The Man From Hope (B.C.)

2010:

Savoring the Olympic flame as it passed from torch to torch beneath the gaze of a five metre high chainsaw carving of a grizzly bear wearing hockey gear and forechecking a parade of Chinese lanterns, my mind chanced upon the unspoken tragedy of the athletic extravaganza just a few flag parades hence. It’s another even-numbered year, and the assembly of Earth’s greatest athletes is still incomplete. Bowlers in every time zone will continue to push their bodies to the limits of endurance and metaphor, dreaming of the day their passion earns official gold medal status.

In happier days one summer in Seoul, bowlers felt the ancient Greek buzz as a demonstration sport. Barcelona proved to be a bad bottle of Cava for strikers and gutterites, and the sport has not been seen in the games since.  As valiantly as the FIQ lobbies the IOC, bowlers must still content themselves with the annual Bowling World Cup. Popular thinking on the movement has become way too uptight. It is time for Olympic bowling advocates to shift their focus 540 ° and apply for entry to the winter games.

Make no mistake: the winter games are struggling. They are the forgotten victims of a forgotten feedback loop, transporting snow by the truckload to replace the snow melted by their media tents.  Already there is talk of awarding the next 45 Winter Olympics to Antarctica, as that would give each Antarctic Treaty signatory country the opportunity to profit from irresistible penguin mascots before snow becomes extinct.  Brazil, the nineteenth signatory country and thus projected host for 2092, is apparently discussing construction of a mega-resort in the Fimbulheimen range named ‘Reno di Janeiro’.

Bowling is a sport the Winter Olympics needs because it is the perfect sport for 21^st century winters.  Whatever side of the thermocline you float on, you are wise enough to know that in winter it’s better to be indoors.  Here is the world sport that creates a perfect world; no need to wrestle with the vagaries of ice and snow. Winter weather is bad weather, and bowlers make it to the alley no matter how bad it gets outside.

Cynics in need of inspiration need look no further than one of the redeeming triumphs of that old stupid century: the introduction of curling as an official medal sport at Nagano in 1998.  The skips and their sweepers launched their ‘curlsade’ 74 years earlier at the first winter games in Chamonix.  After three more auditions as a demonstration sport, the IOC finally heard the beauty of the Roaring Game after Lillehammer. The saga is a stirring testament to the indefatigable resolve of competitors who wear collared shirts and slippery shoes.

If you question whether the struggle to become an Olympic sport is worthwhile, take a gander at the drama on the rink these next two weeks in Vancouver.  Once you become addicted, imagine that your favorite Bowl Portland teams have morphed into international curling titans, battling on the international stage.  The following estimation of appropriate bowling-to-curling team analogies is based on the Week 6 leaderboard, the 2009 World Curling Championships and the remains of some killer Super Bowl chili.

Binga’s Ringa’s : Canada

The host with the most, Canada is the self-proclaimed Eldorado of Curling.  Skip Kevin Martin, the Boss of the Rocks, and skip Cheryl Bernard, who started throwing rocks at age 8, both know that Eldorado has nothing to do with silver or bronze.

Off Constantly: Scotland

The inventors of the sport compete valiantly under the flag of Great Britain, their monarchical landlords.  The athlete-farmer skip David Murdoch and the young, tattooed skip Eve Muirhead want to recreate ‘the stone of destiny’ that put the Scots on the podium in Salt Lake.  Why does Puerto Rico have an Olympic team, but not Scotland?

Urban Achievers: Denmark

The Danes have an axe to grind with the Canadians over the disputed territory of Hans Island halfway between Greenland and Ellesmere Island.  Fatalist skip Madeleine Dupont and poker-faced skip Johnny Frederiksen are looking to make a geopolitical statement with their pick shots.

Young & Bowled: Switzerland

The Swiss are a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Hard-driving skip Ralph Stöckli, who took silver at the last World Championships, and skip Mirjam Ott, whose rink shoes were stolen last week in Winnipeg, are out for redemption.

Gutterballs: Germany

The two-headed threat from the Bundesrepublik comes in the form of skip Andreas Kapp and his brother Uli.  Equally formidable is the German women’s team skipped by the venerable Dr. Andrea Schöpp, a former wunderkind of the sport who won bronze at the European Championships at age 15.

