Tag: absurdity

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Everything You Learned in School Matters

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, August, 2016

There is one phrase most humans will utter at least once during their formative years, either as naïve grade schoolers, know-it-all middle schoolers or figured-out-life-in-its-entirety high schoolers: “I’ll never need this in real life.”

Whether it’s the location of the frog’s kidney, the proper use of a semicolon or the Pythagorean Theorem, some kid somewhere thinks it’s useless knowledge that will never appear in his life ever again beyond the test he’s going to fail next week.

Of course, this oblivious, self-important, insufferable degenerate is wrong. The proof, as with most things, is in bowling.



Math

From the simplest things—the pins are numbered, the lanes are numbered and the building’s address is in numbers—to the glorious insanity of a changes-with-every-shot cut line, bowling cannot exist as a sport without math.

In order to know who is leading the tournament, you need to know how to add scores through all 898 qualifying games as well as how to determine which cumulative total is larger than all others. To figure the score in relation to par, it’s imperative you can multiply 200 by the number of games and subtract that product from the sum of qualifying scores. What’s your average? The quotient of two sums will tell you. Finding the volume of your freshly drilled bowling ball is a simple matter of rudimentary calculus. It’s time to integrate, ladies and gentlemen.

The reason you can so quickly add by 19 and 29 these days is due in large part to all the math problems you solved as a youngster. And because you’re stubborn and won’t adjust after a trip 4.

Science

This ball, with this cover stock and this core design drilled with this layout held with this grip and rolled at this target at this speed, will get to the right spot on the lane to turn back toward the pins, making contact with the pocket at the precise angle that propels each of the pins into each of the other pins, resulting in an X on the board.

Even if most high-level bowlers can’t explain the actual amount of acceleration required to generate enough force with the ball to turn the potential energy of the inert pins into kinetic energy, especially considering the ever-changing coefficient of friction (30 bonus pins to anyone who can pronounce μ). But, if they miss by even a little, they know a two-and-one move will make all those complicated physics equations work out properly on the next shot. Inherent mastery is still mastery. Every time you ace a physics test, your bowling average goes up one pin.

Geography

If there is only one type of map you can recall from elementary cartography, it is undoubtedly a topographical map. Bowlers can’t get enough topography. Or they get too much. The only certainty is the topography on every lane is advantageous to every bowler except the one telling the story.

Beyond topography, a sense of direction is massively important as a competitive bowler. Without a modest comprehension of land and sea, your 94-hour drives stuffed into an SUV with 10 other bowlers and 368 bowling balls might seem unbearable.

Reading and Writing

It’s long been said without attribution that writing is an essential skill to every job on the planet. Haha ya rite lol but rly tho. In bowling, you need to be able to read to decipher what the asterisk next to the word “Guaranteed” on the entry form means (hint: it means “not guaranteed”).

If you lack even basic writing skills, you’ll never be able to label your equipment, keep notes on pair-to-pair tendencies or write eloquent complaint letters to the tournament director.

Capstone

Pay attention, kids. Everything you learn in school will some day and in some way help you improve your bowling game, which, as we all know, is the reason schools were originally invented.

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Shouts and Murmurs and Nonsequiturs

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, July, 2016

To cover the stepladder finals for an Xtra Frame event, I needed to put a camera two lanes to the right of the championship pair. The lane man stripped the lane in question and I strolled 45 feet of the synthetic with oil-free confidence. After setting up the camera, I sauntered back, only to be greeted by an irate fan on the approach. “You’re tracking oil all over these approaches! Someone could get hurt!” That fan shouldn’t have been on the approach in his street shoes.

If the if-people-only-understood-how-complicated-and-difficult-bowling-is argument had any validity, wouldn’t there be droves of fans lined up to watch accountants do taxes?

“It’s not a sport if you can drink while playing it.” – I.G. Norant

If you’re feeling like a winner winner, you might want to make a chicken dinner. Can’t find the meat tenderizer? Don’t fret. You have three dozen bowling pins in your basement for some reason. Put the chicken in a bag and whack it with a bowling pin. The best meat tenderizer you’ll ever use.


