Intermission: Concerning Bowling and Patience

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A Particular Type Of Mediation

A bowling alley, to most, is a casual Friday evening. It doesn’t matter if it is 2021: the alley you walk into is an immediate time machine that transports you either to 1972 or 1999. You can expect traditional seating, with three bus-seat replicas forming a workflow towards the ball return, or if it’s modern joint, the Brunswick Zone style layout that makes a communal table the focus of each lane, designed for socializing above all. In any case, the thing that lives universal in all bowling alleys is the soft, stale aroma that leaves with you on your clothes.

That smell is an unwelcome agent at dinner. You and your date are about to dig into some lobster tails, but something seems… off. You go to sip your wine but something that almost reminds you of a musty-basement-but-not-quite breathes exhaustively into you nostrils. You begin to wonder if the smell is the distinctive odor of Time Forgotten and vow to avoid bowling alleys for at least a few months, lest you become forever tainted with what might be the scent that Death itself was born to stalk.

That smell, my friend, is lane oil, and I can’t even fathom what horrid acts I would agree to commit in order to feel its tendrils in my nostrils once again.

Bowling, like all else, is a process more than anything. Though scoring may feel difficult, the task at hand is quite simple: knock the pins down. The rules for the sport are also simple: don’t cross the line. Outside of that, you’re stuck with environmental bylaws dedicated to protecting the people around you and the structural integrity of the space itself, i.e. please do not treat the rental balls like a shot-put. The beauty in bowling’s simplicity gives the occasional recreational bowler an unassuming air of competency. If one can throw the ball hard enough and straight enough, one has the potential to knock down all the pins. The more that happens in a row, the more the score compounds onto itself. Ten pins and ten frames becomes a potential of 300, not 100, points.

The early allure of bowling took hold for me in the dirty summers of limited responsibility. Before we had jobs, Luke, Craig, and I had gotten a summer season pass to the local amusement park, which, at the time, boasted the largest and fastest roller coaster in America. We had older brothers rotate dropping us off and picking us up, hitting empty lines for the biggest thrills three to four times a week. At sixteen we all had summer jobs, a newfound freedom afforded by a driver’s license, and a budget dictated by own earned income. The summer pass at Valley Lanes allowed for 8 games a day per pass holder for $40. On days off, Craig would drive me and Luke over to the wide, sad, somehow mansard-roofed bowling alley for our early afternoon ritual. Each of us would get our own lane, each of us would find our appropriate ball weight (mine was a paltry 12), and each of us would silently and stoicly bowl 8 games in a row with alley equipment, poorly stitched shoes gently sliding on slick hardwood as the plastic alley balls skidded across the finish line through the pins.

In retrospect, it was all a lie and a farce. While my average started creeping toward 130 and my ball had picked up some of that undeniably cool curve that you’d see on TV, everything we were doing was a complete and utter sham. We weren’t necessarily bowling as much as we were just going through the motions.

While most sports benefit from professional equipment that gives some stability and advantage to the greatest of our superstars, bowling is entirely a system built on equipment and materials, and all of it designed to reckon with the aforementioned lane oil. A new set of footie boots might help you realize your potential on the pitch but using an alley ball while bowling is more like trying to chop wood with a butter knife: the task at hand requires the appropriate tool, and that tool requires the right shape, design, and materials.

It almost feels like a cruel joke, the first time a custom drilled polyurethane ball leaves your hand. You watch it careen over the alley lane and dig in its spurs, turning seemingly on an invisible pivot point as it rapidly curves and darts in towards the pocket and crashes just east of the head pin. The ball follows a seemingly ancient and unknowable path, working its way on a wire towards the pins, like the buffalo of old instinctively traversing thousand-mile trails single-file. If you head to the plains in South Dakota, you can almost visualize those trails the buafflo would follow: single-file, densely trodden paths through the prairie grass, and endless stream of tissue and tallow covered in dense, dark-brown fur. That is the path the ball follows on the lane, your ball, your new ball, the ball that now cradles in your hand like your bones were built around it and not the other way around.

Like all disappointments in the world, it’s science, not magic, that makes this work. The lanes themselves are assembled planks of hardwood, laquered and compressed together, in order to create a continuous, level surface that’s 60 feet long. However, to create the near frictionless flow we see on those lanes, they’re oiled to all hell. That oiling is designed to let the balls roll smoothly and quickly towards the pins, and most of the time that default oiling pattern will be a scorpion oil pattern: lanes usually are oiled about 2/3 of the way down, with the oil pattern coming towards a point in the middle of the lane the closer you get to the pins.

