Last week was Brunswick's training camp for their staff, once again held here in Topeka, KS. Although I didn't get to spend near as much time watching this year as I did last year, it's really pretty interesting rubbing shoulders with them and even interacting with them. Brad Angelo remains one of the most personable people I'll ever meet. He was trying to hook my wife's 5 year old son up with his little daughter . . This year was a little more interesting, given that the female staffers were invited, which included Carolyn Dorin-Ballard, Joy Esterson, and Missy Bellinder. Caroyln could seem to come off as a little stiff and aloof, but the woman is sooo competitive, she just really loves the sport and really seems more to me like a perfectionist. You'd have to search pretty far through the ranks of the guys to find one with a better ability to focus. Smart smart woman. Missy is personable like Brad, but quieter. Joy seems somewhere in between Missy and Caroyln.
Brad Angelo, Parker, Mika, Del Ballard, Sean Rash, Nathan Bohr, Humberto Vasquez, Tom Sorce, and Andrew Cain rounded out the guys list. There was also another regional guy there too, his name escapes me at the moment. The most interesting thing this year was that Rick Benoit has devised a REAL way to create a golf style bowling game. It's not like pick a split and see how many shots it takes you to knock all the pins down . . he actually laid down all kinds of patterns. One was a checkerboard pattern, some squares were oily, some were bone dry. One had a sandtrap in the middle of it, and so on and so forth. His pitch is that bowling is the only sport in existance where the course is invisible. People credit golf with being one of the tougher games out there . . but you can see the sand traps, you can see the water, you can see the tall grass, you can feel the wind. A lane with a house shot on it looks nearly the same as it does with a sport pattern on it unless you take a magnifying glass out on the lanes and inspect them all. And unlike golf, where only the pin position changes from time to time, the oil changes every shot. Maybe not drastically enough to notice for a game or two, but it does. You get the idea. Fun stuff.
On to other things. Rick Benoit gave the local lane mechanic and friend of mine an Ultra Zone. The guy's a little older than I am, and as talented as any guy on tour. Punches it up, first 3 in league give him a 300/819 combo. Next night, I shot 300/813 with my Blast Zone, both were on the first nights of winter leagues. Nice way to start of the new year with Brunswick. Another guy in town that we bowl with drilled a Twisted Solid. Smoooooth ball. Put some polish on it, and if you can actually miss the pocket with it on a house shot . . I'll just say it's hard to do if you're halfway decent. The local youth girls star drilled a Swarm, and it's also pretty smooth. Nice amount of power. Bob Benoit won our local tournament that features the bowlers with the ten highest composite averages in the city a couple weeks ago, and Rick Benoit's son Kenny won the boys side of it. Kenny lacks a bit on the consistency, but as you could expect from being Rick Benoit's son, man he throws a pretty ball.
To my last topic. I've got a goal for the new season, and it's not honor scores, it's not getting my name in the paper, it's not the normal crap all the local guys go crazy about. I'm really out to change the way the city looks at bowling, and I know I'm not gonna get anything accomplished, but I'm gonna ruffle all the feathers I can. People whine and whine constantly whenever the shot isn't absolutely pristine, because it can't possibly be that they're not good . . it's gotta be the lane's fault or the ball's fault or the lane mechanic's fault. Then when they blow a thousand bucks at nationals and shoot 1500 or less for all events they wonder what's going on. All the talent in the world couldn't make it out of this town with any kind of headstart on the game. This girl in town really has talent, and could really go somewhere, but she has to drive way out of town and spend a lot of money to ever see anything tough or different. Everything in town is centered around this stupid top ten tournament, which requires that you have two different leagues at two different houses minimum, and the highest ten composite averages compete every year in a tournament. For no money at all. People plan their years around this thing, they'll load up on leagues at the house they did the best at the year before, because all extra leagues count towards the composite. I'm so sick of the whining and complaining, and the people who actually want to do more than bowl for pride in some podunk city tournament have to spend a lot of time and money to do that, and most of us don't have it laying around. We have no PBA or sport leagues during the winter or summer, the best we can get is one PBA pattern once a week laid down to practice on during the summer. Everybody keeps trying to think of ways to improve things, but their idea of improving things is to change the shot to cater to themselves. They think honor scores on a house shot or a big average impresses somebody. Nobody wants to contribute anything to anybody but themselves, and I'm sick of it. I'm serious about this, and I want bonafide ideas on how exactly I can go about this, and if anybody's been in a situation like this before. Bowling in town is going south, and I want to bring it around. You'd think that for a town with residents like Rick and Bob Benoit, a former resident in Chris Barnes, and the guy that has the only back to back 300's in USBC national tournament history, things would be in better shape. How do you bring about change without pissing the majority of people off?
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This is Fluffy. He is the Destroyer of Worlds.
