I have become known as the Kingslayer in our bowling group because it is now twice in as many months that I have gone from being relegated to the 2nd division, to getting promoted from that division, to **immediately being randomly drawn to face the overall champion." In both of these situations I shocked the group by beating the reigning champion on both occasions. These were not paper champions either, in all of 2024 these two guys have held the top award for the longest amount of time, more than all other participants combined.
In my last taking of the belt, I won by just a few points and nobody thought that I was going to come even close, including me. I did win on that triumphant day though, and then went on to defend the belt once against the guy who has been a thorn in my side and has been around since DUMBO began. Our overall record against one another is now 2-7, with me being the "2."
When my name was drawn last week to play for the belt, I once again had almost no faith that I was going to actually win. I once again was just trying to not embarrass myself and hopefully make a decent showing.
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The first game I started out doing pretty well, not so much with strikes but I think this was because I was playing it safe and really trying to finesse the pins rather than destroy them. I got a lot of spares and ended up with a respectable 149. My opponent, who was a little bit off his game managed a 143. This is certainly exciting from a viewership standpoint but both of us were kicking ourselves a bit because there was a lot of missed opportunities to really blow this thing open and take a massive lead. Neither of us capitalized on it though.
Things would get worse for both of us in game two, me in particular as neither of us looked like we belonged in the championship game at all. Strikes were missed, spares were missed A LOT and the score at the end of game two was 124 for my opponent and an embarrassing 106 for me.
So if you are keeping track this puts me behind by a mere 12 points, which is something that can be made up in a single frame. So things were still very close and I think both of us were thanking our lucky stars that when one of us does poorly, the other one seems to follow suit.
By game 3 both of us were wondering what the hell we have to in order to turn this thing around. Like I said, just 2 good frames, or even just one and a half can put 20 points or more between you and the person you are playing against and try as we may, both of us kept missing everything and by the time we reached frame 4 neither of us had gotten even a single strike or spare. Then some sort of switch went off in my head and I remembered how to bowl
In frame 5 I got a spare, the first of either "championship contender" in that entire game, and then followed it up with 3 strikes in a row. This changes everything because after 1 spare and 3 strikes in a row I tripled my score. My opponent found a bit of steam as well but it wasn't as well as I was doing. I ended up getting 2 more strikes in the 10th frame as well as a spare in the 9th. This turns your score around totally and by the time we got to the end of the game it was 171 points for me, and 127 points for my opponent. This resulted in me winning the entire 3-game showdown by just over 30 points.
I was as much in awe as anyone that this happened and even more so I was on cloud 9 that this is the 2nd time this year that I have gone into these matches as a huge underdog only to win relatively convincingly. The now ex-champion held no sort of grudge against me and was happy to hand over the belt.
In other news someone else, a guy that I previously had taken the belt from only to have him come and take it back 2 weeks later, landed a record-tying 5 strikes in a row and a final score of 214, the highest score of the month as well as all of 2024. Only twice before has anyone in our league gotten 5 strikes in a row and now we have a third.
I went practice bowling yesterday in order to prepare for this week's first title defense that I have to do and was happy to say that I did pretty well with a 3 game score pattern of 136, 163, and 185. In the last game, I looked like I would be a real menace to deal with on the lanes if I can replicate that sort of performance come the official day of Thursday.
It looks like the picture is out of focus but strangely, it is actually the monitor that is out of focus all the time. It pains my eyes to look at it when I am there. Mine is the score on the bottom and I would end up getting two more strikes in a row in that same game. Had it not been for the missed opportunity in frames 3 and the one open frame that I had in frame 9, that score would have been well over 200. To the unfamiliar, it appears as though my opponent (the guy on top) is actually ahead of me but that is not the case. Those two strikes of mine have not yet been calculated because the system doesn't know what your score is after a strike or spare until after you bowl your next one or two balls. In reality, my frame 7 score is AT LEAST 126 even if I gutter-balled on both of my next rolls. I almost never gutter so that is not what happened.
The decision about who gets to face off for the belt is made by a wheel that doesn't have any bias and the people in the wheel are the 4 people in the premiere league who got the 4 highest single-game scores of the day. This time around the wheel landed on the one and only woman who is in the Premiere league. There has only been one time in the history of DUMBO that a woman has been the overall champion and she defeated her husband for the honor. She is about a 125-130 average bowler.
I am trying to not be arrogant about this because she is quite good and routinely has the women's high score for every single month. If she is on her game, and I am not on mine, we could very well have a woman champion for the 2nd time in nearly 5 years. It should be exciting, but me being the pessimist that I am, I fully expect to have the pressure get to me and completely flub it up tomorrow :)