How just 3 good frames in a row can completely change your bowling score

The other day I was in line to bowl for promotion to our premiere league. Earlier this year we got rid of the men and women's championship and instead unified just one championship with there being a bottom division as well. It's kind of like the Premiere League and Championship League in football. If you don't perform well enough in the premiere league, you get relegated to the lower division. If you do well in the lower division, you get moved up to the Premiere League.

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The main reason for us doing this is because there were 2 women who were better than most of the men that were attending and we felt as though it was unfair to not include them in the overall championship. It was also unfair to the other 8 women or so that play with us, because they were NEVER going to be the women's champion with those two women that were significantly better than everyone else.

Anyway, that is how the league works now and this past week I was in the championship game to see if I could earn a spot back in the top division, which historically speaking, is where I feel I belong.

The game didn't start out very well for me as my opponent, who by the way is someone I don't particularly care for and if I were to choose a member or two to eliminate from the league he would be one of them, bowled a strike in frame 1. I was up second and got 7 on the first ball, but missed on a relatively easy spare pickup. While I did relatively well from that point forward in the game, I wasn't hitting a lot of my spares and got very few strikes.

Then in frame 8 something happened and I guess I learned all of a sudden how to play this crazy game we call 10-pin bowling.

We were neck-in-neck up to the 8th frame as you can tell by the overall scores, but then I put down a strike, one of the only ones I had gotten up to that point. From that point forward you can see that I experienced absolute brilliance as far as bowling is concerned. The spare in the 9th is green because it was a late pin fall and the computer had marked it as 9, but sometimes a pin that you hit rolls around and knocks over another one. I had actually already turned around at this point and didn't even know about it until the people watching pointed it out to me.

In frame 10 I looked unstoppable, which is something I used to do on a regular basis, but haven't experienced in quite some time. Almost everyone in the lanes was watching during my 3rd roll in the 10th because if you get 3 strikes in a row you get something called a "turkey" and we actually have one of those squeaking chickens as a reward for doing so.

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This is actually one of the most sought after awards in our league, and it can change hands at any time. As you can see by my 10th frame, I failed to get it even though I was close. I missed the head pin by a few cm and if you don't hit that one, there is very little chance of getting a strike.

The point here is that I was 5 points ahead of my opponent in frame 8 but this was only after the strike in frame 8 got me a bonus of 20 points, without that, I would have been 6 points behind him. By the time we rounded out the first game, I was 37 points ahead.

We play 3 games total and the winner is determined by the total of all 3 games' scores. If you are against someone that is around your level of ability, it is very difficult to get back on top from 37 points down.

I did give him quite the opportunity in game two though because after sparing in frame one, I managed to double gutter in the 2nd frame. I almost NEVER gutter so this was as much a surprise to me as it was to everyone else watching. I managed to get out of that rut pretty quickly though and slogged my way back to a game 2 score of 129. This isn't a great score, but is typical of the 2nd division players in our league. He outscored me with a 138, but like I said, he was already 37 points behind from game one so after two games, I still had a 28 point lead going into game 3.

In game three my ability stabilized, although I did miss quite a few spares that I am upset about.... However, my opponent missed more and played like an amateur and finished with a 3rd game score of 108. I finished with 138. So overall, I won by 58 points and this really picked up my spirits because even though I try to be as nice as possible to everyone that turns up to the lanes to bowl with us, I sincerely do not like this guy. Losing to him would have made me feel pretty bad.

Now, even without that big boost that I had in game one, I likely still would have won based on the game 2 and 3 scores, but giving yourself that much of an advantage early on, boosts your confidence and allows you some leeway when it comes to doing something extremely stupid like rolling a double gutter-ball after sparing in the first. It was all because of 3 frames of brilliance though. The rest of my day, was actually quite average.

I ended up having the top overall score of anyone involved that day and that kind of picked up my spirits as far as this slump I have been in is concerned. I went on to have a rather wonderful afternoon and even went home and gave my dog a bath afterwards.

Nadi of course is never very pleased about this sort of thing, but after the past week of near nonstop rain and her getting dirty as hell every time we go outside, it was necessary.

Now let's see if I can carry this ability into next week. Based on past performance and the fact that I am a pessimist, I wouldn't count on it.