This is the first sentence in the history of writing. In an officially sanctioned magazine. With 43 letters in it. Following the sentence, “The best meat tenderizer you’ll ever use.”

“That’s a bad rack” is insulting and crude in certain company.

High-school students: when taking college entrance exams, use a freshly sharpened 2H pencil for essays. When you need to make check marks, make a pencil change to a 3H, sharpened a little farther up, to give you a more crisp look into the box. For bubbles, go back to the 2H, but put a tad more surface on it to help read the paper a little earlier. If you’re ever unsure of an answer, pencil down to a 6H and mark your second guess just enough to make a case for your intent if necessary.

I wonder what kind of racket Roger Federer is using.

The TSA will let you carry a bowling ball onto a plane, but they will not allow a bowling pin. Unsure whether they will allow a bowling anecdote.

I travel to Las Vegas often. The worst day to fly there is Friday, because the flight is full of irresponsible vacationers drinking heavily in preparation for a weekend of drinking heavily. Their rowdiness really detracts from my heavy drinking.

If you meet a pro bowler and tell him you loved his performance in a specific event, I guarantee he will know what he scored (and what ball he threw and how many pieces of thumb tape he used and whether or not it rained the night before) in the fourth frame of the third game of the second round of qualifying.

What if Dan MacLelland’s parents had named him Bruce? Would we call him Bruce “The Man” MacLelland?

Because you’re a hoarder, you still have every bowling-ball box that ever housed a glorious new rock. You also still have every VHS recording of MacGyver you diligently catalogued over the years. Good news: a standard bowling-ball box is the perfect size to fit 16 VHS tapes, which, if you recorded in EP, contain a total of 96 MacGyver episodes. Your movers will be so impressed with your incredible packing efficiency, they might even forgive you for the trip hazard you created by leaving a hundred bowling balls loose on the floor when you had those perfectly good boxes you could’ve used.

I don’t watch in-flight safety videos because they’re not live.

In summary, Kenny Waters’ dog, Maddie, is debatably the most popular living thing among fans on the PBA50 Tour. Sorry, myriad of Hall of Famers.

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The Oil Spill

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, June, 2016

You’re practicing one afternoon at your local bowling center in the middle of June. A 34-year-old father of two (a six-year-old boy and four-year-old girl, each of whom has a similarly aged and gendered friend along), who made the novel profession choice of schoolteacher and thus gets the prize of toting the kids around all summer, directs his group to a nearby lane and does his best to keep the youngsters from running off into other lanes, bowlers and pinsetters.

In the very first frame, Gord’s daughter’s friend defies all probabilities of physics and wedges her ball in the gutter, despite the bumpers being raised.


Naïve Gord, who is only doing his best to treat his kids and their friends to an afternoon of fun, does not know there is any difference between the surface of the approach and the surface of the lane.

His confident stride begins.

Of the four kids, maybe one (his daughter) is actually paying attention. The daughter’s friend is still crying and thus vaguely glancing through salty, distorted lenses. The two boys are beating each other with the licorice Gord had to buy in order to keep their screeching to a minimum.

And here he is—the adult, the infallible father who can and does solve every problem in these kids’ lives—about to give the children a rude awakening.

The blissful ignorance you sense around you is enviable. You almost wish you didn’t know what was going to happen. You might even feel a twinge of guilt for pulling your phone out and setting it to video.

Here he goes. One step over the line.

He’s still upright, but here comes his first oil-filled push-off step. His footing is no longer secure. He didn’t expect this, so a little panic shakes his entire body. His weight shifts wildly and, combined with his complete lack of trust in the floor beneath his rental shoes, his limbs flail.

In his head, he sees his life flashing before him. He doesn’t know how much it’s going to hurt or even where. His eyes convey a mixture of terror and sheer disdain, which amazingly has time to amply grow during his desperate floundering.

It’s scrambling time for this poor man, but you know it’s already over. He’s going to bite it, and our only hope now, as decent humans, is the most pain to come will be from embarrassment.