Now, there are a variety of oil patterns out there, but what this does is create more traction at the edges than at the center of the lane. If your ball starts to drift towards the gutter, the drier oil pattern will give it more grip and keep it from gutter-balling you to a scratch for the frame. But here’s where technology comes into play: alley balls are made of plastic. Standard bowling balls have a urethane or resin outer layer. The plastic balls skid right over the oil and keep on rolling. Urethane or resinballs actually soak up the oil on the lane, letting them grip down into the actual wood, given them traction an alley ball never could see. So if you take a plastic alley ball and crank your wrist as hard as you can, you may see some spin that curves it towards the pocket. With a urethane ball, however, the gentlest wrist twist gives the ball slight inward rotation that will create a massive hooking curve as the urethane does its job, soaks in the oil, grips into the wood, and cranks itself aggressively into the pocket.

It becomes simple geometry. A straight ball, thrown straight, has a good chance of hitting all the pins. It also has a good chance of going straight through the head pin and leaving the 7 and 10 split. Old bowling balls were made of heavy gauge rubber and were thrown as hard as they could be to create chaos and avoid that deadly split. In 1981, the urethane sheath was introduced. All of a sudden, curve was predictable, and aggressive. Aiming the ball to rocket down the lane only to suddenly pivot just shy of the head pin creates a helicoptering that nearly eradicates all standing pins, regardless of if the ball would plow through them or not. The hook created an entirely new way of imagining a strike. And the hook relies almost entirely on ball material more than anything.

Bowling was no longer a sport of brute force. That simple geometry became complex trigonometry. You could almost always guarantee a strike knowing exactly where your ball would hook, and thusly bowling evolved into a process more about knowing how the oil pattern on the lane would break down and how you ball would react. When the pros are bowling, what they’re doing is noting how the ball breaks, how that changes as the oil is moved down through the lane, and adjusting accordingly. If you’re bowling through the oil pattern and your ball is picking up more oil with each roll, that oil pattern shifts with every frame, and bowling is then a Herzogian struggle of Man Versus Environment more than anything. You become a pendulum swing incarnate: your ball, custom drilled to your hand, is an extension of your arm. On each backswing, you’re building momentum and allowing the weight of the ball, like a chef relying on the weight of the knife to gently slice through a soft tomato’s taut skin, to do the work for you. If you manage to achieve the same release on each frame, theoretically you can then read the lane and adjust.

Bowling, then, is more of a zen experience than most would give it credit for. Your entire body motion becomes a koan of mediation, the contemplative reflection that addresses the great doubt. The complicated mathematics before you becomes simple intuition. Your aim is focused entirely on the arrows on the lane, and your feet are aligned according to the dots ingrained in the flooring. If you align your foot two boards to the left of the center dot and aim for the second arrow and your ball goes softly into the pocket without hitting the head pin, you simply aim for the same arrow and move your feet to the left. By throwing the ball with a more aggressive angle towards the gutter, it will pick up a more aggressive curve and break harder towards the head pin. If you notice that your ball breaks so hard that it zigs to the left and misses the head pin, aim for the same arrow and move your feet to the right so that your curve becomes more slight and you more directly aim through the pocket*.

It’s in these simple adjustments that bowling becomes the ultimate gentle metaphor. We go through life with a distinct and unique approach shaped by our capabilities and personalities that feel dedicated to following a consistent path. We’re always aiming towards the same goal, but if we fall short, we should adjust where we stand, not how we move towards it.

Bowling is the most meditative experience I’ve ever immersed myself into. While a the global pandemic has taken away my ability to go to a bowling alley, Multiple Sclerosis has threatened my ability to be able to comfortable hold a bowling ball. As I type this, my fingertips still are semi-numb and painful, a symptom that may fade as this flare up of symptoms begins to fade, or it may be permanent. There is a possibility that I may never be able to bowl like I used to. And that’s a hard truth to arrive at a year after I had to pause my one distinct hobby.

But without bowling I may never have been able to develop the approach I have towards the world at large. I am still the same person, and I’m still aiming towards the same arrow. There’s not much I can do to change the environment around me. Instead, I implore you to see the lane in front of you, like I do, to note that the oil pattern has changed, and to adjust your starting foot position two boards to the left.

*These angles assume a right-handed bowler.

Big Drinks is currently on hiatus. A new set of beverage focused stories will be in the works for 2021, but managing a newly diagnosed auto-immune disorder has made organizing new topics, scheduling interviews, and mostly typing a more difficult prospect. Big Drinks will return when its able to.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.