Bowling

I returned home late Saturday morning following my shift cleaning our church’s kitchen post-Lenten fish fry and clicked on the television while I kicked my feet up for a few moments.

As I spun through my options I, at first, settled in for several minutes of first-half action of the scoreless Chelsea FC-Leeds United English Premier League match. After it went to halftime, I found myself watching Formula 1 qualifying from Bahrain, before eventually landing on Fox Sports2 and the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA) U.S. Open semifinal match between the fella pictured above, Kyle Troup, and Tomas Kayhko a Finnish professional bowler.

I was immediately transfixed by Troup’s fro and his rather garish attire. And then I got sucked into the action as the two were embroiled in a nip-and-tuck battle to, what I found out later, advance to the championship. So, yeah, I watched 15-20 minutes of bowling action with my son mocking me for it.

“If you can drink beer and eat chicken wings while competing – and you improve while doing so! – it is not a sport,” he cracked.

It was hard to argue, yet there I sat taking in the final four frames as Troup rolled a 219 to Kayhko’s 215 to advance. I read later that Troup fell in the championship to E.J. Hackett (from Bluffton, IN, not far from my hometown!), 221-208.

What those 20 minutes did were take me back to my younger years when ABC Sports would televise the ladder finals each Saturday afternoon with Chris Schenkel and Nelson Burton Jr. on the call of, what was then-known as, the Professional Bowlers Tour.

I always enjoyed watching the broadcasts. I knew Schenkel to be an Indiana native so there was that connection, plus I heard he lived on the same lake in north central Indiana that friends of our family did. And the bowlers of that era are easily recalled by me lo these nearly 40 years later: Earl Anthony, Marshall Holman, Mark Roth, Dick Weber, Walter Ray Williams Jr., and a fella named Guppy Troup (yep, Kyle’s father who was as equally flamboyant).