Gord’s heel tries to support his thrashing body by itself.

His daughter sobs. The friend’s sobbing escalates to howls. His son, face of shock and horror, bawls just as his friend thwaps him in the eye with his licorice, so now the kid is crying for two reasons. Their father is no longer the image of perfection. This is life-altering and confusing for the kids. They can’t get home to Mommy fast enough.

His footing is gone. Both feet are in the air with no hope of regaining traction or balance.

His only crime was being naïve, and now his highly embarrassing learning moment is going to live, probably with vertical orientation, on the Internet forever. As a teacher, he will have to deal with at least one of his students finding this video every single year for the rest of his career.

Which body part will hit first? A sure-to-be-lacerated elbow? A let’s-hope-not head? As much surface area as possible?

This innocent man, trying to give his kids a fun activity, is on his way to fleeting physical and everlasting emotional pain. His kids are going to laugh at him. They’re going to tell their mother all about it, and she’s going to laugh at him. The physical scars may heal eventually, but they’ll be the really noticeable, bumpy kind. And he’ll be covered in oil.

Splat. He is down.

The worst part: you’re bowling on that pair in league tonight, and now the fronts are completely gone.

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League Bowling’s Brand of Small Talk

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, May, 2016

In lauded sociologist Erving Goffman’s Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face to Face Behavior, he discusses the concept of safe supplies. Essentially, in order to avoid offending other humans during social interaction, we need to be able to maintain conversations with each other, often resorting to safe supplies, which are topics anyone can discuss to some extent. In real-world terms: small talk.


When we communicate using safe supplies, we talk about the weather, the local sports team, what we do for work or any other tired topic so generic and boring that the mere thought of being sucked into those doldrums of conversation keeps us from attending networking events or venturing into society in general.

Thankfully, bowling, which the late Goffman certainly should’ve spent time dissecting, has its own brand of safe supplies that deviates from those mind-numbing topics, and there is only one item with which we need to be familiar: one’s own bowling game.

We don’t care about the weather, we don’t realize there are other sports and we certainly don’t care what, if anything, anybody else does for a living. All we care about is our own bowling game and the perception that others also care.

Bowling’s safe supplies make socializing easy for all, particularly during league, as everyone has a personal bowling anecdote and there’s no actual listening required.

When you tell me about your game, whether good or bad, my only socially acceptable response is to tell you about my game. We do not have to listen to each other. We simply have to feign interest until it’s our turn to talk.

You start by describing every detail of your first game, in which a seventh-frame ringing 10 led to a 279, rather than simply telling me you shot 279. I act intrigued, awaiting my opening to say something self-deprecating about a 7 pin I flagged. My brief interjection gives us the social beat and fabricated laughter required before you get back into the detailed account of the eighth frame in which you caught a lucky break, making up for the good shot in the prior frame that didn’t strike. I might conjure a cliché, “It all evens out,” to which you will make some not-funny-at-all joke that causes both of us to explode in laughter. Thankfully, one of us will then be up to bowl, forcing a natural end to the conversation with neither of us being offended.

Whether due to obliviousness or selfishness (the latter likely a catalyst for the former), we bowlers are stuck in our own games to the extent we don’t even realize how our teammates or opponents are doing, despite sharing the lanes with them for hours.

Have you ever had a bad night on the lanes and remarked to a teammate how poorly you were doing, only to eventually realize your teammate was performing much worse than you were? You were so unaware of your surroundings that by insulting your own game, you further insulted your teammate’s even-more-abysmal performance. Thankfully, your teammate was likely not listening and therefore is not mad at you.

Because of this infallible social contract, every bowler can talk to every other bowler. No matter what inane tidbit I share with you about my all-important game, your response is going to be an equally inane tidbit about your all-important game. You don’t care what I say. I don’t care what you say. We’re simply fabricating a conversation to add a semi-social aspect to our weekly bowling session.

We might even become friends. Don’t worry, though. We’ll only have to see each other once a week.

