is fascinating, but in order to fully understand it, you need to know what a hedge fund is, what shorting a stock is and how a group of people on the internet can use this information to create a short squeeze on hedge fund managers and temporarily make GameStop into a Fortune 500 company.

Even this is an oversimplified description and doesn’t get into the countermeasures employed by the hedge funds or the trading restrictions put in place by several companies. Still, beginning with the basics allows us to intrigue people enough that we can then get into the details with some level of knowledge.

In this way, the GME craze directly correlates with bowling. The premise—rolling a ball and trying to knock down as many pins as possible—is fascinating, which is why 67 million people bowl at least once every year (well, maybe not last year) in the United States alone. But to truly understand the game at its highest level can be an overwhelming, mind-boggling pursuit for a beginner.

If a stock-market expert tried to explain what’s going on with GME by first launching into the minutiae of hedge funds, shorts, short squeezes and other intricately detailed non-intuitive topics without explaining what those things actually are, novices would be overwhelmed before they had a chance to truly care about what’s going on.

Likewise, if we start with detailed explanations on oil breakdown (even though a beginner may not know there is oil at all), cover stocks (even though a beginner just wants to know where he can get a ball with a rose in it), rev rates (what?), axis tilts (you lost me), traffic (on the way to the bowling alley?), topography (I’m no cartographer) and match-play matrices (my head hurts), we’ll invariably be greeted with glazed-over eyes and blank faces.

If we can learn one thing from the GME hoopla (aside from the obvious fact that even the Matrix of Fairness can’t prevent the big guys from winning), it’s that we need to be smarter about how we introduce people to bowling. We must teach that there is oil before we can dissect how the oil breaks down. Here’s a simple mnemonic device to help: oil before breakdown, except after C squad.

The whole enterprise of day trading is fascinating and yet, if one wants to take a genuine interest in it, one is confronted by an inordinately inaccessible pile of convoluted jargon relayed through an incomprehensible lexicon that no normal human being could possibly understand without first learning the basics.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to shed the asym and find a shinier cover with a stronger layout that, when crisp, will breeze through the heads and get to the spot without a skid-flippy reaction after a four-and-two move two frames after a zone change following a blower 7 on the uphill left lane, knowing I need the first two hits to even have a chance at seeing cashers round.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, February, 2021

According to olympic.org, there are at least 49 sports with a larger global appeal than bowling: breakdancing, surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing now among them. Bowling must be 50^th.

The recent announcement of these sports being added to the Olympics was undoubtedly great news for fans of those sports. For bowlers and bowling fans, it was merely four new items to add to the Sports to Resent List.

Calling out other sports for taking a spot bowling “should” have isn’t the right way to behave. It’s like the kid who didn’t make the basketball team in high school not content with simply being upset with himself or the coach, but also choosing to chastise another kid who made the team but “shouldn’t have.” No. That kid deserved to be on the bench and breaking deserves to be in the Olympics.

Instead of resenting the good fortune of these other sports, we can find optimism. Each one of them thrives on attributes taken from bowling. Eventually, the subliminal messages will get through and bowling will have its endless qualifying rounds broadcast at 2 a.m. by a perplexed, longing-for-winter Pierre McGuire.

Breakdancing will be called by its original name, breaking, and should be embraced by bowlers who have often taken inspiration from breaking. Whether in triumph or misery, bowlers have been collapsing to the approach for years, even if they exhibit very little movement once they land.

Breaking, with such a wide appeal that many people think it’s called breakdancing, will require constant explanation as to what we’re actually watching—sort of like an event using the World Bowling scoring system—and will also lead to confusing news crawls. “Breaking: Breaking breaker breaks records in Paris, waves break in Tahiti.”

Yes, surfing will take place 15,000 kilometers away, near the beaches of Tahiti. It’s hard to surf in the Rive Seine. This multiple-venue thing is also stolen from bowling, which has employed the tactic many times, notably holding the 2013 U.S. Open in three different bowling centers in Columbus and, although not originally planned this way, as recently as the 2020 World Series of Bowling that began in Las Vegas and concluded in Centreville, Virginia. Nor can we forget the ongoing PBA Players Championship.

