my brother and his gf are big into bowling... they have their own equipment and are in leagues... they got their gear on base (he was in the army) for really cheap...
i like to bowl but i never got serious(guess all the drinking didnt help my scores)... my dad has tons of trophies when he was in the service and in leagues... since he doesnt bowl anymore and if the weather sucks when my brothers come to town(no golf)... i use my dads gear and we hit the alleys
 
I used to bowl in two leagues a week, did the end of year tounaments in Vegas a few times a year. as for a start, I would suggest talking to the bowling shop at your local alley. They guy who ran the one at mine really helped me out in the beginning. Might even have a used ball or two they can re-drill for your hand and save you a few $$$$
 
Any competitive bowlers out there?

Any competitive bowlers out there?

What are your thoughts on the relationships, both physical and mental, between bowling and golf? Which do you think is harder physically, and which do you think is harder mentally?
 
Golf is by far a harder sport, but bowling has it own set of problems with every house being different and no 2 lanes being the same. Use to do both but now I take time and go play golf outside and have a few beers with the guys
 
I play golf with a great kid from Indiana that not only happens to be a great young golfer, he is a even better bowler. Here is a google search of him; http://www.google.com/search?um=1&hl=en&biw=1076&bih=466&q=ej%20tackett&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=iw He is a senior at our local high school. He and his family are members at my home course.

I ask him this very question last summer and he said it is about the same for him at both sports. I bowled a lot in my younger days but haven't played in twenty years I would guess. Bowling was much harder for me I know.
 
I think golf is the harder of the two mentally. There are more situations and possible strategies a golfer faces, whereas bowling is repetitive. All bowling lanes are the same, but golf courses are all different. While I enjoy bowling, i like golf more because of the variety.
 
Well, I have been bowling competitively for about 12 years now and climbed the ranks as a youth bowling to being one of the elite in the nation so I can say with confidence that I know the in/outs of both the physical game and the mental side. I have been a casual golfer for about 10 years, and being a natural athlete, I sort of picked it up with relative ease.

My feelings after being in both games for some time now is that owling is a harder sport physically because of how unnatural the entire swing literally is. Guiding a 15-16lb ball through a course of motion forwards and backwards while walking, and then sliding to a controlled stop, all while maintaining perfect balance has proven to be a much harder thing to do, to me, than all of the different golf shots. There are also just as many minor tweaks a bowler can do to get the perfect ball reaction, that the spectator never sees, as there are in golf for a golfer to make a perfect shot.

Now, as far as the mental game, I think golf clearly wins out because of the drastic number of variables. Don't take that to mean that bowling doesn't have them, because it does. In any given house(alley), you will not have more than 2 lanes that play identical to each other. If you take a machine that is designed to throw a ball the EXACT same way every time and put it on all 40 lanes of a house, all with the same exact oil pattern, you would probably see 40 minutely different shots. The reason for that is that there is a minor tolerance for the construction of lanes that allows for fractions of an inch of difference front/back and side/side. That may not sound bad, but when you factor in imperfect lane machines, humidity, temperature, what other bowlers have done on your lanes, and what is on the line, it all adds up to be quite taxing on the head.

With that being said, even as a recreational golfer, I can clearly see that there are more things in golf that a player needs to be aware of and overcome to make a great shot than there are in bowling.

Also, I believe that golf is a sport, and a damn hard one. Bowling used to be but no longer is. With the power of modern day equipment and the ridiculously easy lane conditions found in 95% of all tournaments/league play, luck has become too high of a factor and the skill of hitting a dime 60' away time after time is no longer necessary. I know consider it a competitive activity to be grouped with the likes of poker and chess.
 
Yes, I have seen the name in articles on bowl.com and also saw when he made Men's Team USA. Seems to have a very bright future.

Yep. I just heard he is going to both golf and bowl for IPFW in FT. Wayne next year. The talk is he plans to go with golf after college.
 
That is the smart choice. There is very little money in bowling and unless you are in the top 3% day in and day out, making a living can be a week to week thing. Makes keeping a love for the game very difficult.
 
