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Tuesday, December 2, 2008
The Ultimate Humility Championship Last week in my PBA.com column, I wrote a recap of the telecast for the Ultimate Scoring Championship (which
maybe should be renamed the Low to Mid-Scoring Championship after last Sunday’s show). In case you missed the show or
my recap, the event was touted by the PBA as the telecast that will finally illustrate just how well the pros would score
if given the opportunity to bowl on a typical league shot. Then, the show aired and they averaged 224.5 for their six TV games…not
bad, but not much better than what they averaged on the brutal Chameleon Championship condition the week prior. Why so low
then? One word: carry.
On the show, the four finalists hit the pocket 54 out of 66 times. The players rolled a
total of 40 strikes for the day, which works out to a 60% strike percentage and a 74% carry percentage (the number of strikes
divided by the number of pocket hits). There was just one open frame for the day and, interestingly enough, the man who missed
the pocket the most (Mike Wolfe, with four misses) had the day’s highest average (241.5) and won the tournament.
So, let’s take a moment and think about what makes an Ultimate Scoring condition so ultimately score-able. First,
you have to have mistake area on the lane. That means when you miss right, you need the ball to hook back to the pocket and
when you miss left, you need it to slide so that it doesn’t hit too squarely on the headpin (if you’re a lefty,
simply reverse this…and stop kicking my butt in all the local tournaments!). A good bowler is always looking for mistake
area on the lane because it gives him/her the ability to focus on maximizing carry, which is defined as the likelihood that
a ball will strike when it hits the pocket.
Now, to have a truly ultimate scoring environment, you want to have
the largest possible room for error on the lane, and a pocket that is as large as possible to produce the greatest probability
of carrying a high percentage of strikes. But first, we have to define what the pocket is so we can understand what kind of
hit should be carrying and what kind of hit is just a bad hit that will require us to make an adjustment. Most people define
the pocket as the area between the 1 and 3-pins (the 1-2 on the left side), but I like to take the definition one step further.
What I like to add to the definition is whether or not the headpin comes in contact with the 2-pin (3 pin for lefties) after
it is hit. If it does, then it was a pocket hit. If it does not, then it was not. This definition excludes us from believing
that a 2-pin leave was a pocket hit, and that a 4-pin leave (where the headpin hits the 2-pin thin and sends it around the
4-pin) is as high as you can go on the headpin and still be considered in the pocket. This works out to a width of about 2
inches on the lane (from the 16th board to the 18th board at the pins) or 10.5 inches on the pins (our 2-inch area plus the
8.5-inch diameter of the ball).
In an ultimate scoring environment, we have to assume that every possible
inch in our “pocket zone” will give us a high probability of striking, or else we’ll get run over by the
bowlers who are carrying better than us (hence the term “carry contest” to describe a tournament where the pocket
is so easy for everyone to find). So, how do we get good carry? Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules to determine
a simple answer to this question. Studies have been conducted by USBC, Kegel and numerous other bowling industry groups and
individuals to determine the optimum “angle of entry” to maximize carry. And if you can tell me what your entry
angle is (in degrees) on any given shot, then I’ll be happy to give you my next born. How do the pros do it then? It’s
called trial and error.
What a good pro will typically do is find a line where he/she can consistently get to the
pocket and have some margin of error. In an ultimate scoring environment, this is fairly easy to do. On a more difficult lane
condition, some degree of poor carry is usually tolerable, since scores are likely to be higher the more often a person hits
the pocket. On a difficult lane condition, a pro will usually be satisfied with 9 out of 10 pocket hits a game, even if only
5 or 6 of those hits are carrying, over 6 or 7 pocket hits a game with a much higher carry percentage. The reason? Because
the 4 or 5 misses a game are much more likely to result in splits or difficult spares that lead to a score-killing open frame.
But in an ultimate scoring environment you need both a high pocket percentage and good carry.
So in this environment,
the pro will start off with a ball and a line that he/she is comfortable with and see what happens. Sometimes, the pro will
get lucky and have a lot of mistake area and great carry right out of the gates. Sometimes, the carry will be so-so. Sometimes,
it will be downright horrible. In certain cases an individual may even have trouble finding the pocket. The worst-case scenario
(for me at least) is so-so carry. With so-so carry there is the illusion that things will get better and that you can hang
in there with 230’s. But nowadays, (and as I mentioned a few weeks back), the equipment is so good and the bowlers are
so adept that anything less than a 260 average on an easy condition is likely to fall short of victory. Unlike the scenarios
of not finding the pocket or having poor carry, which are no-brainer decisions (basically, you immediately try something different
or perish), fixing your so-so carry is a tough decision to make.
For example, take my Tuesday night league. Going
into last week, I was high average in the league with 218. But given the fact that I usually hit the pocket 28-30 times a
week for my 3 games, I believe that this average is sub-par, which is supported by the fact that my high series in the league
is 703 while numerous other bowlers with lower averages have rolled series of 750 or above. I have recently tried two adjustments
to help improve my carry. One week, I used a less-hooking ball and played right of where I normally play. My carry got worse
and I shot a 630 series. Last week, I decided to polish the ball I normally use to see if I could get a little more hook on
the backend to increase my angle into the pins. This change caused me to lose the pocket altogether and I shot 564, my lowest
set since the infamous week 1 debacle (which I wrote about in one of my first blogs here). Next week, I plan to try a more
hooking ball to see how that works. If it doesn’t then, well, I guess there’s always therapy.
And that’s
basically it. It’s like life. Try something and, if it doesn’t work, try something else. Repeat. Repeat. Hopefully,
after a while you find something that works. I believe that as long as the goal doesn’t change (in this case the goal
of scoring as high as possible) taking a side road isn’t necessarily a bad thing…heck, it may even turn out to
be a shortcut. If not, then there’s always therapy. But in order to reach your full potential, you have to be willing
to try something new. Sometimes you go backwards but, in the process, you learn something. As for the PBA’s Ultimate
Scoring Championship, I think it teaches us all a valuable lesson…that humility is the ultimate virtue in our complex
and challenging sport.
See you next week!
Click here to read “Jason’s TV Recap - Uncensored” on PBA.com.
To check out the latest episode of The Bowling
Show >>> Click Here
To check out my book Livin' The Dream: How to Get What You Want, Find True Meaning and Save the World by Bowling!
>>> Click Here
Jason Thomas,
jason@jasonthomasbowling.com
2:08 pm est
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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. 
