Vanderbilt bowling rolls to victory in the Music City Classic and heads into the NCAA tournament with a No. 1 ranking
by Steve Haruch @steveharuch
This past weekend, with the calendar showing March and a whiff of spring in the air, Nashville played host to the last major event of the NCAA season before the championship tournament. Squads from around the Southeast and beyond descended on Middle Tennessee to pound the hardwoods, ranging from the more obscure — Kutztown, Hampton, Minnesota State Mankato — to the more familiar — Maryland Eastern Shore, Delaware State, Fairleigh-Dickinson and, of course, No. 1-ranked Vanderbilt.
Oh, sure, if you happen not to follow women's bowling, you may not have noticed the Columbia 300 Music City Classic was happening at all. Maybe you were too busy paying attention to a certain other tournament in town. Or maybe it's because the Music City Classic actually happens in Smyrna. (Things that happen in Smyrna have a way of staying in Smyrna, as it were.) Either way, you missed 16 of the top 20 teams in the country locked in a battle of endurance and strategy, teamwork and individual skill — it was a whole lot of bowling, all right.
Before you dismiss this storied, ancient sport as something anyone can do without much effort — including an overweight Jeff Bridges drunk on White Russians — consider this: If either of Vanderbilt's basketball teams does well in their respective championship tournament, they'll play six games over the course of about 18 days. By contrast, Vanderbilt's bowling team played six games on the first day of the Music City Classic, knocking down 5,944 pins in the process. Then they bowled 24 games the following day — and the elimination round hadn't even started.
"They're long days," said a father from New Jersey who had come to see his daughter bowl for fourth-ranked Fairleigh-Dickinson. He was not kidding. The first day of qualifying lasted over six hours. There are no "bench" players in bowling, because there are no benches. That means everyone stands. Roll, high-five, stand, roll, repeat. Change lanes. Stand. Roll. Repeat. Stand. There are high-fives after almost every shot, shouts and sometimes even organized chants after strikes and spares.
People who've been coming to these things for a while have folding stepladders they set up along the back wall. Some take smoke breaks together, and can recall which years their respective daughters bowled particularly well. Hang around a bowling tournament long enough, and you might end up in line behind an athlete in the midst of competition who's just ordered a pizza slice.
A modern bowling lane is coated, to varying degrees, with oil. If you bowl with any kind of hook in your shot, as every competitive bowler in the world does, the placement and thickness of that oil has a lot to say about when your ball starts to curve toward the pocket — aka the zone of magic, aka where the ball should go if you want a strike. Hitting the pocket — the sweet spot between the head pin and the 3-pin (for righties) or 2-pin (for southpaws) — is the name of the game.
The oil most of us encounter when we bowl at our local lanes — even if our local lanes happen to be the Smyrna Bowling Center, where this weekend's tourney was held — is laid in a "house pattern." It's basically designed to make us feel good about our game, and for all intents and purposes, it helps guide the hook-bowler's ball into the pocket. The collegiate bowlers in this weekend's tournament were up against a pattern called NCAA 5 TB, a precisely laid array of "forward oil," "reverse oil," "combined oil" and "buff area" that makes the seemingly simple act of rolling a bowling ball in between two pins 60 feet away a lot more like driving a dragster across an icy pond and trying to steer it through a croquet wicket on the opposite shore.
Of course, you can't exactly tell any of this by watching from the back of the lanes. As in NASCAR, much of what makes bowling compelling — compensating for the lane conditions, choosing the right ball, making small physical adjustments to release and velocity — is mostly invisible to the spectator. (Balls will react to the lanes differently depending on the cover stock, the size and shape of the weighted inner core and, believe it or not, where the finger holes are drilled.) But when a bowler finds the pocket and sends an entire rack of pins careening like so many bits of exploded Death Star, you don't have to know the difference between carrydown and track flare to get caught up in the excitement.
You like offense? In bowling, the best defense — well, the only defense, actually — is a good offense. You like high-scoring games? Vandy defeated Nebraska 205-200 in their final game Sunday afternoon to propel them to their second straight tournament championship. You like rooting for a winner? Vanderbilt bowling held onto its No. 1 ranking this week and, in case you didn't know, won the school's first — and thus far only — NCAA title back in 2007. What's that? Ah, yes. See you in Smyrna next year.
Email editor@nashvillescene.com.
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