Surfing, like skateboarding and sport climbing, will actually debut in Tokyo this summer, while breaking will have to wait until 2024. In Japanese, bowling (ボウリング or, using romaji, bōringu) is pronounced—not joking—“boring.” And what says bōringu more than the Olympics?

Skateboarding is arguably most famous for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, a videogame franchise almost as popular as Bowling by Jason Belmonte. At the recreational level, sport climbing is an accessible, fun, indoor athletic endeavor in which novices can rent or borrow equipment while they play. What familiar sport does that sound like?

We can resent these other sports taking up spots in the Olympics if we want, but in reality, bowling’s doing pretty well. 39 PBA Tour national telecasts in 2020 alone is more than breaking, surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing combined. Each of the four will get a few televised hours over two weeks during the Olympics and then we’ll completely forget about them until the next time they usurp bowling’s rightful spot in the Olympics.

While it’s not right to criticize the sports that are in the Olympics instead of bowling, we must admit it would be nice to have bowling join the Olympic lineup. Finally, we’d get to see the best players from around the world compete with each other.

Oh, they already do that? On a near-weekly basis? Well, that’s good news.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, January, 2021

In The One Board’s fifth annual year-start countup, we eschew the trope of the year-end countdown and instead guarantee* 21 bowling-related happenings for the year ahead. Excitement, zeal and optimism are in our near future.

*Based on number of entries

In The One Board’s fifth annual year-start countup, we look into the year ahead with optimism and zeal. As always, all 21 reasons to be excited for the upcoming year involve bowling.

1. Bowling confidently returns, albeit with some lingering uncertainty. This is an upgrade from the certain lack of confidence throughout the back nine frames of 2020.
2. Bowling centers defy directives from governors and bureaucrats, citing simple semantics. The directives tell bowling alleys to close, but bowling centers are not bowling alleys. If one is too ignorant to know the lexicon, one is likely too ignorant to know whether or not it’s a safe environment.
3. After witnessing the success of Ryan Ciminelli immediately following his retirement last year, several more bowlers announce their retirements in an effort to reenergize their careers.
4. It doesn’t work. They can’t beat Ciminelli.
5. Someone figures out the magic formula for when to post bowling results to the internet. Since posting the results immediately after the event—like every other sport in existence—is considered a spoiler and waiting any longer is considered irrelevant, the inventor of the magic formula is immediately inducted into every possible bowling Hall of Fame.
6. The announcement of this genius’ Hall of Fame election is posted at the wrong time, spoiling the irrelevant news.
7. The title match of every PBA major has either EJ Tackett or Anthony Simonsen—or both—in it, improving on their three-for-four performance in 2020. They each win at least one.
8. In addition to national events, regional events and non-champions regional events, the PBA adds retired-only regional events, held every Thursday, to the schedule.
9. Walter Ray Williams Jr. retires every Wednesday, wins every Thursday, unretires every Friday and wins a standard regional every Saturday.
10. Williams wins all-types title number 200 in June.
11. The world finally embraces the enthralling splendor of the deadwood clear. Players choreograph deadwood clears in advance and eventually replace NFL touchdown celebrations on highlight shows.
12. In an effort to prevent better players from having a skills-based advantage in a professional sport, bowlers are excited to learn of the new PBA60 Retired Non-Champions Living North of the 35^th Parallel division. Williams abdicates all his titles, retires and moves to Minnesota. He wins his first event.
13. Beef and Barnzy, still going strong even with the return of actual bowling requiring more of their time, perfectly predict the PBA League draft picks during their 43^rd mock draft.
14. Cashers round is officially renamed cashiers round in order to make things easier on autocorrect. Everyone qualifying within the top third of the field, plus the next eight retired players, makes the cut.
15. The PWBA returns after a one-year sabbatical. Its expanded schedule gives fans in more locations than ever an up-close glimpse of Shannon O’Keefe hoisting a trophy.
16. Yes, fans.
17. Bowlers Journal announces its All-American team full of non-Americans, then has to explain (1) it’s like collegiate All-American teams and (2) what a collegiate All-American team is and (3) why professional bowlers are likened to amateur college students.
18. PBA League players adopt an optimistic attitude about only getting to bowl two frames per game, realizing it gives them eight extra frames during which to complain about not having eight extra frames to bowl.
19. The USBC brings back patches, pleasing several dozen lifelong bowlers. A few hundred thousand kids, upon receiving their first patches, ask, “What do I do with this?”
20. Jason Belmonte wins his seventh career PBA Player of the Year Award, either tying Williams’ record or moving seven ahead of him, depending on the day of the week.
21. Qualifying, in a grandiose show of its indestructability, outlasts a global pandemic. Then adds more games.

