I was vacillating most of the day yesterday between going to practice at my usual time or going late and hanging around for the Coke Classic league, which is the big league at Westgate Lanes and where I have many old friends bowling. I eventually did decide to go late, so I left my house to catch the bus at around 5:00 PM so I wouldn’t have to be bored for too long while I wait for the Coke Classic bowlers to show up (and dinner would fill some of the time, as well).
My practice was pretty pedestrian, as I was mucking around with a first arrow shot some more (which turned out to not be a wise decision, as I’ll touch on later in this post). I did manage a first in my last frame of the day, however: converting the 2-10 split. The times I’ve had to face this split (not many), I was either hitting the 2 pin too full or too light, but I somehow found the right shot for this split yesterday.
Result: 176-146-160=482
Running average (63 games): 165 Last 9 average: 169
Talking with Junior immediately after practice, I found out that they also put down the Coke Classic shot, a sport shot, on all of the tenpin lanes (there are also a dozen candlepin lanes there) in the morning on Mondays, which surprised me, as I had been used to seeing Bob Hamilton put the shot down on the lanes to the right of where I usually practice. As the Coke Classic shot is a tougher shot, as should be expected for a league that attracts the best bowlers in the area, I figure being close to my old league average in practice on a sport shot means, in a lot of ways, that I’m actually ahead of where I was when I quit the game. In the long run, practicing on a sport shot can only help me, and as the shot is also put down for stuff like “The People’s Tournament,” I would like to be able to eventually do well on the shot.
Noting the shot I’m seeing, I chatted a bit with another pro shop employee, Tony Attardo, who is a Coke Classic bowler. I had been in the pro shop briefly before practice to see if they had the Ebonite Reactor/R Palm Pad glove in stock, but having time to kill before the league bowlers filtered in, I asked him about how bowlers were playing the shot. Asked about playing outside, he said it’s tough to play outside on the shot unless you can hit the 1 to 3 board consistently and have a lot of hand in the shot. As I’m more of a stroker with not a whole lot of hand action, he recommended second arrow for me, which I had been playing most of the time.
I caught up with my old friends who were bowling in the Coke Classic league between dinner and the start of bowling for the night. Particularly, I wanted to see two people: Steve Travers, who had been the best bowler in the house during the time I was in leagues and is still very good, and Jim Yost, who is also part of my tournament story, but who was also my opponent for individual points in the league I was bowling in the night I shot my 268. I stayed past the start of actual bowling and ran into another old friend I had asked people about: George Hamilton. As I also knew George from hanging around the local slow-pitch softball scene years ago, I made it a point to ask him if he was still playing that in the summer, and he indicated that he was. I told George that I would let a mutual friend know I saw him. I was hoping to be able to also stick around to do a karaoke song in the pub, but decided against it and called a cab home. It has indeed been good to reconnect with my old friends the last couple of weeks. 
Tournament notes:
- The Northeast Amateur Tournament has scheduled a stop at Westgate Lanes for April 13.
- The originally-reported winner of the February “People’s Tournament” at E. Providence Lanes has been disqualified for reporting an invalid entry average, and Brian “Hawk” Earle was declared the official winner of the tournament. Congrats again Hawk!
