We have a lot of silly awards at our weekly bowling league that is called DUMBO. What this acronym stands for is disputed among members but mostly it was a forced word that we had to fit words into it in order for it to work. It began as Danang Underground Men's Bowling Organization but over time it has evolved into a number of things. I think it now stands for Danang Underground Mental Bowling Organization but it doesn't really matter.
The awards are looking a bit dated because they are all cheap pieces of shit that we ordered online
We have a total of 6 awards including women and men's championship belts which are determined on a weekly basis, the tag-team medals that are defended every week, the "Gobbler" which is an award for getting 3 strikes in a row and can change hands at any time, and then there are the all-time highest scores which get reset for a number of reasons.
Currently the all-time highest men's score is 221 and the all-time highest women's score is 172
We were a little lost when it came to these awards because there aren't a lot of options when you are looking for non-trophy awards for bowling. The men's awards is clearly for soccer / football or a type of bowling that will injure you very quickly and get you kicked out of the lanes.
The women's high-score medal is blank and this was only because we wanted to be able to tell them apart easily since most of us are a bunch of morons.
For a seasoned bowler, 221 is not a particularly good score but there are a lot of things that are holding us back here in Da Nang, Vietnam. For one thing, bowling is not taken as seriously here as it is in other countries, especially USA, Canada, and Australia.
Bowling alleys in Asia tend to be additions to shopping malls and most of the people that come to them don't really know much about the game at all. That is to say that aside from a few rare instances, most of the people in the bowling alley, including most of our members, spend an awful lot of time with their ball in the gutter.
The lanes are not well-maintained and the oiling of the lanes themselves is something that varies wildly from day-to-day. If you don't bowl with a curve, this probably wont affect you very much but for those of us that know how to do the curve, your ability to hit pins is going to be very different from day-to-day.
Also, the shoes at the lanes here are probably the original pairs they purchased when they first opened the lanes 20+ years ago. They are falling apart. The bowling balls themselves are very low quality and as far as we can tell it isn't very easy to find a pro-shop to get your own ball made.
Having these things available would probably increase all of our scores quite a bit but we aren't going to fuss about it since it costs around $1 a game to play here. Try to accomplish that back in the west, it isn't going to happen unless you go back in time to the 80's and attend mid-day during the week.
It is extremely rare that any of us break the 200 barrier and only 4 members have ever done it in DUMBO at all. I'm happy to say that I am one of them but it has been many moons since I held the top score position. The best I have ever bowled in DUMBO is 203 and the best I have ever bowled in my life is 235.
I know this is a long-shot but if you happen to find yourself in Da Nang on a Thursday you can find our group on the top floor of Lotte Mart (there's only one in town) and look for the giant group of foreigners around 11am each week. We should be pretty easy to spot.