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Bowler Profiling: A Very Real Fake Problem

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, March, 2016

Bowling bags are sacred ground for bowlers. The list of people who can acceptably invade such hallowed personal space is shorter than the list of people who can listen to a bowling anecdote without interrupting with a very loosely related tale of their own.

“I picked the 7-10 off the 6-7-10. Greatest worst moment of my life.”

“Oh yeah? That reminds me of the fourth time I shot 300.”

But we digress, as often happens when rudely interrupted, even if by oneself.


Back to bowling bags. The actual bowler, obviously, is permitted access to his or her own bag. He or she may allow a trusted friend, coach or ball rep in there, but only for a specific purpose. Bowlers are right to be protective of their personal space. That’s why they’re smart to only let their closest, personal friends anywhere near it. Well, them and the complete strangers from the Transportation Security Administration, of course.

Anyone who has flown with a bowling ball within the United States has received a notice of baggage inspection. The 3.625” x 8.5” bilingual notifications of warrantless search litter the squad rooms at PBA Tour events. Some bowlers no longer bother removing them. Stacks of 20 or more avisos de inspección de equipaje rest in the bottom of bags, soaking up oil and fraying with wear. Soon, players won’t need towels anymore, leading to intense interactions on television: “Do not put your TSA notice of baggage inspection on my bowling ball.”

Ignoring anyone’s stance on whether or not the TSA should exist, the fact is it does, so one has to concede if they’re going to search a piece of luggage, it makes sense to look at one that holds three spherical, heavy objects with scary core shapes. Add the bevel tools, inexplicable rolls of tape scraps, weird-colored potions, what looks to be a fruit zester if not a cheese grater, stacks of circular sandpaper and brushes with hard metal wires, and the untrained eye would be horrified.

However, TSA agents have trained eyes. They’re supposed to, anyway. Thus, it shouldn’t take long to determine a bowling bag, which already has 27 TSA notices in it and is draped in priority tags (indicating a frequent traveler), probably doesn’t need to be inspected again.

It all leads to an under-reported social problem: bowler profiling. Why are bowlers constantly scrutinized and searched while non-bowlers can do whatever they want? Some IT consultant can fly around the country with a simple carry-on bag while bowlers, who make their livings with their hands, have to risk devastating paper cuts every time they find yet another TSA notice in their luggage.

Profiling starts before the TSA even gets involved. Airlines, hotels and car-rental agencies all mandate bowler profiling by their employees. Random businessman? Have a nice flight. Bowler? You owe another $300 for these bags, which may or may not arrive on time because they’re heavy and thus will be the last bags anyone on our crew touches. And by the way, when you land, all the SUVs will be rented by seafood moguls with no luggage, so you and your four friends and 48 bowling balls will somehow have to devise and execute a clown act in a compact car. Then, when you get to the hotel, the bellman is going to pretend he doesn’t see you, rushing to help the one guy with a single jacket on a hanger rather than load up your as-light-as-you-could-make-them three-ball rollers.

When will it stop? When will bowlers start being treated fairly?

That is a question even Confucius couldn’t fathom pondering.

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Of Routines and Superstitions

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, February, 2016

Superstitions, by definition and if believed as having any real effect on anything, are asinine. Most people understand this, which is why bowlers refer to ridiculous superstitions as routines. This lets us continue our admittedly absurd quirks while not having to stigmatize ourselves as superstitious.

And, in many cases, these things really are routines.


“I always get to the bowling center exactly 90 minutes before my block because it’s my routine. Then I have precisely one cup of coffee because it’s my routine. Then I relieve myself in the third urinal from the left, unless there are only two urinals, in which case I walk past both of them, then backward to the one on the right, because it’s my routine.”

Perfectly normal stuff.

There are two main types of superstitions. The indisputably ineffective brand is indirect, in which a fan of a sports team might refuse to wash his socks for the duration of his favorite team’s playoff run. What happens when people (even those of us who are so adamant against superstitions we deliberately do everything different every time as irrefutable proof and simultaneous ironic disproof of our belief in superstitions) start to believe these things? Let’s investigate the spectacle of the black cloud.

