My rise to the top of the ranks in our local bowling league took a turn for the amazing in the past month. I, the founder, and 4 time champion of the league (one of which was defended for 9 weeks in a row) was in a real slump and actually bowled a league game of 83 points, which was my worst league score ever. That week resulted in me rightfully being relegated from the premiere league for the first time since the tier system was introduced.
Then on a day that I was playing to get promoted back to the premiere league something snapped in my head and all of a sudden I was bowling well again. I didn't really TRY to make this happen, it just kind of happened. To this day I don't even know what adjustment I made in order to make this happen but it just happened. I dominated that game and won by around 200 points in a 3-game series. Then, by dumb luck I was selected by the randomizer app to face the current overall champion the following week. I was not looking forward to this and had resigned myself to defeat before the match even began. I think it was actually because I wasn't stressed about winning because I thought I had no chance of winning that I managed to actually win. Later I would speak to a lot of people in the league about who they thought was going to win and no one had chosen me for victory. I was not insulted by this because I didn't choose me for victory either.
The following week I had to defend my belt against the overall best average score holder in the league and once again, I chose him to win. I ended up bowling the best 3-game set of my entire life and beat this dominant guy by over 150 points. It seemed as though things had changed for me. When it came time to choose who I would face next in the randomizer app, it just happened to land on the guy that I took the championship from in the first place. This is the toughest 3 weeks of title games that ANYONE has ever faced in our league. So how did it work out?
The game started out in a fantastic manner with my opponent scoring an expected spare on the first frame. The people were watching from all around to see if my magic was still going to exist and at first it seemed as though it was going to because I pulled off a strike on my very first ball. I was kind of hopeful from that point forward that things were going to continue like this for the rest of the game.
Unfortunately, not everything can be a strike but I do have a bit of an advantage because I bowl with a right to left curve. For people that bowl straight they have to have pinpoint accuracy hitting the pins just between the 1 and 3 pins, which is a very small window of opportunity. When you bowl with a curve, you can actually miss and still hit a "sweet spot."
src
When you approach from the right with the ball moving left in a curve it is of course ideal to hit the 1/3 pocket, however, more often than not I do a "swipe" along the front of the pins causing a "wave" of sorts that throws all the pins to the right and this results in a strike very often as well provided that you hit the 1 pin. This is called a "Brooklyn Strike" and I manage to make it a little bit more entertaining by shouting out "Brooklyn" right before the ball hits the pins. It's always kind of exciting because I am the only person in our league that actually can get these.
My opponent bowls with a right to left curve as well but his is less profound. He also throws the ball nearly half of the way to the pins whereas I basically lie it down just over the foul line and because my ball spends more time on the actual wood, this is why my spin is more profound. He also rolls a heavier ball.
So things were close between us in the first game with our final scores looking like this
135 (me) to 143 (not me)
IF you are keeping track this is well below what I had done the week before where I bowled a 172 in game one. My opponent was not doing well either and we agreed that both of us were bowling like crap with his crap being slightly less crap than mine. We were both getting very unlucky on our first rolls where we would hit the pins in what appeared to be a perfect manner, but one or two pins just refused to go down. This ended up being my weak point of the day because while my opponent has a 90% single-pin pickup rate on the 2nd ball. I, on the other hand, was doing something like 75%. You gotta pick up those single pin spares and this was frustrating me immensely when i would miss by just inches.
The second game was still close with both of us doing much better in the 2nd game
159 (me) to 170 (not me)
Now if you are keeping track my opponent has technically won 2 of the 3 games but that is not how the scoring works. The winner is determined by the overall score of all 3 games so the fact that he is at this point is 19 points ahead of me. This difference can be made up in a single frame so it is not anything to get worked up about. I just needed to pull off a stellar game in game 3.
Unfortunately for me, I continued to miss my spare pickups and I even did something that I have not done in a really long time: I rolled a gutter ball on my first ball. I don't really know what happened, the ball just kind of got away from me on my approach but I also was seriously overthinking the game at this point. This overthinking is what got me in trouble in the first place and why my overall game started to fail really badly weeks ago.
It also didn't help very much that in the middle of game three my opponent got a turkey
src
This excellence on his part made me do well also because I did a spare - strike - strike as well but at that point the damage was already done. By the time we got to frame 8 his victory was a mathematical certainty.
game 3 score
138 (me) to 172 (not me)
So the overall score was
432 (me) to 485 (not me)
Therefore my reign of terror is over, for now. Even though these scores of mine were nowhere near as good as I had done in the past 2 weeks it was still well above the numbers I was putting up a month ago so I don't think this is the last time we are going to see me with championship gold raised above my head. I look forward to getting another crack at it in the future and I think that the other bowlers are now genuinely afraid of getting matched up against me. I will return to the regular lanes next week competing as a common bowler with no awards to his name.
I always say that a bad day of losing at the lanes is still a lot better than a good day of doing most anything else, at least here in Vietnam. I hold no grudge against the guy who beat me and am happy that he did well. In the end I defeated myself more than he defeated me because you gotta put up good numbers and I simply didn't manage to do that. I guess lightning can't strike 3 weeks in a row for me.
In the meantime I am the only bowler in the current year to defeat top 3 members of our league in back to back weeks. I am currently ranked at number 4 out of the 30 people in our league. In the coming weeks, I hope to jump to number 3 which if I can keep this form or at least stick somewhat close to it, should be very possible.