Yeah, and it slows down time. This is still a great accomplishment. “I thought for sure it would work,” he tells me. Whatever your race, creed, politics, gender, a lot of people at some point in their lives have thrown a bowling ball down an aisle, down some sort of alley.
(According to Gilmartin, who spoke to me from his home in rural Montana, it has also won him invitations to speak on love-shyness in Japan, where as many as one in four unmarried men in their thirties is a virgin, a disruption in romantic patterns that has been linked to a decline in Japanese job security. It takes him awhile, but eventually Fong says he’d rather be alive.
Right.
Was it difficult to balance your role as a journalist with your experience of the situation as just a human being, reacting in the moment to something you disagree with?
The fact that he missed perfection by the last pin on the last roll—that makes the whole thing more human, less robotic. Even his own website is no good anymore.
And so I was really surprised. But here’s the thing: While I wouldn’t call Michael handsome, he struck me as a fine, average-looking guy. Because there are kind of cliffhangers at the end of each section as well.
They mention it every week, without fail. Fewer as the story goes on, I think. I get the impression that Michael is thinking out loud—jumping between explanations in a search for the most palatable way to justify the site’s ongoing existence. He tried to push through it.He lined up and threw a ball without much hook on it.
When you say slows down time, it slows down time for the people who are watching it, but are you thinking from a writer’s standpoint as well?
When you think a 300 is rare, then you never even think about a 900. “The best way to describe the first 300 was just ‘powerful,’” Race says.One of the Super Bowl employees announced Fong’s name and score over the loudspeaker, something Fong is a particular fan of. For 10 years, through career changes, through his divorce, through his move to Dallas (several family members had moved to Texas for various reasons and he’d always enjoyed visiting), Fong played golf.
But this just seemed like the most obvious place to put that.
Bill Fong’s run at perfection started as most of his nights do, with practice at around 5:30 pm. “Is Bill Fong switching balls?” the man called out to his friends incredulously.Fong grinned and turned back toward the lane.
I don’t think originally it was conscious. “Looking back,” Fong says, “I guess bowling just always filled whatever emptiness I had.”That night, people were still coming over to congratulate Bill Fong on the 300, when he did something unimaginable: for his second game, he switched bowling balls.
In this world, his life did change, right?
Association is dangerous. There’s almost never a time when every decision you make is correct and every step is in the right direction. But women?
“She started kissing me,” Michael recalls, obviously still a little proud. Fong looked dizzy as he walked back to the ball exchange. On other Nieman Sites. It’s not on video.
Especially, you know, if you feel like you’re doing battle with those pins.
How important was it for you to nail that description? Probably like 15 to 20, including two or three of his really, really close friends.
That’s a very Bill Fong thing to say. He was in his car, listening to the radio; immediately he pulled over and contacted another of the site’s administrators. Were you surprised that Fong’s teammates weren’t necessarily as serious about bowling as he was?
Lane five, for example, has a higher strike percentage when people throw straighter. looks and money….”“I think feminism is the most destructive force in history.”On one of the site’s forums, there’s a notice thread at the top welcoming women: “If you’ve come to LS.com because you think you are LS or incel yourself, tell us your story in good faith, and don’t expect any special treatment by virtue of being female (no ‘pussy pass’), and don’t be surprised if we tell you what we think, not what you want to hear. This is a lovely, subtle sentence that drives home exactly Fong’s point, that his life hasn’t changed, that it wasn’t amazing, that it’s just the fodder for another Monday night at the Plano Super Bowl.
“I skim them. Just last fall, Chris Harper-Mercer, the 26-year-old who killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, was posting online about being “involuntarily” celibate.What set Rodger apart from other “virgin killers” (as headlines have dubbed them) was that he left an extensive digital footprint in an Internet world dedicated to men complaining about their solo state. As he stood in front of lane 28, he felt numb. Explaining why he spends less time on love-shy.com these days, he says that many of the regulars have moved on, replaced by a generation whose posts don’t interest him. He has all of these little notes in his records that he’s kept. “We did have sex,” Michael says, shrugging. Gilmartin presents himself as an expert, but clearly he has credibility issues — and you’re careful to make note of that.
As the clutter at the end of the lane cleared, he could see the nine pin (the second from the right on the last row) still standing. But after all those years of playing nearly every day, he still wasn’t a scratch golfer.
He could tell from the sound of the pins. A few were embarrassed that they hadn’t come over after the first 300. Story Annotations June 21, 2016 Annotation Tuesday: ... To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button below the byline, up and to the right. It’s not a bowling story; it’s not a story about perfection.
Could you talk about how you made that choice?
Nobody is as serious about bowling as he is, that I’ve ever met probably.