by Jesse Raub

On Tuesday, I tried to go bowling.  I had bought a new ball on my way back into town on Saturday, and was excited to try it out.  The fact that I had bowled three games on Saturday and two on Sunday didn’t seem like much of a deterrent, but couple them workout I did at the gym on Monday, and I was in no shape to bowl.

There are a few tricks to bowling with your own ball.  Steps you need to remember to throw a perfect strike ball.  The first is that you need to keep your wrist straight, so that it looks like you’re actually cupping the ball when you bring it down – in order to do this, you need to have your own ball drilled for your own hand.  Otherwise you’ll be squeezing the ball to keep from dropping it, and it’ll pull to the left.  If your wrist is straight, then the next thing to do is keep your arm perfectly straight as you begin your approach and swing the ball backwards.  You should bring the ball back as far as it can go, and let the weight of the ball carry your arm like a pendulum downwards, releasing the ball as close as you can to the lane’s surface and reaching out to the mark you’ve decided to use.  If you’ve lined your feet up and hit your mark on the lane, and already adjusted your speed based on oil conditions, you’ll throw a perfect strike everytime.

Tuesday I was a mess.  My wrist kept buckling, my arm would start shaking before I even attempted my approach, and I’d either throw the ball across my body, hooking it into the seven pin in the back left corner, or I’d turn my wrist and dump the ball into the right gutter.  I didn’t have enough strength left. I ended up bowling a 123 and a 125.

Sunday, I was a champ.  I bowled a 177 and a 175.  The best two games I’ve ever bowled back to back.  And it got me thinking about the science of bowling, and how it all applies to life.

Bowling is a science.  The wrist guards the pros use, the polyurethane balls designed to pick up the oil and go charging across the lane with massive hooks – it’s a lot of technical advances that even the playing field.  So long as you keep your wrist and arm straight and hit your mark.  Unlike most sports, bowling is a constant, and the variable is human error that causes any fluctuation.

And even if you know what you’re doing wrong, what you need to do to fix your wavering ball, if you don’t have the strength you can’t change a thing.  You just have to watch your ball roll down the alley lanes and quit before you embarrass yourself.

Life is full of excuses.  “I couldn’t do blank because of blank.”  Sometimes, though, in bowling, those excuses are valid.  And if you’ve got a clear head, a calm demeanor, and mild temper, you know that you can come back in a week and throw the ball just like you wanted to.  There are always second chances in bowling.  And third.  And fourth. A single game may end, but the series never stops. You’ve always got to think of your lifetime average.

“The Saddest Short Stories Never Written” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.