Black Cloud: Supernatural phenomenon of one person’s innocuous act having a legitimate impact on another person’s athletic performance.

Some people believe if they even approach or notice a bowler on the front eight, for example, there is no chance that bowler will get the ninth strike. “I black clouded him,” those people will say.

Others don’t believe a black cloud is present until the potential feat is specifically mentioned. But to what degree? Can a fan or announcer say, “He’s on the front eight” without black clouding the competitor? Or does that fan or announcer have to explicitly say “He has a chance at a 300 game” or “He’s perfect through eight” to qualify as black clouding the poor schlub?

Further, if you mention a bowler has the first eight strikes, and that bowler strikes in the ninth but not in the 10th, does that still count as you black clouding him? Or did his strike in the ninth absolve you of all responsibility, thereby slamming the blame onto some other jerk who walked up after hearing about the front nine?

Or, and I realize this is reaching, can it be possible that throwing nine strikes in a row is difficult, and therefore the likelihood of not striking increases the longer the string of strikes goes?

Indirect superstitions pose more questions than they answer. So let’s move on.

Direct superstitions involve an actual player performing some absurd act such as refusing to wash his socks. Clean socks, dirty socks or no socks, that player has a direct impact on the game, and therefore, we can’t discount his or her superstition quite so quickly.

A fan thinking his unwashed, smelly, yellowed, disgusting lucky t-shirt helps his favorite bowler is undeniably irrational. But when the player feels better about his chances while wearing his own microbe farm of a t-shirt under his jersey, our perception of absurdity subsides, even if only a little.

This is the beauty of bowling superstitions. Very rarely does someone actually believe the restaurant in which he dined the day before had anything to do with him bowling well. And yet, because nothing went wrong, what’s the harm in going back to that same restaurant and ordering the same meal at the same table in the same chair with the same waiter? Superstitions breed comfort. Whatever he did felt right, and although he knows he could bowl just as well without having done it, he has confidence that doing it again will not diminish his chances on the lanes.

What’s a simpler way of putting that? Oh yeah: routine.

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Speaking Well About Bowling Good

This first installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, January, 2016

We’ve all heard it. Most of us have said it. Some of us say it with a twinge of uneasiness, but not enough to stop ourselves. It’s time we eliminate the apprehension and, once and for all, solve the unsolvable.

No, we’re not going to divide by zero, travel through time or throw a perfect game on the Bear pattern without a single Brooklyn. We’re going to answer the question that’s plagued bowling for ages: are you bowling good or bowling well?


In reality, most of us are doing neither. We’re bowling badly. But that’s another debate for another time, even if grammar enthusiasts may have noticed the answer right here in this paragraph.

The distinction between bowling good and bowling well is not the same as between doing good and doing well. Both latter phrases can be correct, but have totally different meanings. You’re either doing good things or doing things well. If you’re a true saint, you’re doing good things well.

Grammatically speaking, the answer is clear and has no room for deviation. You are bowling well. To use boring jargon most American students don’t realize exists until they take a foreign-language class in high school, when you want to describe how you’re bowling (a verb), you need to use an adverb, as that is the part of speech that modifies the verb. “Well” can be used as an adverb, whereas “Good” is most commonly used as an adjective, which is a word that describes a noun. That is, you are a good bowler, which is why it’s no surprise to see you bowling well.

It’s definitive, unrelenting and absolute: according to grammar, “Bowling well” is the proper phrase.

To end the discussion here, though, would slap not just the entire bowling community in the face, but would also throw shade (new bowling-ball name?) at most sports, particularly when played at the highest levels.

The prevalence of “bowling good” is not because bowlers as a whole don’t know what’s grammatically correct, but because it has become ingrained in the culture of the sport, as it also has in so many others. And, if you spend enough time with the best players in the world, you will notice many of them will use the phrase “bowling well” in normal conversation, but in wishing each other well prior to bowling a block, they will almost always say, “Bowl good.”

