If you can’t out-bowl ‘em, out-drink ‘em.

That was the motto of my first bowling league, which I will describe in the absence of a league night recap. I was placed on the DL last week due to a non-bowling injury (illness). Rumour was it would have been a healthy scratch anyway but that stays between me and coach. I know what I need to do better. In any case, my teammates and the sub got boat-raced right out of the joint. Tonight we focus on getting back on the winning track.

Way back when, near 20 years ago now, my friends and I had a stretch of time to kill in our small town with not much to do. It must have been winter. 12th grade or shortly thereafter seems about right. After playing a couple games of 5 pin at the local alley on a lark we decided to form our very own two team league and have it out over the course of six or seven games. The preliminary frames made it clear that my team was outmatched by a wide margin in bowling ability. In order to even the playing field we devised a complicated method of scoring that was so near to perfection that we were all blinded and rendered unable to walk for 6 hours after its discovery.

The standard rules of 5 pin bowling are fairly similar to 10 pin. The main difference being, obviously to some, the number of pins. Where there are 10 pins all worth a single point in the bowling be all know and love from the PBA’s many high profile events, the 5 smaller pins in this Canadian variation have different point values. The headpin is worth 5 points while the two next door are worth 3 and the corner pins are worth 2. This can force the bowler to use some strategy when picking up splits in order to maximize point values in case of a miss.

Like 10 pin, a strike in one frame adds the next two balls from the following frame while a spare adds just the first ball from the next frame. Unlike 10 pin the total point value of the pins is 15 points so a perfect score is 450 in 5 pin instead of 300. The balls are also quite a bit smaller, ostensibly to make it less strenuous but more likely because of skinflint Canuck alley owners. The balls are the same as a duckpin ball — about the size of a rolling melon, which is what we call a cantelope.

The main groundbreaking rule change adopted by our fertile teenage minds (other than the presence of high school girls to cheer us on because they also had nothing to do) was the patented beer multiplier. After rolling an initial, semi-soberish first game, our two teams would retire to the parking lot and, over the course of about 15 to 20 minutes time, drive as many cans of beer down our gullets as possible. The number of beers would increase your second game score by a factor of 1.4 if 4 beers were chugged, 1.6 if 6 beers had been quaffed, etc.

Since my side was down after almost every first game due to our lack of pin-striking ability, we would typically know roughly how hard we had to step on the gas at halftime based on the deficit we were facing. We, of course, also had to be wary of liquor-induced jelly legs. We learned early on not to add non-scoring whiskies into the mix. The other team, sharing this knowledge of the score and their own imbibing limitations, would have to fend off our fevered shotguns while maintaining enough sobriety to keep out-bowling us.

There was even a major cheating scandal when one of the opposing team’s members was caught hurling full cans of beer into the woods in order to inflate his score. Being a jackass-gate it was called, quite possibly. Punishment was severe. I believe it took the form of having to down an entire 26 of Fireball in one sitting. Despite this black mark on the game, it was so perfectly designed that the championship came down to the 10th and final frame of the last game of the “season”.

Victory was claimed by the alcoholic gluttons over those whose actions tarnished the soul of the game forever. Their bowling prowess no match for the insatiable thirst and irritated colons of our world-beating squad. It was the first and last season we played, most of us having got lives or ended up entwined with one of the bonny cheerleaders. The glory will live on, though, in our hazy booze-soaked memories.