Grodence Here: My latest blog post is a feel-good story about an underdog duo achieving something far more than they could imagine.  This is the story about me, my friend Ken, and our bowling season this year.

Ken and I have bowled in a league called Dave’s Doubles for several years now.  Dave’s Doubles consists of two person teams, or pairs competing against other pairs of bowlers.  The idea started when Ken and I would bowl recreationally, and I saw that he could knock down his fair share of strikes.  I had been bowling for a few years in two different leagues, but I was tired of bowling with people I did not know at all.  So, I approached Ken with the idea that we could bowl together, and he liked the idea.  Many leagues have four or 5 people competing on a team, where it would take 2 and a half hours to bowl three games against other teams, but Ken was not interested in bowling for over two hours each week and frankly, neither was I.  Because it takes less time for two pairs to bowl three games than two 5 person teams, Dave’s Double’s with its format was perfect for us and we would be done in less than an hour and a half.

Dave’s Double’s always plays their league with two halves of the season, from September- December and from January to April.  We accumulate points for the first half of the season, and when the end of December comes, we revert to 0 points and have a chance to do better or worse in the second half of the season.  You could get 65 points and be in 12^th place for the first half, and 95 points and be in 5^th place for the second half, for example.  Your place in the standings after each half determines how much total prize money you get at the end of season. 

Even though we had fun bowling, we competed against people who were great in the sport, some who have bowled for decades in two or three leagues a week.  In all but one year, I have had the lowest average in the league.  So, we always were finishing near or at the bottom of the standings each half of each year.  We were like the old Washington Senators baseball team, “First in War, First in Peace, Last in the American League, without the War and Peace.  You could also say that we were like the Division II college football team that all the Division I teams play the first or second week of the season and trounce.  This year was very bipolar for the two of us.  From September-December, we got 80.5 points, our highest number of points ever and finished tied for 15^th out of 20 teams.  But from January to April, we got our third lowest point total ever, with 42.5 points, 34.5 points less than the second to last place team.  Then we got to the end of the season, and that is where the story really begins.

          

After we get our prize money at the end of the season, we have the option to play in tournament called “The Eliminator”.  How it works is any team that wants to compete gets assigned a lane, bowl two games, and the ten pairs with the highest total score, including handicap, move on to the second round.  The remaining ten teams bowl one game, and the top 4 scoring pairs from that group move on to the final round.  The final 4 pairs bowl one last remaining game, and whoever gets the top score there wins the tournament.

In the past, Ken and I would never make it past the first round of “The Eliminator”.  But this year, we bowled our first two games, and I bowled particularly well those two games.  As we were finishing up our second game, I looked around and compared our total score to that of our fellow competitors, and I noticed that we were more than holding our own.  I told Ken that I thought that we could make it to the second round, and we ended up getting the 5^th best total score out of 16-17 teams.  I was thrilled that we had advanced.  In the second round, we got the highest total score out of the remaining competitors and moved on to the final round!  I felt that we already exceeded our expectations by advancing to the second round, so moving on to the Final Four, so to speak, was incredible.  It felt surreal.  Our Cinderella Story ended there as we finished fourth, but we still ended our season on a great note.  We also won 125 more dollars as a pair by advancing to the final round.  We succeeded not by bowling the highest scratch games out of everyone, but by bowling higher than our bowling averages.  By beating our average in each game and taking advantage of our high handicaps, we scored enough total points to help us advance in each round.

I will be honest, I was thinking about the possibility of us bowling in a different league next year because of how poorly we were playing the second half of this season.  I wondered if our opponents were too good for us to compete against.  I abandoned those thoughts after a few weeks, and in “The Eliminator” tournament, we advanced past many pairs who beat us handily in during the season, and who are better than Ken and me.  It made me very proud of us, and it validated our time spent bowling in Dave’s Doubles.  It makes me very excited about how the two of us will bowl starting next September.

There will be a blockbuster movie adaptation of our past season in Dave’s Doubles starring Jonah Hill as me, and Ryan Reynolds as Ken.  Look for it to debut in theaters probably never.