June 30, 2011

Whenever I think I’m basically the same person I’ve always been, all I have to do is remind myself that I actually used to bowl in a Saturday morning league, from around the age of 11 until I was about 14. However, I didn’t really enjoy it, so maybe I am the same person.

Unlike baseball, basketball, and football, at which I always excelled, I simply wasn’t very good at bowling. I reached my personal degree of pseudo-competence after a couple of years and just sort of straggled around in the middle of the pack from that point onward, all the while rubbing a grotesque blister into my left thumb because my grip was wrong, in some obscure way, and the skin would often peel up toward my thumbnail upon release of the ball. It bled a lot, and hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.

Eventually, and after far too long, I put my thumb out of its misery. I was in a tournament in Birmingham, and bowled way over my head— for who knows what reason, I was nailing strikes left and right, and, with my considerable handicap tacked on at the end of each game, I wound up winning a trophy over about 80 other competitors. On the way home, I announced to my mom and dad that I still didn’t have much fun, and, if I couldn’t get a buzz from finishing near the top in a huge tournament, I might as well not bowl anymore. So I quit, right then and there. Like Garbo, I bowed out while I was at my best.

I didn’t pick up a bowling ball again for another 11 years, and even then it was for two desperate games because there’s nothing else to do on a Thanksgiving afternoon in suburban New Jersey. You know, unless you’re Bruce Springsteen.

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My sudden withdrawal from the sport didn’t go over too well in the car that day. I come from a family of Cleveland-style bowlers, you see. My mom, who just turned 75 this past Monday, still bowls in a league, and has done so for over 40 years now, and my dad was also throwing the ball, delicately and gracefully, until the cancer that would claim him made bowling an impossibility.

Dad, a lefty like me, always complained that he’d bury the ball in the pocket, but leave the 7 pin. I’m glad we arranged to have a 7 pin tossed into the furnace when his body was cremated, so he could have it as his own for eternity. He would have loved the humor and good sense of that.

My brother, Jim, is the one, though. He was a pretty solid bowler back when we were kids, certainly way better than me. But, after laying off for over a decade, he started tossing a few games during his lunch break a couple years back. And, lo and behold— he’s now the best bowler I’ve ever known! He’s probably the best bowler you’ve ever known, too, and you don’t even know him.

Jim often rolls games in the 220-230 range, and in 2009 he pulled off a perfect 300 game— that’s 12 strikes in a row, gang! I couldn’t do that if you let me walk down the lane and shoot the pins with a shotgun. Those are legitimate pro-level scores; even Jim can’t figure out his sudden mastery of a sport that he struggled with, just like everybody else who tries it does, for years and years. (The above picture depicts the scoreboard from a game he threw a while back. Joey, by the way, is his son, who also wasn’t too shabby that day.)

I’m guessing Jim’s brain just hasn’t caught on to how difficult bowling is this time around, but it’ll eventually re-grasp reality, much like when Wile E. Coyote strolls off a cliff, then stands in mid-air until he finally looks down, at which point his body falls, his neck stretches like a rubber band, and his head stays in place for a few seconds until it springs downward into the canyon with the rest of his totally screwed being.

I’m not envisioning my brother suddenly plunging off a cliff, mind you. But he may well start averaging 176 again, which is nearly as horrible a fate when you’ve been regularly bowling 230’s.

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So Jim is really good right now, but he’s not the best ever. There was one guy back in the 1940s whose name my dad used to speak as if it was the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx, or, at least, the bowling equivalent of Jim Brown.

That would be Andy Varipapa…say the name out loud, and dig its rhythmic pitty-pat. Now say it again. Now move on.

Varipapa, an Italian immigrant, is unique in the history of bowling, as far as I can tell, because he was a trick shot master. He started out as a mere really good competitive bowler, but I suppose the beer flowed from there - or maybe it was the Chianti - and he started putting on traveling exhibitions in which he pulled off some of the craziest shit anyone had ever attempted at a bowling alley.

Check this out, and don’t forget to note the production techniques that make this brief piece of footage as groovy as Varipapa’s name: the narrator who sounds like your cornball uncle who won’t shut up, the spooky music behind Andy’s “drop-kick” shot, the staged cut-aways that make the audience look like overgrown members of Howdy Doody’s “Peanut Gallery,” Andy wagging his finger while he “admonishes” the crowd, etc.

I guess before they had the Internet, you had to print the name on your shirt much larger if you wanted to get noticed.

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In 1946, Varipapa won the prestigious (or so they say) BAA All-Star tournament, making him the oldest winner ever at the age of 55. Then he won it again the next year, thus becoming the first person to manage the feat two years in a row.

Here’s my favorite of Varipapa’s accomplishments, though, outside of simply thinking up those seriously wacky shots, then convincing some lane manager to let him practice them for days on end— when he was 78 years-old, his right hand started acting up, so he taught himself to roll with his left hand. And, within two years, he was averaging 180!

Forget Jim Brown. This guy had some working-class God in him. I bet that shirt constantly smelled like cigarette smoke, though.

Paul Tatara