Bowling

April 12, 2007, was one of my days off from work (I don't run this site full time yet),
and I had planned a trip to my home bowling center, Brunswick Wekiva Lanes in Apopka, Florida (near Orlando), for a day of bowling. Wekiva Lanes is not more than a 5 or 10 minute drive from my house. I'm visually impaired and don't see well enough to drive, so I used a paratransit service to get me to the bowling alley and back home. (And yes, I bowl and I'm visually impaired. I have about a 115 average, which if I do say so myself, is good for one who is blind in one eye and has about 20/70 vision in the other.) But the catch with this paratransit service is you have to plan your trips a day in advance, and once planned, it's set in stone and all you can do is cancel as little as three hours before the trip. And I was about to wish I'd called the bowling alley in advance and asked if there would be lanes available that day before planning the trip. It turned out that there was a tournament going on and I had no knowledge of it, and I was stuck there for three hours because of the way my ride works, so all I could do was stick around and watch. But it wasn't just any tournament, it was the NCAA women's college bowling national championships. An NCAA national championship bowling tournament at my home bowling center, not more than 5 or 10 minutes from my house? Oh my gosh! There was a lot of good bowling going on, and it was a really cool experience to be able to attend such a big tournament. The finals on the 14th were broadcast on ESPN2 the next day. I couldn't go to the finals because I had to work, but I did manage to tape it. But even if it was just the first day of the tournament, it was quite an experience. If there's ever an NCAA bowling tournament in your area, then go check it out if you get the chance. It will be quite an experience. But in case you never get to go to an NCAA bowling tournament, keep reading and I'll tell you all about my day at the tournament in enough detail to make you feel like you're there.

Did you know? December 29th is Bowling Day, a day created to celebrate the great game of bowling. It was just as new to me as it is to many of you. So how did I find about it, and how did it originate?

Before I get into that, I'm sorry for the lack of updates in the past few months. I currently run this site part time while I'm working (of course I hope to change that some day), and I've had other things going on, and the site wasn't getting a lot of visitors at the time, so I had to put it on the back burner. But now the site has gotten more visitors, and I have 229 subscribers to my newsletter and increasing, so I will try to update normally again from now on. Now, with that said, let's move right along.

On December 29, 2003, on lane one of the Lebanon Bowling Center in Lebanon, Indiana, Gene Wethington set a new world record for the sport of bowling. But it's not the type of record you might expect.

Ryo Nishimura, a JPBA bowler from Japan, is the first bowler ever to bowl a 900 series outside the United States. Not even an American PBA bowler has done that. The PBA tour's high three-game series is held by Jason Hurd, who bowled an 889 series in the 1999 Tournament of Champions in Overland Park, Kansas.

And if you think that 900 series is something, you won't believe this! Robert Mushtare, a 17-year-old from Carthage, New York, is not only the youngest bowler to have bowled a 900 series (that's three perfect 300 games, or 36 consecutive strikes) approved by the United States Bowling Congress, but he is the first bowler (period) ever to bowl two 900 series approved by the USBC. Local cable news channel News 10 Now even did a story on this event.

You think that's incredible? Well check this out! Brandie Reamy from Livonia, Michigan, is the youngest female bowler to bowl a perfect 300 game approved by the USBC. How old is she, you ask? She's not even in her 20's. She's not 17, not 16, not 15, not even 13, but 12 years old. That may not sound like much when you consider that the previous holder of this record, Nicole Long, was only a month older. But that record was set 11 years before Brandie Reamy set her new record. So anyone that young bowling a perfect game is outstanding.

Most of those are only within the United States, but Wethington's world record is nothing like that at all. In fact, it's probably far beyond what you would expect or even believe. Are you ready for this one? Wethington's record is for--oh yeah, I forgot to say that it has nothing to do with scoring. Okay, now that I've pointed that out, let's move right along. Wethington's record is for--the longest amount of time of continuous bowling. (Fooled you there for a second, didn't I?) So how long was it? It wasn't 12 hours. It was greater than that. It wasn't even 24 hours, and it wasn't even 48 hours. it was 54 hours and 4 minutes of non-stop bowling.

Here's another one from FreshTribe.com. Have you ever tried a new challenge when bowling, such as bowling with your left hand (assuming of course you're right-handed, otherwise bowling with your right hand) or even bowling backwards? This guy tried bowling backwards, and you wouldn't believe how he started doing that and how well he does it.

This isn't another article about Superman at the bowling alley, but about a video I found of a professional bowler doing his split-second impression of Superman, or an impression of Superman trying to fly with a ball that he doesn't realize contains traces of kryptonite, however you want to look at it. The pro bowler steps up to the line and makes his approach, and on his release--well, let's just say there was no release.

The new "Superman Returns" movie just started. When I heard about it, I started thinking about the old Superman movies. That made me remember the bowling alley scene from Superman 3. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any video clips of what happened, but I was able to find a script for the movie and a full synopsis of everything that happened. The way I remembered the bowling alley scene wasn't quite how it actually happened, but there was one part of it that was unforgettable, and I'm surprised it didn't get a whole lot of attention.

I recently put up a blog for FunBowlingTees.com mostly for news about this site, but also to share interesting news about bowling and anything else interesting I find occasionally. But when I searched the Web for other bowling blogs, from which I could find information in to post and link to in this blog, I was pretty disappointed. I found some bowling blogs which were good, but they were more of a personal nature--people bragging about their high scores and hot streaks and talking strictly about their personal experiences with bowling. In other bowling blogs, the entries were just a mish-mash of photos and stuff with little substance thrown together, and they actually called it a blog. Again, some were really good, but contained little (if anything) that would be considered useful, informative, entertaining, or interesting in any other fashion to me and other fellow bowlers. Just stuff about themselves. One or two others had information and statistics about bowling tournaments. They were very good, but not what I was looking for. But after hours of searching and searching, there was one blog that managed to actually hold my attention for .001 microseconds (or so it seems--more like 5 seconds or so) without me just skimming through it.