Bowling

This weekend, my family had the opportunity to show off our athletic prowess.

We try not to gloat about our stalwart agility. Not every family has the heritage of…

Oh, who’s kidding who? We went bowling.

My family doesn’t have some great bowling heritage. We are probably like most families. We bowl maybe once every 2-3 years and are lucky to leave without someone dropping a ball on their foot and breaking a toe.

Nobody is really ‘good’ at bowling. Well, I guess some people are but I have never encountered them at a bowling alley.

And you would think that’s where they would hang out.

My youngest son and his fiancé came down from Atlanta to attend the birthday party of my sweet little granddaughter. The party ended late afternoon and we were looking for something to do for an hour or so before dinner.

My son suggested bowling.

Why not? I hadn’t been bowling in years.

And there’s a good reason for that.

I am awful at it. Everyone I knew is awful at it.

So it sounded like fun.

Our crew rolled up into the bowling alley and got us a lane for an hour.
They put us between two other groups of folks out for a little Saturday night fun.

On our right were two teenage girls. Their bowling method consisted of walking to the edge of lane, sighing heavily and just dropping the ball.

The two looked like a judge had given them a choice between going bowling or going to prison.

It was a hard decision but they reluctantly chose bowling.

On the other side was a young family with a couple of kids. One maybe four. The other was in diapers and spent the entire hour using the vinyl sofa as a teething device.

It was halfway through their game and the four year was out-scouring his parents by double digits.

Right past them was a group of juvenile delinquents who were on a mission to see who could get the lowest score.

Every time one of their group was up, they purposely threw their ball into the gutter. And with every gutter ball, they laughed louder and louder.

Shaking my head and focusing back on our group’s progress, I noticed a sign near the scoreboard that read, ‘Bowling is the #1 participation sport in America.’

I looked around again and saw that this was probably true. Every lane was packed with people tossing balls halfway down the lane where they thudded and bounced off the polished wood like basketballs.

I listened to the constant clunk of the heavy balls dropping into gutters.

If bowling was so popular, why were so many of these people- including my own family- so lousy at it.

I knew the answer.

None of these people were serious about bowling.

They didn’t care if they threw a strike or broke a ceiling tile.

I don’t know how to bowl but I know how to recognize somebody who does.
I actually watched a couple of bowling tournaments on ESPN back during a period of my life when I must have lost the tv remote. And I noticed several things about professional bowlers that was missing from my fellow ball-tossers and gutter jockeys.

First, they never smile.

It doesn’t matter if the bowler threw a strike or Miss Venezuela just streaked naked across the lanes. Their expression always said one thing. Bowling is a serious game.

Also, how does that machine set those pins back up into a perfect triangle so fast?

Second, they don’t care how ugly bowling shoes are.

The rest of us hate those ugly shoes they make you wear. Not only is the design hideous, but you know the shoes you just put on your feet have been worn by approximately 499,312 people before the guy handed them to you and said, “Here, try these.”

If the show ‘This is Us’ does come true and we all die from a fungus, it will have originated from sharing bowling shoes.

But serious bowlers don’t care. Do you think they waste an hour making jokes about how ugly their shoes are, like the rest of us? No, they put on their ugly shoes and they start bowling.

And lastly, professional bowlers don’t spend more time eating nachos and drinking warm beer than they do actually bowling.

In fact, never have I seen a bowler on ESPN call for a time out while he wandered over to the snack bar and ordered a two chili dogs, a jumbo bag of Funyuns, three bags of Twizzlers (the red ones), a large bag of Skittles and a flimsy cardboard bowl filled with triangular corn chips covered with greasy, melted nacho cheese.

Not once.

That’s what the girls to our right had on their table. They wouldn’t have gotten those snacks in prison.

We were on the last frame of our game and I noticed that nobody in my family had broken a hundred. But one thing I did notice was the fact that despite our less than stellar abilities to knock down the pins, everyone seemed to be having a grand time.

And they were getting along.

There was a time when something as simple as taking our kids bowling would end in someone yelling, someone crying and maybe even a punch or two being thrown.

Years ago, when my sons were teenagers, I honestly thought I would come home and find one of them standing over the body of the other lying dead in a pool of blood.

That how serious their fighting got at times.

And here they were. All grown up. Laughing. Drinking warm beer. Eating the world’s worst nachos. Throwing gutter balls.

They had somehow survived those teenage years and now actually loved each other.

I may not be a great bowler- okay, I’m not a great bowler- but when it comes to how my kids turned out, I definitely threw a strike.