Livin’ On A Spare: China

The Chinese are new to the sport, but they are learning to dominate. The women’s team, skipped by Bingyu Wang, won the last World Championships. She is the Coco of the Middle Kingdom.

Pinups: United States

Don’t expect to hear much southern twang in these “HARD” calls. Women’s skip Debbie McCormick was born in Saskatchewan and now lives in Rio, Wisconsin. Men’s skip John Shuster is a Duluthian who goes by the nickname Shoostie.

Saucy Posse: Norway

Although the women’s team did not qualify, the men’s team is skipped by a talent the likes of Walter.  Thomas Ulsrud has come close to gold at several recent competitions, and is part of what commentators call “the New World Order” emerging in international curling.

B.E.E.R. : Sweden

The Swedes have a brought case of glögg and a giant bag of nuts and raisins to Vancouver in preparation for a victory party. Skip Anette Norberg, an actuary away from the rink, is the defending Olympic women’s champion, and men’s skip Niklas Edin, a fitness nut like Hungus, is the defending European champion.  The Swedish word for beer is öl and the Swedish word for speed is fart.

Huevos Rancheros: Russia

The proud women of Russia have made the trip alone. The skip, Ludmila Privivkova, and the rest of the team are the self-proclaimed “Girls from Moscow.”  Since one of the primary drivers of success on the curling rink is the ability to withstand cold, this team can never be counted out.

Dirty Half Dozen: France

Without their women, the French men’s team will be miserable but competitive.  Skipped by Thomas Dufour, the French are quite envious of the status curling has in Canada versus their homeland.  They refer to Edmonton as “la Mecque.”

Cracked Bowl of Nutz: Japan

Although the men’s team didn’t qualify, the Japanese women’s team is a rising sun. Skip Moe Meguro was just one frame away from the gold medal game at the World’s in 2008, before the Canadian’s stole a point with a brilliant peel. Revenge is dish best served raw.

Unfortunately, that is all of the countries that qualified for the Olympics this year, leaving the rest of the Bowl Portland teams without a nationalistic curling alias for 2010. The following trivia challenge, however, is open to all teams, and the first correct respondent will be rewarded with a goody bag of Olympic paraphernalia direct from British Columbia:

What countries won gold in women’s and men’s Bowling, respectively, when it was a demonstration sport at the Seoul Olympics?

All in favor of Bowling in 2014 in Sochi say “DA!”

2009:

A Canadian View of BowlPortland, eh.

“Don’t piss on my rug!”

-U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson to Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, April 1965, Camp David, Maryland, U.S.A.

The Canadian Prime Minister was housebroken, but how else could LBJ respond? In a speech a few days earlier at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pearson had suggested that suspending the bombing campaign in North Vietnam might bring the communist leadership back to the bargaining table. Pearson was apparently skilled in the “black arts” of diplomacy, having served as President of the U.N. General Assembly in 1952 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. Nonetheless, it was shocking that a Canadian Prime Minister could be so un-American.

What were the historical antecedents to Pearson’s outburst? Was he avenging the scorn of Thomas Jefferson, who once said that capturing Canada was “a mere matter of marching”? Was he rebuking the incendiary, anti-Canadian, cartographically esoteric 1844 Presidential campaign slogan of James K. Polk: “54°40′ or Fight”? Or was his brazen commentary a symptom of an incurable cultural divergence over the rules of bowling, a fault that began to rift roughly 100 years ago today?

Ten-pin bowling is the sport of kings, enriching the lives of millions in that great democratic experiment Americans call America. Residents of the New England states are familiar with the novel joys of Candlepin bowling, which also requires ten pins. Why Ten-pin bowling has such an ambiguous and inappropriate name is one of the three most puzzling mysteries of modern English. The other two (in no particular order) are: a) Why are some species of sloth called three-toed sloths when all sloths have in fact three toes, and b) Why is the Toronto hockey team called the Maple Leafs instead of the Maple Leaves?