Happy 2021, bowling fans and bowlers. Wishing you happiness, prosperity and quadruple your entry fee for last cash in the new year.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, December, 2020

Experts agree (except for those who don’t): the most important aspect of a bowling ball, especially at the highest levels of the game, is its surface. Whether the cover stock is reactive resin, urethane or plastic is obviously important, but more than that, it’s the precise surface of that surface that really matters.

A reactive-resin ball that comes out of the box with a 2,000-grit finish may be perfect for some bowlers in some conditions. In others, a bowler may want to use that same ball, but with a shinier finish (higher than 2,000 in this example) or a duller finish (lower than 2,000). In most cases, a ball with a shinier finish will hook later on the lane and a duller finish will hook sooner.

Intuitive so far.

To dull the cover, we want to add surface to the ball. In order to add surface, we must remove surface. Yes, in bowling, we refer to removing some of the surface from a bowling ball as adding surface to the bowling ball.

This process is why ball reps don’t own any clean jackets. Using sanding pads to scuff the bowling ball (the entire ball by rule, even though the track is the only part that touches the lane), the surface of the ball becomes duller. Although the shards and dust all over the ball rep and surrounding area make it clear surface has been removed, we now say the ball has more surface.

That’s great and still intuitive, but what do we achieve when we add surface by removing surface? We’re looking to find friction, specifically between the ball and the lane. The rougher the surface of the ball, the greater the potential for friction. Getting absurdly technical, but still intuitive, the higher a ball’s Ra value (no one knows what this stands for but it measures the height of the peaks and valleys on a ball’s surface; think the depth of treads on your car tires) and RS value (again, no one knows what this stands for or why RS is fully capitalized but Ra is half-capitalized, but it measures the distance between the peaks and valleys; think the distance between your tire treads), the rougher the surface of the ball and greater potential for friction.

Of course, physicists will tell us friction always exists when a bowling ball is in contact with a lane. From the shiniest ball on the most voluminous oil to the dullest ball on an outdoor lane in downtown Reno, there is always friction.

To appease the large number of physicists who subscribe to this publication, we should clarify: when we say we’re looking for friction, what we actually mean is we’re looking for more friction. Generally, we’re talking about finding friction at the end of the oil pattern or in parts of the pattern with less oil volume or even some spots broken down in the front and middle parts of the lane.

Sometimes, we want to find friction to use the friction and sometimes we want to find friction to avoid the friction. The latter case can lead to lofting, when we’re hurling the ball over the friction we don’t want, thus allowing us to get to the friction we do want, all the while creating a totally different kind of friction with anti-loft community.

Understanding what surface means to your bowling ball can have a profound impact on your game. If you can create the potential for more friction by adding surface to the bowling ball by removing surface from the bowling ball, and if you can consistently get your ball to the ideal break point where the desirable friction resides by avoiding the other parts of the lane where the detrimental friction lives, and if you trust the process and take it one shot at a time, you should be fine.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, November, 2020

It’s been a tumultuous year for bowling in every aspect, starting with the most fundamental: whether or not bowling centers are open at all. Without bowling centers, there’s no recreational, league, high school, collegiate or professional bowling. If people aren’t bowling, they’re not buying equipment, which to some is even harder to endure than not bowling. Plus, if we’re not paying sanction fees, we’re simultaneously deprived of being able to complain about the cost while also suggesting we pay an extra dollar to be passed directly to Jason Belmonte for some reason.

