Ten-pin bowler shares top tips
It takes more than fluking a few strikes in a row to become one of New Zealand’s top ten-pin bowlers.
In fact, it takes owning 14 bowling balls, focusing on one of the 39 pieces of wood that make up a lane, practising every spare minute you get and postponing knee surgery, according to Taranaki bowler Mark Francis.
Francis, 45, is off to Australia for tournaments he describes as the ‘‘Bledisloe Cup of bowling’’ in coming weeks before heading off to Hong Kong for his first world championships.
The top Taranaki bowler has no idea how many strikes he’s got in his life but knows he’s the only person in the region to ever get a sanctioned 300 point game – a game with all strikes and all legal gear.
A typical game for Francis involves multiple different soles for his shoes, skin patches for his thumb, different sized fillers for the bowling ball holes, lots of ball spray – and that’s just his gear.
When the game begins he has to stretch his shoulders, get a feel for the lanes and their oil patterns – which can change between games and make the balls move differently, focus solely on the pins he wants to hit and which of the 39 pieces of inch-wide wood in the lane they line up with, kiss his ball and bowl.
Most of the time it’s a strike. If it’s not he usually gets a spare, and if it’s not that it’s not far from it.
He often watches people who play socially and can tell what they’re doing wrong.
‘‘One of the biggest things is it’s called ten-pin bowling, not ten-pin throwing at 100 miles per hour.’’
Francis said people often combine speed with bowling a ball that’s too light and it just bounces off the pins, rather than pushing them all down.
‘‘It’s also about having a consistent shot. And just having fun.’’
Francis started bowling socially in 1992 and began representing Taranaki two years later.
‘‘I was told I had a reasonably good basic technique.’’
He took a break in 2000 and only decided to get back into it a decade later after receiving a call from the bowling club saying they’d found his old gear. ‘‘And I got the bug back.’’ Nowadays Francis has to fit his bowling in around his work and his two daughters Ashleigh, 11, and Sarah, 6, who he often takes down to the lanes. They play, he trains.
‘‘I like the challenge of trying to better myself,’’ he said.
‘‘I’m yet to win a New Zealand tournament – it annoys me.’’
In saying that, he still decided to postpone a knee surgery this year so he could represent the country.
‘‘The doctors said ‘go and bowl, we’ll put the surgery off until next year’.’’