The week before I left for Mexico I did something that I have not been able to do at all in 2026 until that day - I won the overall championship for our little league here in Da Nang.
There was a time not that long ago (ok it was a long time ago, years in fact) where I would regularly win the championship and often, I would keep it for a very long period of time once I got it. People were afraid to bowl against me but then my game just kind of fell apart through a combination of me never practicing outside of league games and other reasons but mostly that one.
[src](https://splay.co.uk/cdn/shop/files/Splay-10-Pin-Bowling-Set-10-Pins-2-Balls-Carry-Bag-Bowling-Set-Splay-Large.jpg?v=1788355457)Before I go on I want to let you know that this baby bowling game is super cute, and unless you want to give yourself endless headaches NEVER buy this for a kid you have. It takes ages to set it up and the kid is just going to make a mess of it. Then of course you are going to end up being the pin-setter and you will have to do that over and over and over again. My friend here made that mistake and one day the bowling set just "got lost." It was a remarkable coincidence.
Anyway, winning the championship was something I hadn't expected to do because while I was performing well enough to maintain my position in the premiere league for the most part, it was often just barely enough for me to stay up. We have a pretty solid crew of bowlers here and in order to stay in the top league you need to be bowling around 150 average. I was just barely accomplishing this but the week that my name came up for the draw for the championship I was just on fire and my opponent was missing shots and getting very unlucky.
Whatever the reasons were, I emerged victorious and it was a wonderful thing to win it right as I was leaving the country the following week.
We looked at bowling while I was in Mexico. My family there is aware of how much I enjoy the game. But I was kind of surprised to find out that bowling in Mexico, is friggin expensive. It was going to be around $6 a game and while Americans might think that is cheap, the Asian world doesn't agree. In my league we pay $4 for 1.5 hours of play per person. If bowling was even $4 a game here I don't think I would go very often not because that is too much money but because Vietnam's economics aren't like that and living in this country changes you as far as how much you think things should cost. This is true with almost anything. In fact, I can't think of anything that is expensive here.
[src](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSxQO-LJvdIUUimYjluHUrsNSzLjRBLWpC73gJnsV-CASxrx2rPSChiI6c&s=10)I did take a look at one of the lanes online though and it looked really nice, huge too.
So while I was in Mexico, for nearly a month, I didn't bowl at all and as the rules of our league are, when I returned I was granted an automatic chance to win my belt back just like an interim championship in fighting sports.
I didn't fancy my chances of actually winning but I wasn't going to bitch out. I thought I would lose but wanted to keep it respectable. Then, in my first game, I bowled one of the lowest scores of my adult life with an 83. There was a guy there that had broken his shoulder about 6 weeks ago that was bowling with his off arm and he bowled better than this.
Things got a bit better for me as the games went on but the highest score I got was a 125. I still had fun but that was shockingly bad.
I got annihilated in the championship, unsurprisingly.
It did open my eyes to how important regular practice of certain things are and I don't think all sports or games are like this. For example, I was a pretty good snow skier in my teens and 20's and about 8 years ago I had a chance to go skiing in Korea for the first time in 2 decades. I was still quite good at it. I picked up a basketball for the first time in nearly a decade a few months ago and could still kind of hold my own on the court but there's something about the muscle memory of bowling and perhaps other halfway sports such as golf where I think that if you don't regularly practice you are going to lose almost all of your skill.
I still haven't been practicing and only go on the league days. I have too many other things to do to bother with being in the lanes for a few hours. Our current champion is kind of pissing people off because he goes to the bowling alley almost every day, regularly bowls 200 games and this dominance isn't making the league very much fun for anyone else involved. It's like major league baseball and how the teams with the most money manage to win all the time.
I'm not going to complain though because the current champion is in his 60's and doesn't have a whole hell of a lot else going on in his life.
Will I get better? Well, if you read my stuff you know that this is something that is kind of an up and down thing for me on a regular basis. I could probably sort it out if I were to practice a bit and maybe I will do just that in the future sometime once I can get caught back up on work. I didn't work a great deal while I was on my rather luxurious month long vacation South of the Border, so since there is no money in it and it is just a silly league, that is going to have be put on the back burner for a while.