Still, it’s Thanksgiving month in the United States, Norfolk Island, Brazil, Liberia, the Netherlands and the Philippines, so it’s a good time to reflect on all we have rather than all we don’t. Residents of Canada, Grenada and St. Lucia have been ruminating on gratitude for a full month already, but that’s no reason for them to stop. Even if you’re from a country that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, you can still be grateful, just as you retain eligibility for the Bowlers Journal All-American Team.

Despite any troubles the sport has had this year, there are still plenty of things to appreciate, especially as many leagues have resumed in some capacity and the PBA has been on TV so much lately, showing us bowling still exists and the best players are still absurdly good at it.

Regarding the PBA telecasts, we all should be thankful for the reminder that constant crowd noise does not hinder the bowlers’ ability to focus, as we saw during PBA League, World Series of Bowling XI and PBA Playoffs competition. Before the world shut down, we packed the bowling centers with as many fans as we could under the easy-to-follow caveat that they were to be inert as statues and silent as Marcel Marceau. Now, we don’t let anyone in the building but instead pump crowd noise onto the lanes. By combining the best parts of these two scenarios—once we’re able to do so—perhaps we’ll have fans in the building making real sports noise during sporting events. As long as the fans don’t stop once they start or start once they stop, they shouldn’t have to worry about being berated by the professional athletes they paid to see.

Pro bowlers are thankful for the fans who, although not allowed in attendance at the events, continue to engage with the pros on social media, whether by liking a photo, asking what ball the pro is throwing or staring at daily bowler-hosted talk shows, (im)patiently waiting for the day they can once again attend A-Squad qualifying.

Likewise, fans are thankful for the bowlers who continue to generate content and interact, at least partially satiating the fans’ desire to watch competitive bowling.

Hematologists are thankful for PBA League competition. In the absence of high-fives, the players spent two hours every night smashing their forearms against their teammates’ forearms, saturating their bodies with deep, painful bruising. The hematologists are grateful for the uptick in business as well as the chance to meet some of their favorite players.

Non-American players are thankful for the athlete waivers that got them into the United States for the recent professional competition. The waivers assure us the players are trustworthy and healthy by virtue of possessing a very specific skill. We remain skeptical of their non-athlete neighbors. This makes sense, because no matter the situation in the world, we should always be wary of someone who doesn’t know how to get his ball to the spot.

As always, youth bowlers are simply thankful for bowling. They don’t yet know that the guaranteed first-place check in an amateur tournament is not guaranteed, nor that changes in humidity will benefit every bowler in the field except themselves, nor that pre-practice practice might be the difference between winning and losing. They just like to bowl. Take them bowling.

Happy Thanksgiving, bowling fans and bowlers.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, October, 2020

Typically, this is the time of year when league season would be several weeks old and excuses for why our averages are so low to start the season would be flying. Some bowlers would be struggling due to not having touched a ball since the end of the previous season. Others would have difficulty because they hadn’t yet gotten accustomed to the new six-ball arsenal they just bought. A similar group would be at a disadvantage because they didn’t have new six-ball arsenals and were doomed to compete with the relics released almost a month ago. Sandbaggers would prattle on about how “it’s just one of those nights” for five straight weeks.

This year, leagues are quite different, if they even exist, so it’s important we find at least a few familiar comforts to keep things semi-normal.

Thankfully, new bowling balls will continue to be released every few days, so anyone suffering from a ball-related calamity can get quick relief. The rusty folks who haven’t rolled a ball in months will start to get their swings back as the season progresses, so they’ll be fine. The sandbaggers, as they do every year, will find their games at just the right time to capture the league championship, so no worries there.