The answer to the ten-pin bowling mystery can be found just across the longest unguarded border on earth circa 2009: the game of five-pin bowling, invented and played exclusively in the Dominion of Canada. The devious mind behind this great schism belonged to Thomas F. Ryan, owner or the Toronto Bowling Club. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, Ryan modified ten-pin bowling to boost business (p. 212, vol. 1, Hurtig, Edmonton, 1985). Sources state that his clientele found the ten-pin game too strenuous, but alternate reality pundits insist that Ryan was driven by an insidious proto-nationalist, quasi-oedipal desire to discreetly modify American pastimes for Canadian consumption (e.g., have you seen what they did to football? Who wants to sit on the 55-yard line?).

Whatever his motivation, the result was a game with five pins that are shorter and squatter than U.S. ten-pins. Each pin is adorned with a thick blue rubber band around the waist that not only causes the pins to fly farther when struck, but also makes them less noisy; Toronto was evidently a cosmopolitan trailblazer in regards to nuisance ordinances. The five-pin bowling balls are smaller too, though New Englanders can take heart that Candlepin balls are still the smallest.

This quirky half-sport might exist only on north shore of Lake Ontario were it not for the extraordinary outcome of the Oregon Crisis of the 1840s. Despite his fiery geomatic rhetoric, two years after election Polk broke his campaign promise and agreed to 49° north as the boundary line from the Rockies to the Pacific. The compromise kept alive the possibility of a transcontinental Canada, but the traditional and sole navigable route down the Columbia River to the sea was suddenly blocked by a new abstract boundary. In 1848, the panicked fur traders of Vancouver Island paddled up the Fraser River to a large bend a few miles downstream from the impassable Fraser River Canyon, featuring the seething, canoe-crushing, salmon-flinging rapids of Hell’s Gate. On a small flood plain surrounded by mile-high mountains they established Fort Hope, as in “I hope we can find a way to Winnipeg from here.”

One hundred and sixty years later, two veteran slingers of Yankee Lanes walked into Fraser Bowl & Racquetball in Hope, BC determined to test their mettle against Ryan’s rules. The five-pin game had beaten its ancestral rival to Hope, traveling over 2,700 miles of the Canadian Pacific Railway (via Winnipeg). The five pins were arranged like a flock of migrating geese wearing speedos. The balls were palmable and chocolate swirled.

Thanks to automation, the slingers were able to focus their energies on shot-making and let the ghosts in the machine do the scoring. It was instantly apparent that all five pins are not created equal; knocking down the head pin earns five points, the next two on its tail are worth three, and the last two lagging in the corners rack up deuces. One can’t help but wonder about Ryan’s affinity for a certain 13^th century Italian mathemagician.

Ryan also gave players three shots per frame, which seemed to conflict with his alleged motive to make the game less strenuous. Like ten-pin, however, a spare was awarded for knocking down all pins in two shots, not three. Because a strike yielded 15, ten frames of perfect five-pin bowling would register 450 on the awesome scale, and any score over 400 would certainly be far out.

Unnerving nuances aside, the déjà vu-already seen quality of the atmosphere stimulated the intrepid aliens to excellence. A black light and disco provided the requisite teenage angst overlay for a classic rock soundtrack featuring a Golden Earring song that wasn’t Radar Love, a Rush (surprise!) song that wasn’t Tom Sawyer, and a Heart song that wasn’t Magic Man. If you can guess all three, you will win a laminated Canadian flag for your car antenna courtesy of BowlPortland.

Lucky winners: as you gaze at the maple leaf wiggling in the breeze, thing of the Right Honourable Carpetpisser Lester B. Pearson. Two months prior to his micturating incident in North Philly, Pearson’s long fought campaign to create a new Canadian flag had come to a successful conclusion. The stylish red and white and leafy pennant, officially recognized by Her Majesty on February 15, 1965, replaced a series of Union Jack derivatives that closely resembled Bermuda’s flag and caused undue confusion at international hockey tournaments.

The triumphant Pearson was no doubt feeling a bit heady in the Spring of ‘65, a condition that may excuse his outlandish suggestion of a peaceful solution to a U.S. foreign policy dilemma. Our heroine, known in some circles as S-Bomb, was certainly feeling heady after she lit up a 182 in her first game of five-pin. Her sidekick was unafraid and unashamed with his 151 + 1. Both resolved to return in search of higher scores, inspired by the notion that you can be proudly un-American, even in a bowling alley.