Annotation Tuesday: Michael J. Mooney and the Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever

"The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever"

By Michael J. Mooney
D magazine
July 2012

When Bill Fong approaches the lane, 15-pound bowling ball in hand, he tries not to breathe. He tries not to think about not breathing. He wants his body to perform a series of complex movements that his muscles themselves have memorized. In short, he wants to become a robot. I’m thinking there are a lot of places you can start this story, structurally, but also in time. Why did you choose this paragraph and this space in time, and how did you come to understand what he thinks about as he’s getting ready to roll the ball down the lane? I talked to him a lot about this. He is—the robot analogy came from him. That is something he talks about and thinks about. And in some ways it was… You know somebody who tries not to feel emotion just provokes more emotion. And so, you know, it’s about him throwing the bowling ball. On a really, really basic level, the entire story is about him throwing a bowling ball. So why not start with the way he throws a bowling ball? In terms of time, though, why this? I wanted to bookend it… I was writing this right when Ben Fountain’s novel came out, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” And we were talking about it a lot in the office. And it’s largely, you know, you understand that something happened, and you’re going through the book trying to figure out exactly what happened to put these guys in this situation. And I just really liked that dynamic, and so I wanted the story to do that. We knew something incredible happened, but we didn’t know exactly what.

Fong, 48 years old, 6 feet tall with broad shoulders, pulls the ball into his chest and does a quick shimmy with his hips. He swings the ball first backward, then forward, his arm a pendulum of kinetic energy, as he takes five measured steps toward the foul line. He releases the ball, and it glides across the oiled wooden planks like it’s floating, hydroplaning, spinning counterclockwise along a trajectory that seems to be taking it straight for the right-hand gutter. How many times did you have to watch Bill roll a ball in order to be able to nail that description you have of him in the second paragraph there? I thought about this. I’ve probably seen him roll 50 to 100 times. No, I guess over 100 times. So I watched him practice, and I watched him bowl an entire series of games. Then I watched a video of him bowling quite a bit. And I watched those last couple frames, or the last frame actually, like the last couple rolls, over and over and over again.  How important was it for you to nail that description? Yeah, it felt like it was kind of part of his personality. That’s the way we’re going to help build this, help people understand this character-- by looking at the way he does the thing he loves doing.

But as the ball nears the edge of the lane, it veers back toward the center, as if guided by remote control. The hook carries the ball back just in time. In a heartbeat, what was a wide, sneering mouth of pins is now—nothing. Wide, sneering mouth of pins is fantastic. It just is kind of what it looks like to me. Especially, you know, if you feel like you’re doing battle with those pins. It was a subtle way of trying to kind of establish a nemesis for Bill here.

He comes back to the table where his teammates are seated—they always sit and bowl in the same order—and they congratulate him the same way they have thousands of times over the last decade. But Fong looks displeased. His strike wasn’t good enough.

“I got pretty lucky that time,” he says in his distinctly Chicago accent. “The seven was hanging there before it fell. I’ve got to make adjustments.” With a pencil, he jots down notes on a folded piece of blue paper.

His teammates aren’t interested in talking about what he can do to make his strikes more solid, though, or even tonight’s mildly competitive league game. They’re still discussing a night two years ago. They mention it every week, without fail. When you watched him bowl on that night, that one night you went and watched him bowl in the series, were you there solely as an observer or were you also talking to his teammates? Were you kind of doing a little bit of everything? Yeah, it was everything. I think I had to pull up a chair next to the table, right, because I didn’t want to disrupt their actual seating arrangement, their traditional seating arrangement. They were much less interested in the game that was actually going on that night than talking about this incredible night. And as soon as we started talking about that night—everybody just calls it “that night”—as soon as we started talking about that night, people from other tables were coming over. You know, it was a big discussion that got around very quickly. It was very easy to find a lot of people who were there that night and people who had thoughts of what was going on. This was two years later, and it’s still a lot of the same people who bowled in that league, even two years earlier? That’s their community, that’s their regular Monday night. Everybody at the bowling alley, that’s their thing, right? Plano is a gigantic suburb. Sometimes it’s hard for people to cut out specific lives for themselves, and people who go to this—you know, that’s one of the ways that people do that. It’s a subculture, really.

In fact, all you have to do is say the words “That Night” and everyone at the Plano Super Bowl knows what you’re talking about. They also refer to it as “The Incident” or “That Incredible Series.” How did you get those descriptions? Honestly, just being there, talking about it. It comes up very quickly. So you know, people were pointing out, oh he was there, he was there. People were coming over to our table. I was able to talk to probably 10 or 12 people who were there that night and remember it very vividly, within an hour of being at the bowling alley.