Other similarities, such as a patchless existence (unsubstantiated rumor: USBC purchased this very publication using the money from the bring-back-the-reward-patch fund), will make leagues feel as if nothing has changed.

We will still be able to claim the lanes are walled for our opponents and impossible for ourselves, a familiar certainty we can count on forever. In some leagues, opponents will bowl at separate times or on separate lanes (or both) in order to limit the number of people in the building, giving our accusations more merit while simultaneously becoming more baseless.

Gambling, side pots and other table games will probably stay the same. Once we get through the door and have been reminded we’re supposed to be terrified of each other, we’ll forget we’re terrified of each other and have fun. We might not high-five as much, but that’s a practice long overdue for removal from the game.

High-fiving in general has always been strange even if there’s nothing really wrong with it. But when college bowling decided every single act by any player, whether successful, unsuccessful or completely unrelated and irrelevant, required all members of the team to slap hands, things got out of… hand. The only reason high-fiving is done—at any level, even the pro level, where most of the guys and gals detest it—is because it’s done. By that twisted logic, if we stop doing it, we can continue not doing it because it’s no longer done.

However, if we’re afraid of the transfer of germs, a high-five is actually the safest option among the alternative congratulatory tactics. Consider a fist bump in which people, who wipe their noses with the backs of their fingers, touch other people’s similarly snot-ridden finger backs. Or, ponder the new craze: the elbow bump, a fantastical contrivance in which two people coughing and sneezing into their elbows have found a method to transfer those coughs and sneezes in a more polite way.

While these comforts will help us find familiar enjoyment for at least a few hours a week while we bowl our three games with no hope of receiving a reward patch, we will have to remain flexible enough to adapt and adjust to some of the changes required in order to have a league at all.

Of course, if we were flexible enough to be able to adapt and adjust to changes, our averages wouldn’t be so low. Maybe things will get better when the humidity drops.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, September, 2020

For millennia, people have been searching for the perfect bowling scoring pace. Despite the greatest efforts from the pharaohs to the Hapsburgs to the PBA King of Bowling, the perfect pace still eludes us. Averaging 250 is too high, but averaging 180 is too low. 200 is par? Not anymore, it isn’t. 210 to cash might be about right, unless too many—or too few—lefties make it.

When determining the scoring pace, we can’t go by the leader’s average. No matter whether the lanes are impossibly simple or simply impossible, the leader is often averaging 5-10 pins more than the next best player. Similarly, we can’t go by the red leader’s average, which is frequently 50-60 pins below the cut to match play, but we can’t go by the cut to match play because it’s possible to miss that cut and still get paid. Thus, the scoring pace that matters is the cash line.

Bowlers understand someone is going to lead by a lot and that’s fine. They understand someone is going to trail by a lot and that’s fine. But if they can count on a perfect scoring pace required to get paid, then it’s all up to each player to bowl that number and get paid. The only slight downside to this line of thinking is bowling tournaments are competition and thus always graded on a curve. Sometimes 205 gets a player into match play in 12^th and other times 205 misses the cut by hundreds of total pins.

If the scores are too high, the tournament becomes a carry contest, favoring power players and unfair to the shotmakers. How will the pros gain any respect from the general public when there’s no way to explain how hard it is to be that good?

When the scores are too low, qualifying somehow takes even longer than it usually does. It’s all about grinding and unfair to the power guys. How can the pros gain respect from the general public by rolling 180s when any schlub at home has bowled a 180 game at least once? Obviously, a 180 average on a flat pattern is much harder than a single 180 game by a random schlub, but the schlub doesn’t know that.

Sometimes, the leaderboard is full of lefties. It’s unfair they have no traffic over there and can do whatever they want with no repercussions. A single ball for the whole round? This is unfair to the righties.

Unless the lefties are shut out, that is. How can they ever build any miss room on such a brutal condition when there are so few of them and the righties are all carving a groove on their side and also cutting into the lefty laydown area? This is unfair to the lefties.

