Why To Watch Bowling

When I was in eighth grade I joined the Junior High Intramural Bowling League with two friends. We did it largely to torment Mrs. Brown, our dour gym teacher who seemed to think it was her job to turn anything active into a joyless exercise.

Our team wrestled for two evenings with what to name ourselves, finally settling on “The Gutter Gals.” It reflected our aspirations. We wanted to irritate Mrs. Brown. For The Gutter Gals, bowling was one long winter joke that we took pleasure in mocking. It was in no way cool.

Fifteen years later I was driving north to my home in Montana and had stopped in Salt Lake City to fill my car with gas. I struck up a conversation with Mel, the fellow across the gas pump from me, and found out he was a professional bowler and he and his girlfriend Milly were headed to a tournament in Las Vegas. He invited me to come. He’d get me a Guest Pass. I could sit with Milly right behind his lane.

Although Las Vegas was south and I was headed north, I knew I would never again be offered a Guest Pass to a Professional Bowling Tournament. I got out my Rand McNally and headed south. Six hours later I was at the South Point Bowling Plaza and Round 1 of a week-long tournament.

I could smell the fevered competition as I walked in the door. Bowlers had on their khaki pants and collared shirts, their names emblazoned on the back. Mel’s last name was ADAMS. They all looked fit. They all focused inward. Attendants had the corner of their towels tucked into their back pockets. Everybody’s hair was parted.

I was a wreck. All I wanted, as if all I had ever wanted, was for Mel to win.

I watched him, erect posture, walk up to the line cradling his ball in his cupped hand, balancing it against his wrist. He didn’t seem to be praying, but I was. Please, God, please! His eyes focused over the top of his ball and straight down the lane. Then he danced, swinging the ball behind him in an elegant arc then moving forward, hurling it in a curve—a curve!—that glanced the edge of the gutter before bending left to smash every single pin to kingdom come. I leapt out of my seat. I screamed. I clapped. Honest to God, I cried.

The crowd at a bowling tournament doesn’t scream. At all. I admired their reserve but simply couldn’t match it. Watching that level of performance, that studied form, that beauty, required me to scream. It always does. Because seeing someone—anyone—fully embody what they love, seeing them reach a point at which all their failure and all their endurance pays off requires a scream. To see the glory of all their studying and practicing, when success lived way beyond the fog and was by no means certain, requires a scream, a full-throated one.

Mel did well, moving on to the next round, and I resumed my trek north, glad for the bountiful delay, to get to see all that. Bowling was cool, I thought, incomparably cool. There’s nothing like beauty, in whatever form it comes, to stir the soul.

Beauty is never promised. Success doesn’t always come. None of it happens with certainty. The path is strewn with failure and with starting again. In the beginning you have a dream, you have desire, then you work, you work, you work. You work not because work guarantees anything, but because not working does. You work because the dream—the urgency of it—is worth the possibility of failure.