...."I didn't shoot well", or, "My equipment didn't match up", or, "Should I go to a house where I can average 230 like the rest of the hacks?"......
Just a thought............
How did your team do? Isn't bowling (for the 95% of us who aren't consumed by side pot games and brackets, etc.) about putting my three/four/five guys and/or gals against yours and we'll see what happens?
So many times and in so many posts I am reading, "I shot this...and I shot that....and I struggled this and that.....". Bottom line, how did your team do?
I can definitely sympathize with the frustration of not scoring when I feel that I am throwing the ball well, but the main focus of bowling for me is the team competition. I average 218 in a medium-scoring house (not the highest, not the lowest in the Northern NJ area), and shot 265 in my first game last week. And yes, I was p*ssed off!! Why? On my fill ball, I threw a 7 count and we lost the game by a stick. Second game, strike in the 9th, buried the first ball in the tenth, and dead-wrapped a 10-pin, losing us the game by 5 sticks. By the way, that was a 279 game. Was I p*ssed off? H*ll yes.
I don't participate in the scratch pot, but from what I've heard, I have been staked every week by someone in the center. Don't care who it is, I wish them lots of success. My 265 and 279 both won the pot by over 2 marks (usually much tighter from what I've heard), but the point is that our team lost the games. So that 700+ is a failure, since we got our salad tossed 20-8, on a position round. As it would turn out, I shot 205 in the last game, the only game we won.
Please don't get me wrong. I am not criticizing, but I am just finding a much more prevalent de-stressing of the team concept lately. I think that, more than some other factors cited on this board, this may be the misguided direction that we are taking our bowling into.
We all know (in 90+% of our formats out there, unless you are a pro or in a singles league) that bowling is a team sport. Could it be the reason that our sport is getting a "bad rap" as some of us lament, is that we are TO'ing ourselves. We never hear Albert Pujols talk about an individual performance, nor Kevin Garnett, nor the consummate team player, Tom Brady....
Brady/Garnett/Pujols are the 180 guys I would love to fight to the death with on my bowling team, not the 230+ guy in Dallas.
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"Enjoy every sandwich."
--a cancer-ridden Warren Zevon's reply to David Letterman's question of, "What have you learned from life?"
