Time-Based Fee System

When I was a kid Pops used to take us on Sunday mornings to the Daffodil Bowl in Puyallup, Washington. I would prepare for this by watching the PBA tour on ABC on Saturday afternoon, right before Wide World of Sports. The PBA tournaments had the most bizarre made-for-TV structure: After all of the preliminaries, the top five finalists would play four games to decide the overall winner. That is, the number five seed would play the number four seed and the winner would play the number three seed. The winner of that would play the number two seed and the winner of that game would bowl against the number one seed for the championship.

So if you are the #1 seed then you only have to win one game to win the prize money but if you are the #5 seed then you have to win four games in a row! Seems hardly fair, but whatever. But it was during those years when I came to idolize the lefty nerd Earl Anthony and his graceful dominance. There were epic battles against his nemesis, a skinny and swarthy mustachioed man named Willie Mosconi. That couldn’t have been his name because that’s a legendary pool player, but it was something like that. I always rooted for the southpaw and his wholesome bowling and good sportsmanship. Mosconi was clearly a rogue. Most of the time Anthony won and good prevailed. But not always.

On Sundays Pop would take us to the Daffodil Bowl at around 9 in the morning. This seems totally implausible, but I remember (erroneously perhaps) that we bowled under a time-based fee system. That is, we’d pay (Pops would pay, I mean) for two hours of bowling. We owned the lane for two hours and however many games we could bowl was our business.

So we’d freak out and bowl four or more games…

Maybe it didn’t happen this way but it seems like it was this way for a while.

I would like to propose a return to this system. Of course, this would wreak havoc on glacial bowlers like Lintinin, who is in perpetual risk of delay-of-game warnings. At Lintinin’s pace, he’d probably only get one game in every two hours. So this is very interesting to me because it pits Lintinin’s love of the game and Lintinin’s desire to bowl more games with Lintinin’s desire for quality and good scores.

It is not unlike Heat’s Conundrum: Bowl Sober or Bowl Well?

I encourage the Syndicate to lobby your local bowling stadiums to return to a Time-Based Fee System. A return to the Golden Years, The Halcyon Days of Speed Bowling.

Think of it.