vietnam
My very last post was about how I had decided to go and practice bowling once a week with our officially sanctioned "practice day" along with 6 other DUMBO members. Out of everyone there I did the best with a 179 and a 203 I think it was. I might be slightly wrong about that.
That's all fine and dandy but just like when someone rolls a 300 on a non-league day, it doesn't mean a damn thing as far as their average or accolades in the official day, which for us is only on Thursday mornings.
I hit the lanes on Thursday this week with a plan and a sense of confidence, only to have it all fall apart and I have to say, I got a bit "rattled" by my poor performance.
[src](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQn3JxC5r1gvr3182xeQzhNb3MT8Uwa6AW9xQ&s)On Tuesday I was practicing like a scientist. I was taking careful mental notes about where to start with my stance, taking note on how I was holding the ball, how muchof a follow-through I had and everything else about my rather stellar games on Tuesday. Then on the first ball I completely missed the headpins and then afterwards was wildly off target and missed the remaining 5 pins on my second ball.
[src](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/20241018_4-5-7_spare_conversion_-_ten-pin_bowling.webm/1280px--20241018_4-5-7_spare_conversion_-_ten-pin_bowling.webm.jpg)This is normally a pretty easy one to pick up. As long as you hit the closest pin the other two are going to go down either by the headpin crashing into them, or the ball being deflected in that direction. But you are not going to do this if you fail to hit any of the pins which is what I did.
My bad performance continued unfortunately, and a lot of this can be attributed to the fact that I feel it is very difficult to make micro-adjustments when you have to wait for 2 other people on your lane to go through their motions. This is compounded by the fact that on my lane was our oldest member who at 83 years of age, takes a very long time to complete his turn and that is perfectly fine. I hope I am breathing when I am 83, let alone bowling.
Toward the end of game one, I was extremely worried that I was going to fail to break 100 points, which is just embarrassing in the “premiere league” of our bowling group since the top 8 players are meant to be actually pretty good. I was bowling worse than a majority of the people that are in the bottom division.
When this starts to happen you get “rattled” and now you are overthinking and over-correcting and everything gets even worse. At one point I rolled a gutter ball on my first ball and this should NEVER HAPPEN to someone that has held the championship gold more than a dozen times in our league.
[src](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CVaCZeOUAAAtPI_.jpg)To make a bad situation even worse, I ended up somehow getting a slight cut on one of my most important fingers but this is something I will never advertise to the other bowlers because it is something that we kind of joke about due to this Norwegian couple that bowls with us and every time one of them does something poor, they turn around shaking their hand and grasping their fingers in sort of a "it wasn't me, it was the ball!" sort of way.
But then something kind of magical happened as I transitioned from game 1 to game 2. I just stopped focusing so much on correcting everything and loosened up, because I had already resigned myself to failure and just decided to have some fun.
Maybe that is part of the mental game that seems to be a part of all sports. When I went up to the line in game 2, I wasn't over-analyzing where I was going to put the ball, I just kind of aimed in a general area where I figured was a decent spot and next thing you know I was striking more often than not. I ended up getting a Turkey (3 strikes in a row) after only getting a single strike in the entirety of game 1. I then got a spare and then nearly another Turkey right after that.
I ended game two with a 193, which I think is the highest single-game score I have had in league play in 2026. This all happened after bowling a 102 in game one. I had more than 102 points in game two by the end of the 5th frame.
Getting that high of a score is awesome of course, but then you start to over analyze the mistakes you made and how if you had just one or two frames different, you could have had the highest score the league has ever known which for us, currently sits at 234.
It picked my spirits up big time and then I went on to perform relatively well in the tag-team portion of our day where me and my near 70 year old partner got the 2nd highest score out of 13 teams.
Is there a lesson here that I am trying to convey? Well, not really. I think that part of it is that if you don't take things so seriously but still have a plan, that you might just do better than if you are super stoic, not talking to anyone, and trying to attack with a steadfast strategy that worked two days ago.
I need to remember that there is a 4-5 minute gap between my turns at the roll, and maybe just remember that the biggest part of what we are all doing here is to have fun. There is no prize at the end after all.
I did manage to get the Turkey at the end of the day and that is something that is always nice to have.
Now I will wait and go practice again next week. By the way if any of you out there in internet-land ever find yourself in Da Nang Vietnam on a Thursday, you can come and bowl with us as well.
It is pricey though, a whole $3.70 for 3 games.