Yep. I just heard he is going to both golf and bowl for IPFW in FT. Wayne next year. The talk is he plans to go with golf after college.

Smart move! As a person who bowled for a living in the late 90's, you have to be among the top 5 in the world just to make an average living. Atleast with golf there are many more opportunities to make a nice living.
 
I hear both golfers and bowlers like beer, is that true.

Haha, well I can't speak for any golfers other than my buddies, but as far as bowling goes, I'd say a solid 60-70% of all league bowlers will imbibe an alcoholic beverage of some kind before the league night is over. That accounts for all adult leagues, both serious and not at all serious.
 
Smart move! As a person who bowled for a living in the late 90's, you have to be among the top 5 in the world just to make an average living. Atleast with golf there are many more opportunities to make a nice living.

Regional or Pro?
 
Well, I have been bowling competitively for about 12 years now and climbed the ranks as a youth bowling to being one of the elite in the nation so I can say with confidence that I know the in/outs of both the physical game and the mental side. I have been a casual golfer for about 10 years, and being a natural athlete, I sort of picked it up with relative ease.

My feelings after being in both games for some time now is that owling is a harder sport physically because of how unnatural the entire swing literally is. Guiding a 15-16lb ball through a course of motion forwards and backwards while walking, and then sliding to a controlled stop, all while maintaining perfect balance has proven to be a much harder thing to do, to me, than all of the different golf shots. There are also just as many minor tweaks a bowler can do to get the perfect ball reaction, that the spectator never sees, as there are in golf for a golfer to make a perfect shot.

Now, as far as the mental game, I think golf clearly wins out because of the drastic number of variables. Don't take that to mean that bowling doesn't have them, because it does. In any given house(alley), you will not have more than 2 lanes that play identical to each other. If you take a machine that is designed to throw a ball the EXACT same way every time and put it on all 40 lanes of a house, all with the same exact oil pattern, you would probably see 40 minutely different shots. The reason for that is that there is a minor tolerance for the construction of lanes that allows for fractions of an inch of difference front/back and side/side. That may not sound bad, but when you factor in imperfect lane machines, humidity, temperature, what other bowlers have done on your lanes, and what is on the line, it all adds up to be quite taxing on the head.

With that being said, even as a recreational golfer, I can clearly see that there are more things in golf that a player needs to be aware of and overcome to make a great shot than there are in bowling.

Also, I believe that golf is a sport, and a damn hard one. Bowling used to be but no longer is. With the power of modern day equipment and the ridiculously easy lane conditions found in 95% of all tournaments/league play, luck has become too high of a factor and the skill of hitting a dime 60' away time after time is no longer necessary. I know consider it a competitive activity to be grouped with the likes of poker and chess.

Have to agree with alot of what you said here. Except that with the use of "sport" patterns at alot of the high end tournaments these days, the scoring pace has been slowed and "luck" while still apart of bowling, (as it is with every other sport), rarely determines winners and losers.
 
I agree that there is luck in everything, but I disagree with anyone that says it is the same in bowling as it is in other sports. If a golfer is aimed at the correct target and shanks it, unless it ricochets off a house, rock, or port-o-potty, it will not be a salvageable shot. In football, if a QB throws an arrant ball in to the stands, it will never reach the hands of anyone on his team. However, if a bowler pries a heinous shot off of his hand and misses left at the arrows by 5 boards, he can very easily hit brooklyn and strike without too much stretch of the imagination.

I would equate going to through the face and striking to a ball being thrown, tipped by a defender, and caught by a teammate or a golfer hitting topping a ball on a par 3 with water in between the tee box and green, the ball skipping over the water a couple of times, and rolling up to the safety of land on the other side. Even then, you see a bad shot in bowling rewarded far more often than any other sport I can think of. I could very well be wrong, but I just see way too many people succeed in tournaments because of a good run of luck.

Also, at least in my area, the scratch tournaments on hard patterns are far from the norm. What is out there every weekend is a handicap tourney on a "modified" house shot with nothing but handicap brackets and high game pots. When you do see the once a month scratch tournament, you will be lucky to see 30 people, a payout deeper than top 4, and the winner getting 10x his buy-in. I hate that people around here no longer crave the challenge of bowling someone straight up, just to prove who is ACTUALLY better.
 
