Thursday - July 14, 2011

Losing Safely

We had a bad night at bowling. Phooey.

Bill has realized that his super cranker style of palming the ball is giving him tendinitis. Bowler’s forearm. I’ve had it myself. It means you’re doing things wrong, putting too much effort into throwing the ball. And he has; he’s been using an ancient plastic alley ball, but putting so many revs on it that it hooks like mad. So he’s decided to be a stroker, and is using a second hand ball he picked up for $10 and had drilled for him in the conventional style.

That’s kind of a mistake. If you go the stroker route and you want the ball to hook, or even flare, you want a fingertip layout. He’ll figure that out eventually. It makes a huge difference.

So he’s back to square one, learning the whole game over. And his scores reflect that. He went from throwing 170-230 games to throwing in the 90s. Ouch. That really annoyed him, no kidding, so he tried bowling harder to make things better. Rocketing the ball down the lane. Twisting his hand all around trying to get some action on the ball. Mistake. It was like looking into the past for me, as this is exactly what I went through several years ago. Ease off Bill. Slow down. Be gentle. Let the ball do the work. Get the ball out there, and turn your hand late. Turn your wrist, not your shoulder. Come through the ball, and “answer the phone”. Ha, I didn’t listen either when people told me that stuff. It took me a long time to embrace those methods. But gosh it was a shock to me when he over-rotated, go this thumb stuck in the ball, and threw it straight up in the air and into the gutter. I haven’t done that one in years.

The rest of us had a bad night too, hardly even making our averages.

We played the last place team, 4 raw beginners who roll in the very low 100s. We gave them a handicap that was far larger than the average of their best roller. They didn’t have a great night either, but we sucked worse, so they won. They took the first game by a dozen. They took the second game by 8 I think. We came back in the third game, and if we could have rallied and won by 20 or so we would have taken wood and split the night 4-3. But we couldn’t, even though I went 23 over on that round. We won game 3 by 4 pins but didn’t get wood, so we went 5-2 for the whole night.

The good news is that losing to this team won’t really change anything. An extra 5 points for them won’t hurt us, and we still have enough margin to hold on to first place for another week no matter what. Our poor showing will drop our averages a couple of points, which will only help us hand out less handicap to the next team we play. I’m hoping Bill quickly learns the laid back down-and-in stroker line and gets his numbers back where they belong. It’s more fun that way, and I don’t want him injuring himself trying to win a silly game. It’s not worth it. But I do want to win.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/14/2011 at 08:35 AM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
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