2004 Norwegian Open Super Series Stop #3

Super Series Tournament in Norway

By: Steve Cross

After an absence of more than a year, The Foundation returned to the Scandinavian Countries to provide the lane maintenance for the Super Series Tournament.  I had the privilege of going to Norway for this event, the 2 nd Norwegian Open. This particular tournament was contested at Bowling 1 Lanes in Moss, Norway from September 25 th thru October 3 rd , 2004.

Since this is my first time being in Norway, I always like to start the "lines-of-communication" early. During this time period (as you all might know), Florida was just getting over hurricane Charley. This catastrophe left Floridians without power and all phone lines down for a week, some places longer. If that wasn't inconvenient enough, here comes hurricane Frances which took the same track, but from the other side of the state. Tracking both hurricanes, both of their paths came through Lake Wales, which we all know is where Kegel's new facility is located.

I flew out of Orlando to Oslo on the 21 st of September with Hurricane Ivan buzzing the west coast of Florida and going north to the panhandle, and hurricane Jean and Karl following me up to Norway. Finding out later in the week that "Jean" decided to take a left turn and end up in my own back yard creating more damage, as if Charley and Frances didn't do enough damage.

I arrived in Oslo, Norway where I rented a car and took the hour-and-a-half drive to Moss where the tournament was being held. I had three days to set up and to determine the pattern.  The oiling pattern was based on a prototype that we started with for this Tournament. Bowling 1 Lanes has 16-lanes with a 5-year old Pro-Anvilane synthetic surface. We used a new Kustodian Plus lane machine; Offense-HV lane conditioner and Pure cleaner.

The tournament started on Saturday the 25 th and ended on the 3 rd of October, attracting 340 bowlers, including re-entries and a full "Desperado Squad". It took a score of +81 to make the first cut into match play. All styles left to right were represented and all angles (out, up and inside) were playable. Ball speed and not setting the ball short was critical for good pin-carry and consistency.  I feel as a result of this overall consistency, many of the top bowlers entered fared very well, with: Tim Mack of USA taking 4th place, Svein Roger Olsen of Norway in 3rd, Anders Ohman of Sweden in 2nd and Kimmo Lehtonen of Finland winning the event..

One other note that I would like to mention was the weather which stayed around the high 60's in the daytime and in the low 50's at night with low humidity. This type of weather reminded me of the Indian Summers that I was used to, when I lived in the northern part of the U.S.

Overall, I felt that the tournament went very well, and I can't thank the following people enough; Agnethe Brynhildsen (Bowl Manager.), Egil Hansen (Head Mechanic), Linda Bolstad and Rolf Thommesen. All of the help and the long hours that they gave me helped to make the Super Series Tournament a success.  Hopefully, I can return again next year - without any hurricanes.

If you have KOSI , you may download the pattern by right clicking the KOSI icon below and choosing "Save Target As..." from the menu. Save this pattern to any directory on your hard drive where it can be imported by KOSI.

Click on any of the graphs below to see full size.