Bowling: A Pretty Good Time
Martha is out of town for a few weeks so my son, Elijah, and I have the house to ourselves. We’ve been staying indoors most of the time because to go out of doors in Savannah at this time of year is to invite meteorological discomfort of a kind that is anathema to my Jewish love of climate control. Even so, one can only allow oneself to be swaddled in the joys of air conditioning for so long before going stir crazy. This past Sunday, I needed to get out of the house so I asked Elijah if he wanted to go bowling.
“Bowling?” he asked, with what sounded to my ear like extreme dubiousness, as if I had just suggested a mountaineering exposition up Kilimanjaro.
Bowling is one of those puzzling American pastimes that, like cow tipping, has somehow survived the Industrial Age, the Nuclear Age, and now The Information Age. Actually, although we Yanks think of bowling as a quintessentially American activity, the game goes back thousands of years. The Egyptians bowled. Romans bowled. The English went nuts for bowling, so much so that strictures had to put on it. A 1541 law “prohibited workers from bowling except on Christmas.” That law was only repealed three hundred years later.
In addition to setting into motion the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther is also credited with standardizing the number of bowling pins at nine. History have judged one event more “important” than the other, but historians don’t bowl.
Nine pin bowling made its way to the Americas as early as 1609 with the first Dutch explorers. As the nation grew, so did the popularity of the sport, which resulted in several states banning it because Americans love banning things that people enjoy. Ten pin bowling shows up in the early 19th century, with various taverns and such installing “ten pin alleys” as an attraction to drum up more business. The first dedicated American “bowling alley” opened in 1908 in Milwaukee, and we’ve been rollin’ balls ever since.
The frustrating thing about bowling is that it looks so easy. How hard can it be to knock down a bunch of lightweight bowling pins with a moderately heavy ball? The answer: kind of hard. At least with any consistency. Elijah and I both struggled during our first game at our local bowling center* to keep the damned ball out of the gutter. But then, he or I would occasionally get a strike or pick up a spare and we would think, I’m getting the hang out of this.
Friends, we were not getting the hang of anything.
I was the one who suggested we gamble on our matches, a friendly wager between two gentlemen bowlers. Five bucks a game, but we decided not to count the first game as it was clear to us both that we needed a little warming up.
Game one was quite terrible on both of our ends. Neither of us could get much going. Please don’t misunderstood. I kicked his ass, but only because Elijah is an even worse bowler than me. Game two, I have to say, was equally bad. As it turns out, we didn’t need to warm up at all. We’re just legitimately terrible at bowling.
The game is harder than it ought to be. There’s no mystery about where the pins are located. You can see them. They’re not very far away. The surface one needs to negotiate to reach those pins is not only flat, it’s waxy. They have done everything they can to make the processional from foul line to one pin as smooth and frictionless as possible. Any competent adult ought to bowl a strike every single time. And yet, fuck me is it hard to bowl a strike.
By the eighth frame of the second game, Elijah had a good six or seven pins on me. That may not sound like a lot, but when you’re averaging about three pins per frame, it might have been an insurmountable lead had he not faltered, and had not picked up a fortuitous late spare to seal my victory.
At this point, I would like to note that my arm hurt. Friends, two games of bowling wore me out. That hardly seemed right. After all, I’m a handsome young man! Why should I be exhausted after barely exerting myself? Could it be a hemoglobin deficiency or am I, in fact, just an old puss? Coincidentally, I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday for a non-bowling related issue and, medically speaking, I am in fact, just an old puss.
I was ready to head out after two games but Elijah asked for a third. What was I going to do? Refuse my only son a chance at redemption? Nay. We bowled a third, double-or-nothing match. After the twenty previous frames, I felt I had learned enough technique to make a couple adjustments that, I thought, might produce better results.
And did they?
Comedically, of course, I should say they did not. Comedically, I should have failed to make any improvement whatsoever in my miserable bowling abilities. In reality, though, I went on a tear, starting with a spare in the second frame, followed by four strikes in a row, eventually leading to what I believe is my highest-scoring game ever, a cool 160. Not an amazing score for a competent bowler. But for me? Amazing. Did I defeat my boy by over a hundred pins? I would never embarrass him in public by saying that I did.
He reached into his wallet and extracted a ten-dollar bill, which I felt guilty about taking. Not so guilty that I didn’t take it, but guilty nonetheless, a feel eased somewhat when I went to pay. It was like fifty bucks! Fifty bucks to bowl three games?
I’m sorry, but bowling should never cost more than a total of $7.50.
It doesn’t matter how many people bowl, how many games, or whether or not you rent shoes. One should never spend more than $7.50 at a bowling center, not including shitty pizza and beer. Well, we didn’t have any shitty pizza or beer and it still set me back one Ulysses. S. Grant. (Minus the ten dollars I won from my son, who is a truly terrible bowler.)
The next day, I woke up sore. My right buttock, both hamstrings, and my left forearm are all in varying degrees of upset. I am sore from bowling, which just sounds so pathetic. I’m also noticing a slight shoulder soreness as well as a potential hemoglobin deficiency. To be clear, I do not have a hemoglobin deficiency at all, but earlier in the piece I enjoyed typing “hemoglobin” so much that I thought I should look for another opportunity to use the word.
All in all, bowling was a pretty good time. If you’re looking for a fun family that’s way more expensive than it ought to be, I recommend bowling. It’s sort of fun, kind of gives you some exercise, and you’ll feel like a real hero if you manage, like I did, to humiliate your children.
*When I worked on the television show Ed, which takes place in a bowling alley, I was invited to come do a signing at the big annual bowling convention in Columbus, Ohio or some such city that is similar to Columbus, Ohio. At that convention, I learned that the preferred industry nomenclature for places people gather to bowl is bowling center, not bowling alley because of an alley’s association with garbage and cats. Alleys just sound less reputable than centers. Out of respect for the fine American bowling industry, I refer to them now as “centers.” Also: because it’s kind of funny.
Shitty pizza and shittier beer are essential to consistently shitty bowling scores. I should know...I own a bowling shirt.
At the risk of exposing myself as someone who consistently never gets the joke, and as someone who has been married to a lifelong dairy farmer for 43 years, everyone does know that cow tipping is not a thing right? Not once did anyone anywhere ever “tip a cow” unless it had 3 broken legs or was near death at the time.