why?
Apparently this is a decent standard of bowling. If you can get 200 it is considered being the standard of a 'par' bowler, like in golf. And I bet you get a brilliant Megbowl Homemade Certificate. Blokes love certificates.
done?
4/08/06
People reading this may think I'm some sort of semi-pro or amateur bowler as I want to do this task, but I'm afraid this is not the case. The majority of my bowling experience came from birthday parties at the Coventry Megabowl when the balls used to get stuck down the back of the motor-thingy and someone often had to take your turn for you because you had either buggered off to buy a Raspberry Slush-Puppy and some chips from the Wimpy Burger Bar (what happened to Wimpy?) or had given up the bowling for a few goes on the Outrun arcade machine. Bowling when I was a kid was also an exceptional opportunity to watch MTV. Is it just me or were bowling alleys the only place that had MTV between the years of 1985 and 1990?
One Friday lunch time during the school holidays (a brilliant time to have a nice quiet bowl) Em Led and myself popped down the local bowling alley for a few quick games and see how poor we both were. I knew the day was going to be good when we paid for the bowling and the girl behind the counter, completely ignoring me, looked at Em Led and asked her in an irony-free way:
"Would you like the rails down the side up?"
Brilliant. I thought Em Led was going to chin her. You normally put the rails up when you have a load of six-year olds on a birthday outing, not for a 31 year old adult (yes, Em Led is that old).
Something about our stances here tells me that we're not amazing bowlers.
We had paid for three games (18 quid! When did bowling become so expensive?!) and I started to get on Em Led's nerves by taking it very seriously, taking about 'strategies', 'spin', 'side' and 'spares'. Em Led did do her part by trying to ensure that she didn't throw it down the gutter each time.
Say what you like about bowling: it may be a bit naff, but it's good fun. We had a good laugh with Em Led giggling at my seriousness and me laughing with the three ten-year old girls next to us as they all scored higher than Em Led.
What you can see above is me looking really pissed off that I've left three pins and Em Led antagonising me by laughing in my face. Cow.
We played our three games and it turned out that neither of us were too bad. I scored 112, 143 and 141 whilst the Em Led got off to a rather poor start with a 64 but pulled it out the bag with a 102 and a 94.
That seems to be another thing that has changed about bowling: you can actually get a print out of your scores. Now I know they used to pretend to offer this service when I was a kid but the printer was never, ever, ever working.
As I said, we were having fun at this point and the pressure was off as I was quite a long way from my 200 total. We were informed that one more game for both of use would be just 2 quid each so we opted for just one more. Things got off to a fantastic start for me with a strike, half strike and a strike. I remembered reading somewhere that to score 200 or more you need to either pick up a strike or half-strike on each go, so I was pretty pleased with the first three turns.
Strike on the fourth go too!
Fifth, Sixth and Seventh go's... c'mon!
Eight turn kept me on track too:
By the way, it is worth pointing out the difference between our bowling speeds. Women are so weak. So it was all down to the last two turns:
Ahhhhh, so close!! Turn 9 really needed to be a full strike but a double full strike on the last two goes would have given me an extra throw with just four pins needed. But I threw a pathetic 7 and 2 and there we go, it wasn't meant to be. Gives me hope for future bowling sessions though.