I agree that there is luck in everything, but I disagree with anyone that says it is the same in bowling as it is in other sports. If a golfer is aimed at the correct target and shanks it, unless it ricochets off a house, rock, or port-o-potty, it will not be a salvageable shot. In football, if a QB throws an arrant ball in to the stands, it will never reach the hands of anyone on his team. However, if a bowler pries a heinous shot off of his hand and misses left at the arrows by 5 boards, he can very easily hit brooklyn and strike without too much stretch of the imagination.

I would equate going to through the face and striking to a ball being thrown, tipped by a defender, and caught by a teammate or a golfer hitting topping a ball on a par 3 with water in between the tee box and green, the ball skipping over the water a couple of times, and rolling up to the safety of land on the other side. Even then, you see a bad shot in bowling rewarded far more often than any other sport I can think of. I could very well be wrong, but I just see way too many people succeed in tournaments because of a good run of luck.

Also, at least in my area, the scratch tournaments on hard patterns are far from the norm. What is out there every weekend is a handicap tourney on a "modified" house shot with nothing but handicap brackets and high game pots. When you do see the once a month scratch tournament, you will be lucky to see 30 people, a payout deeper than top 4, and the winner getting 10x his buy-in. I hate that people around here no longer crave the challenge of bowling someone straight up, just to prove who is ACTUALLY better.

Very true, but keep in mind that many a perfect shot in bowling may result in a stone 8, or 9, or a ring ten. I know for a fact that most every putt I hit with perfect line and speed going into the center of the cup always goes in. So I guess in this respect "luck" does play a greater role in bowling especially if you count bad luck, too. I must say I appreciate your passion for the competitiveness of bowling. I see you are from Austin, TX. I actually started my short-lived PBA tour career there in 1997.
 
I was never a competitive bowler by my reasoning, but bowled in a league for 17 years. I carried a 195-200 average for a lot of that time while bowling just once a week. I never practiced. I think it is easier to be a "good" bowler. By I mean having a 195 to 210 average, than it is to be a single digit handicap. Being a really good bowler, 210-225 average is probably close to being as hard as being a 4 or less handicap. That being said I've seen guys, including the guy that owned the house where I bowled and was one of the best amateur bowlers in the state, that in no way could be good golfers as they were not, let's say, "built for it."

Golf is harder in general because the number of different shots to be mastered is much higher than in bowling. While you need to determine the line and lane conditions in bowling, most guys are either smooth or power bowlers, it doesn't seem to me that many do both. Weather makes such a difference in golf, and most fine players can hit it left, right, high, low, and in between. Wedge shots alone can be hit a bunch of different ways.

But it's hard as hell to be really good at either.

I think bowling a perfect game is easier than making a hole in one, though I've never done either. LOL.

Kevin
 
Very true, but keep in mind that many a perfect shot in bowling may result in a stone 8, or 9, or a ring ten. I know for a fact that most every putt I hit with perfect line and speed going into the center of the cup always goes in. So I guess in this respect "luck" does play a greater role in bowling especially if you count bad luck, too. I must say I appreciate your passion for the competitiveness of bowling. I see you are from Austin, TX. I actually started my short-lived PBA tour career there in 1997.

Not to be nit-picky, but I've always seen a stone 8/9 as a not-so-perfect shot. It looks pretty, but it is usually the result of a little too much pressure on the fingers resulting in a little too much drive pushing the 5 pin back instead of back and to the left. But I do get what you're saying and that's what I love about bowling. A shot that seems 100% perfect to everyone but the person who threw it can be a shot that he/she instantly knows will not carry the 7, 8, 9, or 10.

And I'm assuming you bowled the Columbia 300 Open? I worked there for a good while and bowled there even longer so it's always fun seeing it on Classic. Did you make the Show?
 
