i just had the thought and i assume it's ignorant and i haven't looked into yet, but why not share...
so ten pin bowling is a thing {a sport?}.
i am assuming there is professional bowling. i'm aware that people play amateurly. so yeah whatever, it just doesn't seem that hard. i'm not great at bowling but i've bowled some strikes and stuff, i think most people have. i have gone bowling less than twenty times in my life i would say}. i've seen random people, like people that were in my school class when we did bowling or my brother for example, who also don't bowl but are a lot better than i am and don't find it that hard to get strikes most of the time/often. they don't play, they don't practice, they just turn up and do that. bowling just doesn't seem that hard. fun, but not hard, which is totally fine and cool and great and i'm not trying to fuck with it.
but if you actually practiced bowling you'd obviously be considerably better than the randoms i know, who to my mind are quite good at it. so like, how good can you be? is professional bowling just the first to make a mistake loses? is amateur bowling kind of the same? am i way off?
sorry i had to write so much to get my point across, i'm not sure if it was necessary.
I suck at bowling, like am absolutely abhorrent at the game but have a lot of memories at the bowling alley.
Most of family bowled in leagues and shit from the 70s until the local ten pin shut down a few years back. It was a community thing- hang out with friends/family, get drunk (bowling alley had the cheapest drinks anywhere), smoke weed, have cheap entertainment, fun, and release competitive energy. As someone who grew up around people who bowled at least once a week, what I can say is that to be consistently good at bowling is hard as fuck and takes a lot of practice. My Dad is an upper mid range bowler, probably 180 average. He's bowled one 300 (all strike) game in all the years. He's a dude that's above average, but not pro/sponsored grade (with the exception of road racing) at every game he plays. Talented, focused, and competitive. If he didn't use every game as a to get shit faced, he'd be even better. My uncle is a slightly better bowler who has bowled numerous 300 games but he's a hyper competitive athlete, one of those dudes that was a beast at every game he plays- horseshoes, darts, softball, volleyball, golfing, fuck, even his job of framing houses. Like all those other games, the dude bowled at least 1 day per week for a 3 or so hour long stretch, for decades. Like I said, to bowl well with consistency is hard as fuck.
In a league, they generally bowl 3 games per match. there's 10 frames per game, I think with the possibility of throwing 3 extra balls at the 10th frame- so that's, max, 26 balls at the end of a game, 78 balls bowled at the end of the night. Those balls probably weigh 14-16lbs. That's a lot of work and you'll see a lot of long time bowlers wearing wrist braces. Then, like when shooting pool, there's techniques like spin and English that get put on the ball.
Pretty sure to qualify as a pro you need 205 average.