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Tuesday, September 30, 2008 Why the Pros Rule We bowling types often blame the low level of respect the culture in general holds for bowlers as athletes on the inability of anyone to properly illustrate what it is about a great bowler that elevates his/her abilities over that of a good league bowler (or, even worse, someone who just shows up at the lanes for disco bowling and rents shoes and a house ball).  Many blame the hard-to-describe difference between tournament and league lane conditions.  Some blame the mere fact that oil is invisible to the naked eye.  And some believe that TV has done an inadequate job of explaining these intricacies (although I do have great hope for the new PBA formats and Tom Clark’s dedication to communicating them). Instead of figuring out who is to blame or why, instead I’d like to take a crack at explaining what makes the Walter Rays and Norm Dukes and Robert Smiths of the world as otherworldly at bowling as Donald Trump is at real estate investing or Roger Federer is at tennis.  As you’re reading, try to pretend that you don’t know diddly squat about units of oil, the difference between wood, synthetic and guardian, and that a rev rate is more than just something that shows up in that little round gauge on your car dashboard.  Remember, if we can’t explain this stuff (and quickly) to someone who doesn’t know anything about it and just happens to stumble upon a PBA telecast on ESPN, then bowling has about as much a chance of getting respect as I have of getting a date with Jessica Alba. To start, we have to be able to get the idea across that great bowling is an art form.  Meaning that when it is played properly by highly skilled, highly trained professionals, it is a thing of absolute athletic beauty.  Yes.  Beauty.  A perfectly thrown strike is as much a thing of beauty as a 50-yard touchdown pass or a 320-yard drive down the middle of the fairway or a perfect down-the-line forehand in tennis (especially when it’s hit by Ana Ivanovic–right guys?!).  The reason is very simple.  All I have to do is take you through what goes into one perfect shot.  Here goes. Let’s say Robert Smith (I choose Robert because (A.) I know his game probably better than anyone, having bowled against him my entire childhood and young adult life and (B.) because he’s arguably the most freakishly talented bowler in the game today) needs one strike to win his latest PBA title.  If you are a casual viewer watching on TV, this is what you see:  Robert gets up, picks up a black ball, mutters a few words under his breath, sets up on the approach, starts walking toward the foul line, throws the ball very near the edge of the right gutter, then watches as it hooks sharply into the pins and throws all ten of them off the deck.  He exults and the crowd cheers.  He gets up to “fill out” his tenth frame bonus shots as an ESPN graphic proclaims him the champion before abruptly cutting to a commercial with one of those inane and now milked-beyond-the-capacity-for-redemption Geico cavemen. You think, “Cool.  Now, I wonder if the Jets were able to stop Cleveland and get the ball back for a chance to score before halftime.  CLICK.” Now, in contrast, here is what happened from the standpoint of a highly trained eye:  Robert gets off his chair remembering that his last shot on the right lane almost hooked a little too much.  He must decide on one of an array of possible adjustments (which I won’t explain in detail, but trust me, they are rather complex) including more ball speed, moving the target line (a one-inch wide line that goes down the lane from the point of release to the intended entry point of the ball into the pins), altering the axis tilt (the spin of the ball which is manipulated at the point of release by the position of the fingers in relation to the thumb), decreasing the amount of rotation, lofting the ball further down the lane or, in an extreme case, changing balls to something that hooks less.  Oh, and here’s the kicker, he may decide to try two OR MORE combinations of these things.  The greatest of the great are the ones who’ve been able to pull off the combo-adjustment on a regular basis, I’m talking Don Carter, Dick Weber, Earl Anthony, Norm Duke, Walter Ray Williams Jr. and maybe a couple more.  (As a quick aside, Chris Barnes almost fits into this category but still lacks the sheer audacity to pull it off regularly on TV...I predict that starting this year, he’s going to move into that league and have a five-year run that will be one of the greatest in history.) Finally, once Robert decides on which course(s) of action he will take, he then must positively reinforce the decision in his mind and incorporate the adjustment into the execution of his delivery. This takes us to the real meat of what makes the pros so much more gifted and talented than even a good league bowler.  The tour pro at the highest level has rehearsed these adjustments thousands and thousands of times in practice and tournaments so that they are ingrained into the subconscious to be acted upon when the conscious mind calls them out.  On a singular shot like this, the successful player will seize on the particular adjustment in mind as the solitary focus of the delivery, while all other aspects of the execution are placed on auto-pilot, having been committed to memory by repeated conditioning.  A once-a-week league bowler (even a good one who averages 230 on league conditions like me) simply cannot do this (assuming, of course, we know the adjustments exist in the first place) even remotely consistently because we do not have the repetitions and the confidence that these subtle adjustments can be executed when called upon, let alone on a shot that could be the difference between earning a chance to continue to pursue your career for another season and making this month’s mortgage payment to going home empty-handed with tail planted firmly between legs. So, for our case, let’s say Robert chooses the “more ball speed” route.  He may raise the ball slightly in his setup to induce a higher backswing and more acceleration on the downswing or simply move back a few inches on the approach and increase the length and pace of his steps.  He initiates whichever method he chooses and ultimately reaches the moment of truth, which is, essentially, the 0.01 second that it takes for the ball to come off of his hand as it whizzes by his ankle at more than 30 mph.  Slowing this moment down (I like to think of the dodging bullets scene in The Matrix for dramatic effect), try to envision, from directly behind, Robert’s hand in the ball at the bottom of its swing just before it is released onto the lane with his fingers at the 7 o’clock position and the thumb at 1 o’clock.  As he releases the ball the thumb comes out first and the fingers rotate up and to the right slightly, finally coming out simultaneously at the 12 o’clock position.  Understand that if there are any slight variances (we’re talking a matter of a degree or two) in the position of the thumb or fingers either at the point of entry into the release or as the ball leaves his hand, there is likely to be tremendous differences in where the ball might end up 60 feet away.  A good analogy for this would be to think of a gun pointed at a target and how even a misalignment of one millimeter is magnified to inches or even feet the further the target is away.  (Incidentally, the shooting range analogy is probably the best way to describe the difference between a league condition and a PBA condition.  Simply imagine in the former that the space in the shooting range is curved into a gravitational funnel by the bullseye so that bullets fired off line will be pulled back to the target.  On PBA conditions this rarely happens and, if and when it does, only slightly.)     That being said, a multitude of things might go wrong once the ball has left Robert’s hand.  He may have guessed wrong on how much faster he needed to throw the ball and it may sail too far to the right (oh, did I forget to mention that his margin for error to give him a reasonable chance to strike is two inches at 60 feet?)  The ball may hook a little too late, altering his ball’s angle into the pins and causing them not to mix properly, leaving a single-pin “tap.”  Or the lanes may turn out to be hooking even more than he adjusted for and the ball may hook too much, leaving a split.  He may even have guessed everything exactly right AND executed perfectly but still leave the solid 8-pin as Randy Pedersen once did to lose a big match back in the mid 1990’s.  Or he may strike and keep his Tour card for another year and make this month’s mortgage.  The amazing thing is, more often than not, the best players overcome these odds and get what they need in the clutch the vast majority of the time.  That is what makes them special and, I would argue, what makes the sport of bowling played at the highest level so beautiful and artful to watch.  Now, pass it on! 11:15 am edt