I was never a competitive bowler by my reasoning, but bowled in a league for 17 years. I carried a 195-200 average for a lot of that time while bowling just once a week. I never practiced. I think it is easier to be a "good" bowler. By I mean having a 195 to 210 average, than it is to be a single digit handicap. Being a really good bowler, 210-225 average is probably close to being as hard as being a 4 or less handicap. That being said I've seen guys, including the guy that owned the house where I bowled and was one of the best amateur bowlers in the state, that in no way could be good golfers as they were not, let's say, "built for it."

Golf is harder in general because the number of different shots to be mastered is much higher than in bowling. While you need to determine the line and lane conditions in bowling, most guys are either smooth or power bowlers, it doesn't seem to me that many do both. Weather makes such a difference in golf, and most fine players can hit it left, right, high, low, and in between. Wedge shots alone can be hit a bunch of different ways.

But it's hard as hell to be really good at either.

I think bowling a perfect game is easier than making a hole in one, though I've never done either. LOL.

Kevin

I also agree that it's easier to be a 180-195 bowler than it is to be a single digit handicap. I consider a 5-7 handicap to be equal to that of a bowler averaging 230 on house shots. I think a scratch golfer from the blacks would be equal to a bowler who averages 230+ on any given oil pattern. There's so many variables that go in to determining how good a bowler truly is. Golf has a much more reliable handicapping/average system that the United States Bowling Congress does. Its one of the reasons professional bowlers don't get the respect that they do. When you see Jo Schmoe Bowler average 215 on his Thursday night drinking league and then watch Wes Mallot or Mika Koivuniemi win a Masters title with a game of 211, it's hard to see why they are so elite.
 
Not to be nit-picky, but I've always seen a stone 8/9 as a not-so-perfect shot. It looks pretty, but it is usually the result of a little too much pressure on the fingers resulting in a little too much drive pushing the 5 pin back instead of back and to the left. But I do get what you're saying and that's what I love about bowling. A shot that seems 100% perfect to everyone but the person who threw it can be a shot that he/she instantly knows will not carry the 7, 8, 9, or 10.

And I'm assuming you bowled the Columbia 300 Open? I worked there for a good while and bowled there even longer so it's always fun seeing it on Classic. Did you make the Show?

Yes it was the Columbia 300 open and no I didn't make the show. I was in first after two games though.lol That was my "these guys are good" moment.
 
I think golf is the harder of the two mentally. There are more situations and possible strategies a golfer faces, whereas bowling is repetitive. All bowling lanes are the same, but golf courses are all different. While I enjoy bowling, i like golf more because of the variety.

I respect your opinion, but I completely disagree with some of your comments.

1. Not all all lanes are the same, in fact no 2 lanes are the same.
2. Lane conditions change during the game. The ball will hook more or less, sooner or later, etc...due to balls carrying the oil down the lane.
3. There are numerous situation and strategies to bowling.
4. The mental side is the same. You have to assess the situation, visualize the shot, execute the shot and hope that the conditions haven't changed since the last time you threw the ball. And, if you are not bowling on a tv tourney, you have to do all that while other bowlers are in action very near you.


I carry a 204 average right now in my bowling league and I carry a 4.2 handicap in golf.
While I do like to bowl.....I love to golf. Golf is my passion, but I see lots of similarities in the two sports.

JMHO.
 
I respect your opinion, but I completely disagree with some of your comments.

1. Not all all lanes are the same, in fact no 2 lanes are the same.
2. Lane conditions change during the game. The ball will hook more or less, sooner or later, etc...due to balls carrying the oil down the lane.
3. There are numerous situation and strategies to bowling.
4. The mental side is the same. You have to assess the situation, visualize the shot, execute the shot and hope that the conditions haven't changed since the last time you threw the ball. And, if you are not bowling on a tv tourney, you have to do all that while other bowlers are in action very near you.


I carry a 204 average right now in my bowling league and I carry a 4.2 handicap in golf.
While I do like to bowl.....I love to golf. Golf is my passion, but I see lots of similarities in the two sports.

JMHO.

Well said Drumdog, I give a ton of bowling lessons and the best students are single digit hdcp golfers. Once I explain the similarities, then they take to bowling very quickly. Most people do not realize in todays game how much the lanes change in a short period of time. Personally I started bowling when I was three, just wish it would've been golf.
 
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