Over the holiday weekend, I crawled from the cool, musty darkness of my apartment and stood blinking beneath the sun’s choking heatshower. But I bore the brunt of that blinding onslaught only long enough for a brief car ride, before retreating into an even cooler, mustier, and darker cavern to participate in something that’s about as close as I ever get to playing sports: bowling.
Bowling is marvelous. You feel like you’re engaging in a physical activity, even though the actual amount of exercise involved is roughly the same as that involved in brushing your teeth. It’s also a game at which a whole lot of people suck royally, so you can clown around with your friends and laugh with good-natured delight at one another’s pratfalls. So many of the aspects of this quasi-sport are lined up against the success of a casual bowler that it’s nearly impossible take it seriously.
For one thing, they actually require you to wear someone else’s shoes. The vessels you rely on for quick and agile movement, custom-chosen for your unique anatomy – the only friendly ambassadors between yourself and the hard floor – are banned. In their place, you are forced to wear things that look to have been raided from the back of Ronald McDonald’s closet.
If this weren’t bad enough, their flat, floppy footwear follows a sizing system whose only resemblance to regular shoes is that numbers are somehow involved. You may invariably be a size 11, unless you are bowling. In that case, determining your exact fit across the range of sizes 8½-14 is a process of pure guesswork. It is believed that one of Albert Einstein’s biggest disappointments was that he was never able to discover the mathematical formula behind bowling shoe sizes.
Also safeguarding bowling from ever turning into a game of skill are the bowling balls themselves. You’re told that they’ve got a wide selection of balls of all shapes and sizes to accomodate players of the same variety. But you know these things were not designed to be used by actual humans. Most of them feature finger-holes which are utterly useless to anyone with fingers wider than a No.2 Ticonderoga. The rest of them arrange these holes in impossible patterns that require you to be at least double-, if not triple-jointed, to comfortably screw your sweaty digits into them.
Then you’ve got the greatest revolution in bowling since the automatic ball return: glow bowling. By flooding the alley with blacklight and loud, pumping dance music, glow bowling turns a game with a vaguely 70s aesthetic into one with a blatantly 70s aesthetic.
So. You’ve got all these amusing oddities that ensure bowling is just a silly, fun-filled pastime. Something to be giggled about over a bottle of root beer and a soggy tray of nachos drenched in cheez sauce that glows bright orange under the blacklights. Something to just fool around and have a good time with.
Except that there’s one group of people out there determined to turn this oafish activity into a fierce contest of strength, coordination, and will. I call them the Next-Laners. They exist under the scientific principle that anytime you go bowling, there are always people in the lane next to yours who are way better than you.
Next-Laners can be tough to spot. They’re typically snickering, immature teenagers. At first glance they appear to be horsing around just as much as you and your friends are. But then, as you’re smiling up at your 36 on the computerized scoring monitor, with not a care in the world, you happen to glance over at the adjacent screen and notice that “Mr. Ass” is bowling a 177. Then you look more closely at one of their t-shirts and discover that its hip-hop graphics are actually a statement of in-your-face bowling ‘tude like “This Is How I Roll” next to a pile of bloody, splintered pins. They’re also casting nonchalant glances over at your scores and chuckling to themselves. Why those little…
Then it’s your turn, and you find yourself standing side by side with Mr. Ass himself, whom you’ve marked as the alpha male of the group. Neither of you looks sideways at the other nor says a word, but you know that he knows that you both know this is a face-off.
His gracefully-thrown ball (the one with his name engraved on it) is released in a fearsome charge toward his set of pins, and at the same time you chuck the pink ball on which you finally settled in the vague direction of your set. Again, no looks are exchanged, but you’re positive that each of you is watching both balls.
As his ball smashes head-on into the center pin with a loud crash, your pink ball slams with an equally loud crash against the side of a gutter two lanes away, then retreats toward the pit at the end in shame.
You slink back to your plastic seat, and think: Whatever, man. It’s just bowling. Who takes this crap seriously, anyway? They probably have no lives, and just bowl all the time. Mr. Ass is a stupid nickname. I probably got the wrong size shoes again and they’re messing me up. Bowling sucks!
Yes, indeed. Just a silly, fun sport where it’s okay to be really bad. It’s okay, that is, because you’re going to await Mr. Ass at the air hockey table, and then satisfaction will be yours.