So, the perfect scoring pace is one that will allow power players, shotmakers, two-handers, one-handers, righthanders, lefthanders and Jason Belmonte to have an equal chance at all times. But what is that number? And does it matter? We can shut out lefties with a 250 pace or a 190 pace. We can handcuff shotmakers at the same time even though, by name and definition, they should be able to make shots. Lefthanded powerful shotmakers? Doomed. No-thumb one-handed shotmaking righties? Disqualified upon entry.

The only way to make it truly fair is to jam a flat pattern out there with oil that never moves. Doing so would also eliminate the need to adjust, taking away one of the most important and compelling parts of the game, though. This leaves us where we started: searching for the magic cash number.

Unfortunately, technology hasn’t yet caught up to the intricacies of bowling fairness, so even with the world’s top statisticians working on it, the perfect number that should be next to the last-cash player’s name at every event continues to evade us.

However, we can definitively say this: at any given event, the perfect scoring pace is the opposite of whatever the actual scoring pace is.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, August, 2020

In June, we saw the return of the PBA on FOX with two events that not only appealed to the usual bowling audience but also enthralled casual sports fans—those who will watch any sport even if they aren’t necessarily fans of that sport. Now, perhaps, many of them are becoming bowling fans.

For existing bowling fans, the shows were fun because they were different from what we usually see and we got to watch the players showcase their talents in new ways. Plus, we hadn’t seen any live bowling in three months, so we would’ve gladly watched anything with a sanding pad.

For casual sports fans—regular people who don’t yet know the delicate intricacies of changing axis tilt to generate a slightly different ball motion—these events showcased exactly what the general public assumes pro bowlers do all day: strike constantly. A casual sports fan can’t relate to a grind-it-out, clean 190 game, but he can relate to strikes.

In the Strike Derby, competitors were each given two minutes in which to roll as many strikes as possible. Because it’s bowling, of course we had to sit through a qualifying round, but once that was over, interest picked up as the players were seeded into a bracket. Again, given two minutes each, the player with the most strikes advanced.

With no time for pre-shot routines, thumb-tape adjustments or incessant balking, the bowlers—who, one hopes, were still able to trust the process among the rapidity—were thrust into a fast-paced strikefest that was as compelling to the fans as it was exhausting to the players. Two minutes is much longer than an average NHL shift, tennis rally or football play, and most of the players hadn’t been able to bowl at all in months. Also, consider a bowling ball weighs about three times as much as a hockey stick, hockey puck, tennis racket, tennis ball and non-Patriots football combined. This was strenuous.

With the oil getting pushed around with every shot, the lanes got considerably more difficult as the players grew more fatigued. Perhaps it’s important to note the oil pattern was not arduous, but it’s also important to note only moderate-to-high-level bowlers understand the game to that extent. Casual sports fans didn’t care about the oil moving around or whether the conditions were tough; they cared about seeing who would strike the most.

In the Summer Clash, each player bowled a 10^th frame in the first round and the lowest score was eliminated. From there, the remaining field rolled one shot each, low score eliminated, until we were down to one. It wasn’t quite as brisk as the Strike Derby but it was just as immediately understandable to new viewers.

In the Strike Derby, casual sports fans saw exactly what they see in every other sport: a result every few seconds (each attempted strike), every two minutes (a player’s final score) and every four minutes (the winner of the match). In the Clash, every shot from the second round on determined if someone was in or out.

Even better: viewers could comprehend on their own what needed to happen for a player to win. That’s right, the score was decipherable. If the first guy rolled 12 strikes in the Strike Derby, the next guy needed 13 to win. If the low score in the Summer Clash was 8, the rest of the bowlers needed 9 or better to advance. This is a bit more intuitive than a novice trying to figure out what’s going on by looking at a scoreboard full of slashes and exes that claims one guy trails by 8 but has a max score 12 pins higher than his opponent.

