Bowling Memories

The ball glided along its path, diagonally straight at first before correcting itself and swerved inwards, heading for the white pins at the end. Only that it completely missed the pins and ended in the gutter just inches away from the targets

"You might want to try standing a couple of boards further along there," he said.

I adjusted. This time the bowling ball hit roughly around the centre, hitting down a few pins. Holloway just looked on and a gave the briefest of nods - he was (is?) a quiet man whose face didn't show much emotion.

"Try again"

Eventually, he recommended that I should use the helicopter method - heavily favoured by the Asians, rather than the hook method, which I preferred because it looked cooler, slicing through the pins diagonally.

During another coaching session at Pyramid Bowl, I noticed a young girl practicing, donning a waterproof jacket in Malaysian (or was it Selangor?) colours. She was around 16 years old, and she was hooking a 16 pound ball (if memory serves me correct), which was very impressive. (Face it, girls who play bowling casually usually never ever use a ball heavier than 11 pounds). Out of curiosity, I asked Holloway who she was.

"Oh, she's my daughter"

That was over three years ago. Holloway became the national coach a few months after. I saw her face again a couple of days ago, this time on the newspapers. Esther Cheah - she's the new world bowling champion for 2005. Congratulations, and my hats off to her for achieving it. As for me, I gradually grew bored of it when I was abroad, especially when there was no alley within easy access and it got too expensive.