So yes, I'm an ass who really needs help when I go to post something. It feels like I'm being "nice" when I make the original post, and then I come back a few days later and read what I originally wrote and think, "man, what douchebag wrote this?" Anyway, here's a response I posted to the thread, in hopes to continue some discussion with a much less inflammatory tone . .
Pin spots being off a board are easy to see when you have 20/10 vision and run your city's lane certification . . but I digress. The bowler in the videos has had a lot of success on house shots, and it's not so much how he's throwing the ball, it's how he's playing the lanes with the equipment. He's trying to throw pearl balls in the same place the same way he's throwing bigger hooking balls. He's trying to get pearls to rev through the oil in the middle, where they won't be grabbing, where the midlane AND backend transitions will be later than they should be, and will produce a lazy reaction. He's also trying to get a big hooking ball to turn sideways at the end of the pattern, which they aren't designed to do. He's over-revving them which is getting the ball itself into the midlane and backend stage earlier than the ball is getting to those points on the lane. He's playing the lanes wrong, and throwing the balls the wrong way with the lanes at the wrong stage of transition to be able to play where he's playing.
Chris Forry, on the other hand, plays the lanes right in every single video, and if you'll notice, the ball reactions are a lot more readable, and the reaction is a lot more crisp and clean. If I watch a video from him, and then drill a ball I've seen him throw, I get a very similar look from the ball. Sometimes he's pretty far right with a pretty aggressive ball, and sometimes he's pretty far left with a less aggressive pearl, but it's all finding the best zone of the lane to fit what the ball wants to do. Yeah, you would think if the ball hooks a lot, you would want to be left, and if it doesn't hook a lot, you would play further right, but bowling is pretty counter-intuitive sometimes. If a ball is coming sideways off the end of the pattern, you WANT to move left to get in some oil and get it down the lane and smooth out the transition enough to make it more playable, and at the same time, if a ball is hooking a lot, big hooking balls don't do big or sharp changes in direction, so trying to play a big swing isn't really the best idea with them.
The LF staffers on here are all standup guys like I said, and my buddy is one of them. Got another guy I know here in town that just got on board, and he's a really good guy. I get the idea of using average bowlers, because you'll get a wildly different perspective between what the average guys are seeing and what the higher average guys are seeing. Bowling has become so technical that it really takes a lot more experience to correctly read or "get" what's really going on with a ball, and if they can make the technical stuff simpler or more accessible to the largest group of bowlers, who like storm making it rain said are the 170-200 averages, they're going to be REALLY successful. I think a lot of companies mistakenly believe that all pro shops know what they're doing and that furthermore the bowlers are going to leave the technical stuff to the pro shops. THAT DOESN'T HAPPEN. That's where it's also fairly critical to keep the pecking order the same. If you get a lot of 170-200 average bowlers thinking they know everything, and they start coming in trying to tell their experienced pro shop guys how things need to be, that's a problem. If somebody decides to drill an Exodus Iron to hook at their toes on a dry 35 ft pattern and it "doesn't hook" and then they want us to take it down to 500 grit . . . that's a problem.
Bowling needs help, a lot of it, and a ton of education to the average bowler, and with everybody getting so butthurt and chippy every time somebody points out something wrong, it doesn't help much. Yes, I'm very obviously an ass who needs a lot of help with the way I go about things, and there's reasons for that, but bottom line is that it won't help anybody whether I have good reasons or not. This is all I'll say for now, but everybody gets so offended at absolutely everything that it's really hurting bowling across the board.
