So the DUMBO (DaNang Unadvertised Moronic Bowling Organization) continues to grow in numbers and we had a very successful outing yesterday that saw us occupy nearly ever single lane in the alley. If we continue to get more and more interest we may have to start to pre-book the entire lanes before we arrive. We used 8 of the 12 lanes yesterday, and if we were to turn up with what is now becoming close to 30 people on a week and they didn't have all the lanes open, we would be in big trouble and have to turn people away - which would make some members, including me, rather upset.
My opponent this week is known as "Goro" and most of our members have no idea that this is a Mortal Kombat reference but him and I do, and that is enough. I was concerned about facing him because he is a 130-ish average bowler, which is right around what you can expect of me also. However, my one advantage is that he has zero experience being in the championship lane and even though the reward is nothing other than glory and a plastic WWE replica belt, a lot of people crack under the pressure. A lot of this has to do with the fact that then entire lanes watch our progress because the top award is on the line.
I must admit that a great deal of the time I kind of wish that someone would defeat me, so that I could go back to just casually bowling rather than being super-concerned about my every move and every failure.
One thing we discovered by having so many people turn up with regularity going on 3 months now, is that that lanes have stopped BS'ing us about lanes 1-4 not being functional. In the past we had no ability to play on these lanes because they claimed they were broken. Now I don't know if that was ever actually true, but they were open this time around and it is a good thing that they were because there were too many of us there otherwise. Thankfully, there was only one other lane occupied by customers so we had plenty of space.
On to my performance
I had an amazing first game and I think that this demoralized my opponent a bit. We both bowl with a spin, so picking up spares is considerably more difficult for us than it is for other players. This is particularly true for any pins that end up on the right side of the lane for a spare pickup because both of us spin right-to-left.
Despite this, I managed to bowl incredibly well in the first game, scoring a 165. My opponent, who is normally a 130 ish bowler, barely broke 100 with a final score of 102.
This means that he enters the second game already down 63 points since the title is awarded to whoever has the best average score between the two games.
I don't know what happened to me in game two, but it was not championship level bowling skills that I exhibited.
That's my score in the middle there. I have been doing weekly bowling at these same lanes for 5 months or so and I have never bowled this poorly in all those visits. It is very rare for me to not break 100 but something happened and I just couldn't catch a break or "find my stride" in game two. It was very lucky for me that my opponent didn't improve very much from game 1 because if he had bowled just slightly better than his average of 130 or so, that 63 point lead of mine would have disappeared rather quickly.
Later, in the tag team round my randomly selected partner and I managed to scratch together a total of 110 points, which doesn't seem like much because it isn't. However, no one else for the 12 total tag teams did very well either and there was a 3-way tie at 114. We settle these ties by having a "sudden death" round where it all gets determined in 1 frame or however many it takes to see who has the most points. It was settled in one round as "RichRash" bowled a 9 and "DangCrap" despite knocking down 8 with an "easy" 2 pin remaining spare attempt, missed them both.
It just pains me a bit that if my team had bowled just a mere 5 more pins, that we would have had that championship as well.
I suppose I am a little glad that we didn't win it, because people in the league might start to get a bit frustrated since I already have 2 of the league's total possible awards (top score of all time at 202, and the championship belt.)
So for now, the belt remains safely in my house for one more week. I have now defended the belt the most number of times than anyone in DUMBO's history has ever done so. The previous record was 4 weeks.
I am sure you can see how incredibly proud of me my dog Nadi is. She loves it!
If you live in DaNang, and I know there are a few people on here that do, please do come and join us!