By Jim Hagarty
1988
A bowling-crazy friend asked me out bowling, so I went. Unfairly, I guess, I decided not to tell her about my hotshot ability in the sport. This way, I’d get to enjoy the shocked look on her face when I burned up the alley and the scoresheet.
I rented a pair of shoes when we got to the lanes but felt a little unsettled as I watched her sit down and put on the flashy bowling shoes she owns. Her name and address is professionally printed on the bottom of each shoe. Who but a real pro would buy her own shoes and have them monogrammed, I thought.
Throwing a few practice balls, I felt my form returning, and my apprehension subside. Each ball rolled quickly and straight to the trembling pins at the other end of the building and I smiled in satisfaction at the sound of them crashing together as they fell.
I also chuckled to myself as I watched my opponent stumble slowly forward with each ball and dump it on the floor in front of her as if she was dropping it down a well. The ball would sit there for a second, trying to decide in which direction to head, and then start off slowly wobbling down the alley like a drunkard down a sidewalk, working hard to keep from ending up in a gutter. Now and then, a pin would totter and teeter from the impact of the hardly moving ball, and finally fall over gently, almost silently, on its side on the floor.
“Nice shot,” I’d say. And then add to myself: “Heh, heh, heh!” In fairness, I reminded myself that my friend had just recently had a baby, but it was she who had instigated this match, not I. If she wasn’t up for it, she shouldn’t have challenged me.
The first game unfolded as it should, though I wasn’t all that pleased with my performance. I managed only a 174 but at least it was better than the 145 points the drunken balls tossed by my friend had managed to tip over. The second game would be a different story.
At the beginning of Game 2, I noticed my friend squinting as she filled out the scoresheet and fumbling with her fingers to take each ball from the ball rack. Acting, in short, as if she was only partially sighted.
“I lost a contact lens the other day,” she explained when she noticed I had noticed, “and I split the other one. So, I can’t see too much.”
“How much can you see?” I asked.
“Well,” she smiled, shyly. “I can’t see the pins.”
“What do you mean you can’t see the pins?” I demanded. “How do you knock them down?”
“See that little black arrow set into the floor at the foul line?” she asked me. “I just aim for it and hope the ball goes down the middle.”
In her second game, the ball went down the middle quite a bit. Mine on the other hand, avoided the pins as if it was a child and they were a swarm of bees. She could hear herself getting strikes and spares. I could see myself rolling down the gutters.
She beat me 183 to 152.
The competition turned ugly. Sighted or unsighted, new mother or not, the sporting lust for victory had overtaken all thoughts of compassion. Where I had wanted to win, now I had to win.
Game 3, the deciding match, was a nerve-wracking event. I fired a strike. She wobbled a strike. I blasted a spare. She wobbled a spare.
Gleefully, she beat me 192 to 169.
I could hear her laughing.
At least she couldn’t see me crying.