When sports fans are given fast-paced action, frequent results and a score they can figure out without straining themselves, sports fans are engrossed.

A first-time viewer didn’t know he was supposed to assume one of the no-thumb bowlers would win the Strike Derby, but that viewer had a lot of fun watching full-thumbed and not-slow-but-certainly-not-fast Kris Prather hoist the trophy. The same viewer had no clue Sean Rash wasn’t winning his 16^th career PBA Tour title in the Summer Clash, but the image of a happy person clutching a trophy is how sporting events end.

Bowling fans got a fun reintroduction to their favorite sport. Sports fans got an approachable, comprehensible inducement into becoming bowling fans. Soon enough, they’ll be clamoring for clean 190s, too.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, July, 2020

The PBA League draft generates intrigue and excitement every year, but especially this year. Not only is the PBA League one of the most recognizable and marketable aspects of the PBA to casual sports fans (that is, those who are not already ardent bowling fans), but the PBA League draft, held on May 17 on FloBowling, was the closest thing to live bowling coverage we’d seen since the PBA World Championship on FOX more than two months prior.

The luxury of being able to simultaneously appeal to the devoted bowling audience and mainstream sports-fan audience is something the PBA is rightly unwilling to pass up.

In general, sports fans like sports drafts, particularly when they already know who the players are. The NFL and NBA drafts are popular in large part because the draft picks feature incredibly famous college students preparing to enter the workforce and fans want to see in which cities those students will earn jobs. With the PBA League, the players are already professionals and thus well known among PBA fans, allowing for hearty debates, tough choices and inevitable snubs.

This year, the natural appeal of the draft even received some coverage from mainstream, non-bowling media in addition to the intense scrutiny and in-depth analysis on all the new bowlers-talking-to-bowlers internet shows.

On the much-heralded Beef & Barnzy Show, the most popular of the bunch, Stu Williams (Beef) and (&) Chris Barnes (Barnzy) hosted 70 or 80 mock drafts leading up to the real thing, probably as a covert act devised by Barnes to create as many scenarios as possible to plan for what his team could do for real, but this is merely speculation.

Finally, after all the hype, discussions, mock drafts and predictions, the real draft happened.

Over the course of two hours, including two commercial breaks that featured no commercials, FloBowling put on a virtual draft, no easy task for a long-distance production with every possible bowler, team manager and host on standby to be inserted into the show.

As expected, the draft was full of the unexpected. Players, fans and analysts were surprised, fascinated and even outraged for some reason at some of the choices.

Amleto Monacelli, manager of the expansion Las Vegas High Rollers, was either lauded or excoriated for his roster with very few public opinions falling between. Monacelli chose François Lavoie with the first overall pick, notably passing on Sean Rash, who went second overall to Marshall Holman’s expansion Brew City Ballers.

Had Rash been selected by Las Vegas, would we have seen an Eric Lindros situation? Had Monacelli accepted a proposed trade from Silver Lake—a tidbit gleaned from manager Mark Baker by bowling pundit Phil Brylow during a panel discussion during the Beef & Barnzy post-draft show—what would that have meant for both expansion teams?

We’re quickly veering into the hypothetical, which is another reason sports fans like sports drafts: second-guessing. Whom should that team have picked? Why didn’t they take this guy when he was still on the board? Who was snubbed?

With two new teams this season, it means 10 fewer snubs. Still, we could’ve added 40 new teams and there would still be snubs.

In any endeavor with limited availability, there will be exclusions. And, just like the high-school basketball team, it’s not enough to say who was snubbed; one must also point out the person who was unfairly chosen over the snub, thereby pseudo-snubbing the unsnubbed.

Beyond the snubs and the pseudo-snubbed unsnubbed, we have the most egregious snubs: the snubs snubbed from the these-guys-were-snubbed lists. We won’t mention them here as that would only create a new list of further snubs.

We will, however, revel in some good news in the world: the PBA returned to television in June and the PBA League will be in Portland this fall to determine which post-draft roster is truly the best.