There’s a certain camaraderie to telling someone to bowl good prior to a block. It shows you’re part of the community of bowlers. You know the vernacular. And, perhaps most important, you’re wishing someone else well, even if you secretly believe the absolute opposite.

Encouragement is positive in almost all cases (the exception being participation trophies—“Hey, kid, congratulations on your mom having a driver’s license and getting you to the game every week”), and if “Bowl good” can supply encouragement from bowler to bowler, then its grammatical fallacies have to carry less weight.

So, then, what’s the answer? We were going to solve the unsolvable here, right? You can say either phrase to a bowler and not be chastised, although you sound less like an outsider if you choose well, which is to say you choose good. Bowling isn’t confusing at all.

The hybrid answer that can get us out of this mess is fairly simple, and despite not being as definitive as we’d like, might please grammarians and bowlers alike. In normal conversation, we will say, “Bowl well,” but in wishing others well, we will say, “Bowl good,” and we will not chastise anyone for accidentally deviating from this decree.

If that’s not decisive enough for you, the only true answer to this question is to stop wishing people well. Or good. Wish them nothing. Prior to a block, simply say to everyone you pass, “Bowl.”

Or, do what I do and avoid the question altogether. “Have fun” seems to work.

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Please Do Not Do Anything

Originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, October, 2015

Bowling is the true American pastime. Baseball is great, yes, but you don’t need seventeen friends to participate in bowling (in fact, you can get by with zero friends), and you don’t need to own any equipment. Just show up to a bowling center, give somebody some money, grab a bacteria-ridden ball, put on a pair of charmingly disgusting shoes and start hurling heavy spheres.

If society is not ready to proclaim bowling the official national pastime yet, we can at least confidently say it is by far the most accessible sport. Right?


Why, then, does the seemingly most accessible sport require the largest concentration of common-sense rules and advisories to be posted everywhere? If bowling is truly as simple as throwing a ball toward some pins and hoping to knock them down, and anyone of any age can do it, why do people need to be told to remove their wet shoes, avoid stepping past the foul line and resist the overwhelming urge to put their dishes in the garbage?

When you’re a twice-a-year bowler who walks into a bowling center, you are probably doing so with the intent to have fun rather than the intent to be told you’re not allowed to do anything at all.

I’ve never been on a hockey rink with a sign posted in the trapezoid area behind the net informing players “Please Do Not Touch the Puck in This Area if You Are a Goaltender.” Nor have I seen “Please Do Not Step Past the Line of Scrimmage” on any football field.

The answer, as usual in bowling: it’s complicated. If you’ve ever tried to explain to a novice the many nuances of high-level bowling, you know how difficult it is. Something you take for granted (for example, breaking down the oil on the lanes), cannot be explained to the beginner unless you first convince him there is, in fact, oil on the lanes.

Please do not wear bowling shoes outside. Please do not wear street shoes inside. Please do not leave bowling equipment on lockers. Please do not place hands inside ball return. Please do not throw away pizza trays. Please do not sit on the grill. Please do not place tobacco products in urinals. Please do not continue this increasingly ridiculous but completely accurate (except this one) list.

How many people actually sat on that grill before somebody had to post a sign? How much tobacco had to be scraped out of the urinals to warrant an instructive piece of paper above said urinals?

It would be nice if society as a whole understood or respected the concept of not throwing away dishes and silverware. Or not shoving limbs into moving mechanical parts (haven’t people seen Kingpin?). Or not leaving a mess of bowling equipment out in the open.

Instead, due to sheer idiocy and/or opportunistic lawsuits, bowling centers have to protect themselves from these things, thereby transforming the world’s most accessible sport into the world’s most intricately regulated activity. And, of course, this absurd dichotomy is perfect for bowling. Poetic, even.

So, next time you go bowling, get something to eat (but please do not take food into the bowlers’ area). Enjoy some time with friends (but please do not participate in horse play). Put on your bowling shoes (but please do not wear them outside). Bowl an entire game (but please contact the control desk to start the next game). Most of all, have fun (but please do not have fun).