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The Art of Bowling, part 2

By JOHN KAFALAS

Earlier this month, I recorded a 4th-place finish in the Candlepin Pro Series playoffs, a season-ending tournament involving the top 40 bowlers in the pro tour standings. I started as the #36 seed and went to the semifinals before losing to the eventual champion. Along the way, several of Josh’s principles came into play.

 

Staying in the present

The day’s agenda: a preliminary round for seeds 25-40, then five rounds of bracket match play. I felt anxious in the preliminary round and had to use a lot of self-talk: Stay in the moment. Believe in yourself. Trust your game – you know it works; do not try to force it. I survived and moved on to match play, where I beat three of the best bowlers in the game, before bowing out.

I know that my game can and will get the job done. But I tend to be too excitable in competition and have sometimes had a problem Josh describes from chess tournaments: investing so much emotion and energy in one match that you’re too spent and lose the next one. I’ve been working on keeping that in check and pacing myself better, trying to avoid putting everything into one match as an end in itself. Josh says, “the solution does not lie in denying emotions, but in learning to use them to our advantage.” That means channeling my excitability into determination and focus. I don’t talk with or even look at my opponent often during a match. After a win (in bowling, when you lose a match, you go home), I try not to react too much or talk about it with other bowlers or spectators; I just drink some water and prepare for the next match.

 

The Soft Zone

In the Pro Series playoffs, my second-round opponent was one of the top bowlers in New England – the winner of this year’s 20-game Easter Classic, in fact. I got off to a quick start and after the first game of the two-game match, had a healthy lead. But early in the second game, just as I was delivering a ball, the public-address system interrupted with a loud announcement related to another tournament going on at the same time. That broke my concentration badly and threw me off my game for a couple of frames, while my opponent threw two spares to cut my comfortable lead to a tenuous one. It was like that moment Josh describes in a chess game, when you have an advantage but then make a small mistake and find yourself in an even game all of a sudden.

At a moment like that, the immediate reaction is to think, “Why does she have to keep interrupting us on the PA? Now I’m in trouble. I had this lead, and the distraction made me screw up and lose it. How am I supposed to get it back against this guy?”

But that’s not what happened. I thought of Josh and said to myself, “Time to make sandals. Stay patient and just get back to business.” I had to trust that my game – which, after all, had staked me to a lead in the first place – was perfectly capable of doing it again. Which is exactly what happened — I got back in gear, defeated my opponent, then won one more match against another of the top bowlers. I finally lost in the semifinal round – but the tournament was my high-water mark as a tour bowler. It also reinforced the incremental theory of learning and the idea that you can always keep getting better. This season was my best ever… but there is still room for improvement.

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