Bowling Lefty -- Garbo

 

One day during the winter of 1995-1996, I suffered a dramatic elbow injury on the right side. After surgery and physical therapy, I regained use of my hand and arm, but I could no longer bowl right-handed. I decided to learn to use my left hand, and took my bowling ball down to the local pro shop to have the finger holes filled in and the ball re-drilled lefty. The shop was amazingly convenient to me, as at the time I lived three blocks away.

 

 

 It's a very old-school storefront place. As small as it is, it has a short practice lane in it so I could try out the re-drilled ball. 

 

 

 

"A lot of people find that they can change their approach when they switch hands," said the pro shop guy. "The old way gets set in your mind and it's hard to change once you do the approach a certain way."

"I see what you mean," I said, hefting the swirling blue bowling ball and giving it a few swings along my left side. 

I didn't share my personal bowling history with the pro shop guy, but I'd always carried a fair amount of stress around getting a bowling ball down the lane. My very practical mom had a Correct Method for everything including bowling. She was short and stocky and she flung the ball forward almost like pitching a softball toward a troublesome batter she was hoping to clock"accidentally." In short, Mom used the Fred Flintstone whammo!! style, where sheer force was supposed to scatter the pins which would then roll away from sheer fright. 

But as a teenager I was the tall Betty Spaghetti type, without a lot of upper-body strength. I needed to do more of a swoop and bend in order to lay the ball on the lane. I was truly incapable of propelling a twelve-pound sphere like a cannonball. And it wasn't my style, personality-wise. I've always preferred to sneak up on the pins when they aren't looking, tossing a casual spinner that doesn't look like it's doing anything, then suddenly whirls up behind the head pin, creating total havoc in Pinville.

I never won any trophies during my last years as a league bowler, but not only did I knock down more pins as a lefty, but I did it with a lot less stress. I could move from stance, into a fairly graceful approach and delivery, and because I'd changed the whole pattern, I didn't get a glitch when I could feel my mom's long-ago dismay that I was doing bowling wrong. 

Over the last ten years, I've only bowled publicly at children's birthday parties or as part of a group when someone was visiting from out of town, and in these pandemic days, I don't know if there's bowling, masked or otherwise, and even if there was, not sure I'd go. An age thing as much as a virus thing; the last time my spouse and I bowled, we both had our own versions of a backache, and that was New England candlestick bowling with the small fingertip bowling balls.

But I do still bowl -- in the living room. Ah, the joys of Wii Bowling! A six-ounce plasti cremote instead of a ball that weighs 14 or 16 pounds, no weekly dues, and the scores are only in the Nintendo system and not a matter of public record. And what a spin I can put, bowling lefty, on that virtual bowling ball!

Next week: A return to the series on Greta Garbo's movies

Garbo