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LIVIN' THE DREAM:

How to get what you want, find true meaning and save the world by bowling!

 

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Q: What is the book about?

A: The book is about how the valuable lessons I learned through my lifelong involvement in bowling saved my life and transformed me from an unhappy cynic into a blissfully happy optimist. 

Q: What made you decide to write it?

A: I had been out of the bowling industry for about two years and I had hit a very low point in my attitude about life. Through the help of a family member, I was able to rediscover the important lessons about success, spirituality and connecting with others. I was so excited about this transformation that I decided to write a book that attempts to detail the metamorphosis while outlining the important lessons I remembered.

Q: How is this book different from other self-help books?

A: The book is different in a number of ways. First, I am a very unlikely person to have written a self-help book. If you had known me before I'd written the book, you'd know precisely what I mean. But that fact alone reveals how strongly I felt about writing it, because I knew that if I could change for the better, then I felt anyone could do it and that there was a good chance that I could help a lot of people by describing the process and arranging the pieces in a way that could be easily understood.

The other key point of difference is the way the book is arranged. The story is structured into three parts, The Method, Some Cool Tricks and For the Hard-Core Cynics, each of which contain the important lessons I wanted to share. Every chapter is also broken up with a narrative of my personal story, told for the purpose of detailing my amazing attitude transformation. It begins with the extremely low point when others felt the need to reach out to help me to remember the important things in life and goes on to detail the many people that helped me to learn the most important life lessons, including: my childhood friend Robert Smith, my father (a former President of Disneyland International), PBA Chairman Chris Peters and former PBA CEO Steve Miller.  

Q: Is the book as funny as your blogs?

A: Yes! But there is also a serious side too.

Q: How is your book different from something like The Secret?

A: My book is similar to The Secret in that it proposes a method for success, but it is different in a number of ways. First, it is a bit more practical when it comes to outlining the method for achieving success. The Secret comes very close to describing a similar method for success in its "Ask, Believe, Receive" mantra. In my book, the first two of these elements ("Ask" and "Believe") are integral (although I call them "Dream" and "Self-Belief"), but I believe there has to be some proactive work done to achieve the goal. I call it hard work (which turns a lot of people off, of course) but to use the model of The Secret, you would simply replace the word "Receive" with "Retrieve." The best part of all this (and the good news for the folks who don't want to have to work hard) is that once you decide on what you want and then you begin to believe you can get it, the work is no longer hard, but becomes a fun activity that fills your days with joy and purpose.

Second, my book spends a significant amount of time discussing how to deal with your success once you've attained it (and that conducting yourself in this manner before you reach your goals will actually help you get there even faster). Probably the best way to describe my book is that it's a cross between The Secret and the late Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture. But I also quote a number of more research-driven books like Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Sam Harris' The End of Faith and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate to help me make my point.

Q: Do you have to be a bowler to like this book?

A: Absolutely not! Bowling obviously plays a major role (although it really serves more as the setting rather than as the primary focal point) because of my involvement with the sport my whole life. But the lessons bowling taught me are lessons I could have learned if I had chosen to be a golfer or a doctor or a writer (oops, I guess that one's a bad example now). My hope is that the book will find its way into the hands of people who don't bowl and that these people will come away with a new appreciation for bowlers and the sport of bowling.

Q: What is your goal with the book?

A: That is a simple one. To help as many people as possible to experience the gift of embracing an optimistic way of life and to help them reap its many rewards.