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Wednesday, Feb 08, 2012 - 01:01 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

The Other Bowl

...though the one with ridiculously expensive and controversial halftime ads and controversial and expensive halftime shows should be fairly obscure in sunny Singapore. No, the sport I'm going to talk about is the one we're actually rather good at.

While I'm not exactly new to bowling, having chucked about a fair few nine and ten pounders in my primary school days, and then after a long hiatus experimented with a backup ball style when the fad hit my class in Secondary Four, I had never had one to call my own.

Until today, that is. My cousin very generously passed me his four-year-old 15-pound Brunswick Red Zone [review], having moved on to a Roto Grip Defiant, together with a new see-saw towel and his dad's old bag; it had a small crack from an unkind ball return mechanism, but that won't come into contact with the lane, assuming the ball's thrown properly. Adds to the character too:




I still had to get it plugged and redrilled at the local pro shop for sixty bucks. The proprietor (an accomplished kegler himself) took a bunch of hand measurements, ranging from the extremely precise (sticking the thumb through a stencil, finding the best fit for the fingers on a template ball) to the deceptively casual (bending thumb to the side... what was that for?), and I can't complain about the final result, with the grip being comfortable (passing the Bowling For Dummies pencil test) and the plugged surface nearly indistinguishable from the original coverstock to my touch.

The hard part was to come, and I obligingly christened my newly customized ball into the gutter on my first throw. Things didn't improve for awhile - reading the theory is simple enough, but putting it all together is another matter altogether. At least I had the encouragement of knowing that I was properly equipped - from painful experience, attempting to hook a polyester house ball more than the bare minimum is an exercise in futility.

After a number of frames, I found some small success by reining in my expectations:


Whatever works...


This did bring me the first turkey (three consecutive strikes) that I can remember ever making (admittedly with some Brooklyn luck) by the second game, and it must be said about a heavy reactive ball that I can feel far more confident of getting all the pins down if I hit the head pin (still a very big if at this stage), as compared to 12-to-14 pound house balls going straight. It is also true that having a personalized grip literally takes pounds off the perceived weight.

But what is the whole point behind a big hook, other than the oohs and aahs? The standard answer would be that it allows the bowler to get a better angle into the pocket (the area between the head pin and one of the pins in the second row), and moreover makes a strike much more likely even if the entry isn't just so.

Given that no professional bowler I know of has a perfectly straight delivery, this reasoning seems to be true, but visit about any alley and you can see a dizzying array of styles on show - for example, while the textbook delivery releases the ball no more than inches above the ground, I've seen my fair share of bowlers lofting it at/dropping it from waist level, which somehow works for them.

One warning about hook shots is that I have observed them to leave nasty splits more than straight ones when they do miss, especially when there isn't much action or speed on the ball. Still, even the best of them can have very bad days.

So this should be yet another hobby making demands on my budget (which reminds me, I should pick up a cheap pair of shoes and avoid the rental fees). Well, at least I get a makeshift kettlebell out of it...



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