18th Asian Tenpin Bowling Championship

Bruce — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 17:12:32 GMT

18th Asian Tenpin Bowling Championship

They say that "CLOSE" is only good in Horseshoes.

By John Forst

Have you ever worked on something hard enough that you thought you covered all the bases and then have it fall apart right in front of you? Have you ever watched something happen right in front of you and everyone around you sees something different? This is how the 18 th Asian Tenpin Bowling Championships held in PS Bowl Bangkapi in Bangkok Thailand went as the results of the tournament were nothing near what I would have expected or predicted. The tournament was so close to being perfect. We seek fairness for the ability to score well with good shot-making between the right handed bowlers, left handed bowlers (and the spinners who bowl mostly in the Asian zone), yet the spinners won 8 out of the 12 Gold Medals. Go figure !!!

The tournament was designed to use two-patterns with the long pattern being 43-feet, and we had hoped they would play on the inside part of the lane. The ratio was 2.60 from 20 board to 2 board and the pattern was symmetrical, as it had 24.43 mls of conditioner per lane. The short pattern was 33-feet and designed to play on the outside part of the lane (also symmetrical in shape) with 21.7 mls and a ratio of 4.00 from 20 board to 2 board. The ratios would normally represent a higher scoring tournament then what we ended up with. The bowlers would bowl 6-games on both patterns for the singles and doubles events and then bowl 3-games on both patterns for the trios and team events. In the Masters event they bowled 8-games on each pattern. We did use Prodigy for the conditioner and Pure for the lane cleaner. In the most recent 2 pattern tournaments we were involved with, the higher scores came from the longer pattern so we adjusted the patterns so to try to equalize the scores from both patterns. The graph below shows that we did accomplish this task as these numbers are for all the bowlers who participated.

Men Long Short Women Long Short

Singles 186.02 184.56 181.58 179.31

Doubles 187.73 185.81 183.04 181.26

Trios 188.66 187.25 178.28 177.96

Team 185.80 186.40 181.00 179.16

Masters 200.82 203.16 192.96 193.44

As you can see by the averages, scoring was not high considering these were Asia 's best bowlers. The lane surface was AMF HPL and only 8-years old. The lane surface did have plenty of topography issues which caused some pairs to be quite awful and that showed up on most of the score sheets of the "normal style" heavy-hand bowlers. The spinner bowlers dominated the Gold Medals that were being contested, yet take the Gold Medals out of the equation and the rest of the medals were split among all styles of bowlers. Throughout the tournament, I kept thinking that the tournament results were going to change and the heavy ball bowlers were going to strike and spare a little more once they will figured out the tough pairs, but it just didn't happen. Because the spinners won the Gold's, the "social" outlook of the tournament seemed like a failure. Unfortunately, spinners in Asia are regarded the same as left-handers are here in the States, and when they win, it is because something went wrong. Simply stated, the spinners won the Gold because they bowled the best and the idea of the game is to knock over all ten-pins in either one shot or clean up the rest on the second shot. I can talk about bad pairs, but there were enough missed single pin spares to cost several bowlers several medals including Gold and a whole different outlook on the tournament.

How so close - can "look" so bad.

As I stated earlier, a lot of little things can cause the tournament to go bad socially with very little evidence to back it up. Pin-carry is one of those things that bowlers don't think about after a tournament is over. Just once I would like a coach or some scoring system to keep track of strike percentage for bowlers in every game for every tournament. If you look at this tournament and just gave all heavy handed bowlers just one strike anywhere within every three game block, they may have raised their averages by 5 to 8 pins - then we wouldn't have had any spinners getting any medals. Many of the coaches were asking me why the spinners were winning. I had them take out the score sheets of their best bowlers and told them to find just one, 9-spare or 9-miss in every three games and if they substituted at strike in its place, chances where another strike would be right next to it and they would have had a different outlook in the tournament. It was plain as day when you go back to the score sheets and analyze what had really happened after the emotion of the moment is over.

Now pin-carry may be part of the problem, but at the pre tournament inspection I was promised by several people at the tournament site that they would have new pins for the tournament and I instructed them to have them in the pinsetters 2-weeks prior to the tournament. When I arrived for the tournament, not only were the new pins not in the pinsetters, but the new pins the center was referring to was actually just new pins for that center and not brand new. When they were finally put in 2-days prior to the tournament, I did inspect them as they didn't appear anywhere close to new. These pins had been used and stored somewhere else and heaven only knows where they were stored, but I guarantee that they were not in any place dry. These supposed new pins (AMF Amflite) acted like logs and didn't change much through the tournament.

In a tournament of this magnitude we usually will be at the site quite a few days early to put the patterns out on the lanes. If the patterns don't play well, or are in need of a little adjusting, we will have time to adjust them and then we can have that information ready for the Team Managers meeting prior to the tournament. Several of the teams showed up 2 to 3 days early to the practice days, so I did get a good look at ball reaction from several bowlers except for one main group, the spinners. With the managers meeting the night before those two practice days, the pattern could not be adjusted or changed, so I needed to be 100 % sure. I didn't see any reason to make any changes to the patterns and the bowlers made it look as if the scoring pace would be a little higher. Even after the two days of practice I didn't think that the spinners would dominate the Gold's, they looked good on the long pattern but looked to have trouble on the short pattern.

Further comments and evaluations

The last thing that I thought that could have affected and influenced this tournament was the air conditioning in the center. At the pre-tournament inspection, the moment I walked into the center I noticed that we might have a problem. The temperature at the foul-line on the lane surface was 91-degrees Fahrenheit. I was told at that time that the technicians were going to work on the air conditioning problem, but after a few minutes there, I came to the conclusion that the center just doesn't use the air much anyway. The center being on the 4 th floor of a mall that normally turns their air off when the sun goes down; it is not going to help a healthy air conditioner in the bowling center. It was summer monsoon season in Bangkok and though we didn't experience much rain while there, I'm sure that over the past several years they probably have had some moisture enter into the warm center making the cribbing under the lanes swell and contract. This explains the topography issues. When I came back for the tournament they told me they worked on the air but it might not ever be great, so through practice and the first 4-days, the temperature on the lanes varied from 80 to 86 degrees. After enough complaining from the bowlers, officials, and the crowd, and a reminder that the warm lanes are not helping the home team play, on day five - the temperatures did get down to between 70 and 76 degrees.

My final thought was that this tournament was so close to being perfect and with a little more cooperation from the center, and with a little better record keeping giving bowlers better information and better understanding of the sport of bowling by everyone involved, the bowlers some day will have a perfect tournament and hopefully everyone associated with the tournament realizes it when it is over. Could I have done something different? Yes, a lot of things. I could have changed the footage (distance) one way or another. I could have put more conditioner in the middle of the lane to bring the scores up and guaranteed the spinners had no chance. I could have yelled a little louder about the issues in the center. My job is to give everyone playing their rightful shot at the Gold and the two pattern system does do that. It wasn't that the spinners averaged 10-pins higher then the heavy ball bowlers and dominate the tournament; they just won by making more spares.

Naturally this is all hindsight. Being a laneman is much the same as being an umpire in baseball, as we are in charge of making the calls. The difference is that umpires have the luxury of seeing the pitch after it has been thrown. We have to make the call "before" the players bowl. That is what makes our job so hard.

Once again I contend that this tournament was very close to being what we had hoped for. It wasn't perceived as such. Looking at those score-sheets though, still makes me wonder...

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( Short Pattern )

( Long Pattern )

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( Short Pattern )

( Long Pattern )

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18th Asian Tenpin Bowling Championship