Saturday Night Bowling Challenge
Posted on October 4, 2008 by Ching under Games, Life.
Brian, in a desperate attempt to cheer me up, took me to Thai Tradition for dinner tonight and challenged me to bowling. I have been extra crabby lately, and I didn’t even realize it until he pointed it out. Since I’m miserable and crabby, then he is too.
He said he was tired of me moping around so he wanted to take to dinner to a place we haven’t been in a really long time. We haven’t been to Thai Tradition in a really long time because he’s not really fond of the place, but he wanted to take me there because he figured it would make me happy. I will save the Thai Tradition comments for the Foodies blog, though. Let’s talk about bowling…
I’m hyper-competitive so everything is a contest. Naturally, we bowled to see who could score the highest. I am a better bowler than Brian so I knew I would come out on top. Brian has his moments though, and has beaten me in the past. I had gotten into a good groove in the first round so I was thinking that I would beat him in such a way that even my lowest score would be higher than his highest score. It didn’t quite turn out that way, but I did beat him two out of three games.
| ROUND 1: | GAME 1 | GAME 2 | GAME 3 | SERIES | AVERAGE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BRIAN | 132 | 134 | 141 | 407 | 136 |
| CHING | 133 | 193 | 134 | 460 | 153 |
Back when I used to bowl regularly, ten years ago or so, I used to bowl a 150 average so that was pretty much expected. The 193 was a surprise, though. Halfway through, it looked like I was about to bowl a 200 game. I would have broken 200, too, had I picked up my spare on the tenth frame. There were two pins and I clipped one and missed the other completely. It was an uncharacteristic miss. I felt robbed.
The next round started out rough, but then I started marking all over the place. Strikes and spares. There were hardly any open frames. At one point, I thought I would have three 200 games going. I fell short, but check out the results.
| ROUND 2: | GAME 1 | GAME 2 | GAME 3 | SERIES | AVERAGE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BRIAN | 136 | 125 | 116 | 377 | 126 |
| CHING | 170 | 190 | 173 | 533 | 178 |
Brian started to get tired halfway through our second round. He’s not really used to bowling more than three games. I was really excited about my 500+ series. When I used to bowl, I didn’t get a lot of 500 series games. I’d get pretty close, but it was hard to get three really good games. My main weakness was that I didn’t ever get enough strikes to score higher. I was really good at picking up spares and hardly ever missed so I would consistently mark on each frame. However, unless you have strikes to connect the marks, you don’t really end up with great scores. I had a pretty good night tonight, getting more strikes than I ever have.
I’m really rusty, though, so I missed several easy spares and had more open frames than I would have liked. My ball was like a guided missile that never missed so it’s a bummer when the ball misses its target. I was pretty inconsistent, too. There were several times that I threw the ball and halfway down the lane I knew that it would be a strike; at the same time, there were also several times that I threw the ball and missed my arrow completely and immediately I knew it would be horrible. I got lucky, though, because on these occasions they were easy spares to pick up. Although, I did have a few splits. I didn’t convert any of them at all.
Anyway, bowling tonight made me realize just how much I enjoy it. Maybe one of these days I can talk Brian into joining a mixed league with me. I would really love to start bowling regularly again so that I can get even better at it.
By the way, our little contest continues with racquetball tomorrow. Brian seems to think that he is going to beat me at racquetball. He won the last time we played, but with my recent bowling victory I think I’ve got momentum on my side. He thinks he will come out on top. For all we know Brian might forfeit tomorrow because he is all achy from bowling six games. We shall see.
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