December 19, 2000 — If you were wondering, professional athletes don’t necessarily make great bowlers. I learned this last week when I hit the lanes with the Atlanta Falcons.
In all fairness, most great bowlers likely wouldn’t fare too well in the face of an all-out blitz by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Pins don’t push back like players do.
But last Tuesday at the Gainesville Bowling Center, spares and strikes took on less importance than dollars and cents, handshakes and smiles. This was Bowling for Kids, the team’s annual charity function that benefits the Atlanta Falcons Youth Foundation.
In its second year in Gainesville, the event generated more than $45,000. Half of the proceeds will go to Hall County-based organizations, such as Challenged Child, Eagle Ranch, Hall County YMCA and Safe Kids of Georgia.
Nearly 20 Falcons players — Terance Mathis, Tim Dwight and Jessie Tuggle, included — shed pads and pride to participate. The rest of the field was made up of front-office types, event sponsors and an assortment of media personalities.
Onlookers and autograph seekers milled about, while cheerleaders, Freddie Falcon and Santa Claus made merry.
The playing field was level from the beginning. Bowling has a way of bringing out the everyman in every man. Bowling shoes have a way of making everyone look equally ridiculous.
“Yours are quite stylish,” Falcons guard Chris Banks said, admiring my fluorescent footwear — perfect for Cosmic Bowling, not for inconspicuousness. “You ask for them?”
I shared lane No. 4 with Banks, center Todd McClure and guard Anthony Redmon. I appreciated the pairing. Bowling is a blue-collar endeavor. Who better to partner with than three offensive linemen, perhaps the most lunch-pail lot in all of professional sports?
I was the only bowler in the group that didn’t tip the scales at more than 300 pounds. Bowling balls look like softballs in the large hands of linemen. This can create a problem.
“I can’t find a ball to fit my fingers,” Banks lamented, searching through a rack of balls.
Banks never did, either. He settled on a bright orange 10-pound ball. He palmed it, using none of the holes, and flung it down the lane with a wild spin.
Redmon couldn’t decide upon rolling a straight ball or a hook. He settled for something in between and warned me that he was going to be the “weak link.”
“I’m a little shaky,” the 6-foot-5, 308-pound Redmon admitted. “Bowling is a little bit of technique and some finesse. We want to muscle the ball and throw it down there and try to bust up everything, but it doesn’t work like that. Those pins have a way of evading contact.”
The buffet table doesn’t, however. And my teammates took full advantage of the catered spread at the bowling alley. Three-hundred-pound frames require a lot of upkeep.
“Did you guys come here for the bowling or the food,” I asked.
McClure, fried chicken in hand, paused and responded, “A little bit of both.”
When they weren’t eating or bowling, the Falcons were obliging a steady stream of autograph requests — a distraction, for some reason, I didn’t have to deal with.
They signed everything: balls and shirts, posters and notepads. Being someone whose signature can vary from one check to another, I wondered how they keep the consistency. The jersey number is more important than the name, I learned.
“Especially when you sign a bunch of them, they start looking different,” McClure said. “Just jot something down and put your number on it. That’s what I do.”
McClure took a break to have his picture taken with Santa Claus, whose jolly expression changed quickly when McClure took a seat on his lap.
“He’s going to break his knee up,” Redmon laughed.
As for the actual bowling itself, there is a reason I have waited so long in this column to describe it. I believe that is the way the players would want it.
Banks was the best of the bunch. He tied me with a 167 in the first game. His secret? He used to play for the Denver Broncos, where it seems football and bowling go hand in hand.
That’s the way it was for Falcons special teams leader Gary Downs, who rolled in the lane beside us. He came prepared, with his own ball and shoes, items he picked up during his 1995 season in Denver.
“We used to get off work and bowl every day,” Downs said. “It was cold. We couldn’t do nothing else.”
After getting picked up by Atlanta, Downs said he bowled for a while with Falcons lineman Calvin Collins. But he decided that activity wasn’t in his best interests.
“It seemed everybody that bowled with him got cut,” Downs said. “I ain’t lying.”
Banks, McClure, Redmon and I combined for a score of 550 the first go around — we got worse after that. But for all the fooling, competitive juices still flowed. McClure wandered the lanes to see how our total stacked up.
I don’t think he liked what he saw.