It’s the only time anyone can remember a local recreational bowler making the sports section of the Dallas Morning News. One man, an opponent of Fong’s that evening, calls it “the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in a bowling alley.” When did you know that this would end up being a special story? Did you know that in the reporting phase? When you work on stories, the kind of stories that we like to do, at the moment, every story is really special. You know, I don’t want to work on a story if I can’t find a way to make it special at the time. I would love to say, "Yeah, I totally knew at the moment when I was talking to these guys that two years later, I’d be talking about it with Nieman." But no, it’s still pretty astounding how far the story has gotten. At the moment, the funniest part was when Bill was asking me about other stories that I’ve written and other people I’ve interviewed. Basically like, who’s the most famous person you’ve ever interviewed? And I think I said Mikhail Gorbachev. When I said Mikhail Gorbachev, then Bill was like, 'Ah now I understand why you’re doing this story.' I still don’t completely understand what that was, but that was what completely explained it to him.

Bill Fong needs no reminders, of course. He thinks about that moment—those hours—every single day of his life. We get to the end of this first section and I’m thinking about the lead again and wondering were you ever tempted to lead with the night you were there, watching, rather than… The other way around. Lead with the night in question, right? The incident, or whatever, rather than leading two years later. And what ultimately made you choose the approach you chose? I don’t think I did consider starting with the original incident. I like stories that are bookended, and it goes back to that Ben Fountain book. I just really liked the dynamic, the way that that sets the reader up to freely go through it fast. It really propels a story, when you know something exciting happened and you don’t know exactly what it is.

• • •

Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night. But only a human robot can roll three 300s in a row—36 straight strikes—for what’s called a “perfect series.” More than 95 million Americans go bowling, but, according to the United States Bowling Congress, there have been only 21 certified 900s since anyone started keeping track. Were you surprised at the low number of certified 900s, when you found that out? Pretty early on, I looked that up, and the United States Bowling Congress is here, in a suburb of Dallas. I was really surprised. Because there’s a couple of videos of other people who have had 900. And when you think about it, you know, at first it depends on your perspective. When you think a 300 is rare, then you never even think about a 900. When you think the sheer number of people who bowl, how many games somebody can bowl, just the sheer number of bowling games that take place, then 300s, yeah okay. Every single bowling alley, every single night, somewhere probably. And then you gotta think just statistically, these have to be more common. And so I was really surprised.

Bill Fong’s run at perfection started as most of his nights do, with practice at around 5:30 pm. He bowls in four active leagues, and he rolls at least 20 games a week, every week. That night, January 18, 2010, he wanted to focus on his timing. You have a lot of details that come from Fong himself, and specifically talking about that night, it’s phenomenal that he remembers some of the things that he does, and I’m curious what was it like interviewing him.  It was interesting. He has notes. So he has very thorough notes, that it’s essentially like finding a source with a diary. Except in this case, the diary consisted largely of numbers. And then you have the fact that when adrenaline is flowing, that’s when humans generally have the most—that’s when memories are kind of burned into place. And he had a lot of adrenaline that night. And a lot of people did. So, talking to him, he was in moments elated and proud. This is still a great accomplishment. He does know that. He’s been told it so many times, and he was also really sad because in so many ways, especially looking back -- his life up to that night -- and it did not go the way that he really, really wishes it had gone.

Timing is everything. Speaking of timing, you really delay letting the reader in on Fong’s backstory. How he got interested in bowling and his childhood and all of that. Why did you set the story up that way? So this is a slotting game. If I wanted to bookend it with the night that I was there and kind of make it about these people recounting the story, then I had certain elements that I had to get at some point. You have to explain the whole 900. You have to explain his background. You have to, at some point, get to, and I will talk about it in a bit, but you have to get to the fact that he almost had a chance at a Texas record before. He had a chance at a really incredible night and then completely cracked. And then you have to get to the stroke. And inside of all of that, or through all of that, the story of that night. So it was really just slotting what goes first… You know you have to explain the 900 before the rest of the stuff. And then I wanted to break it up in terms of his games that night. So it’s the night that I was with him, in the beginning and the end, and his three games throughout the middle of that. And then to each one of those games we attach something else, some other concept or backstory or something else. In the first one, it’s this explanation of 900. In the second one, it’s his backstory and his buildup. In the third one, it’s the kind of notion of perfection and how rare it is and how ethereal it is. Did you outline the story? I did. I’m a religious outliner. Give me an example of how you go about outlining. I think for this story, it was actually sitting down talking with Tim. And it was, you know, Roman numeral one, talking to them. Then it was two, first game. Three, second game. Four… And then underneath each one, what we’re going to get at in those sections. And it was probably on the back of—Probably the first time I did it was on the back of any kind of scrap paper, and then at some point, I kind of sat down and built a more thorough outline in my notebook. When your timing is right, when your arms, legs, and torso all move in rhythm toward the lane, you have better balance. When you’re balanced, you’re also more accurate. And when you’re accurate, your decision-making also improves. By contrast, if your timing is off, your balance is off, and you don’t hit your targets. There are too many variables to assess, too many elements to gauge, and you can’t possibly make the best decisions. So, do you bowl at all? Not competitively, but I have gone bowling somewhat regularly since I was really young, since I was in daycare probably. And especially in college, I spent a lot of time with one of my best friends one summer. We basically went to the school bowling alley almost every single day. We bowled 13 games one day, actually. So in terms of understanding what Bill was talking about, that wasn’t difficult for you? Oh yeah, no, no. I still had no idea about the…In no way was I an analytical bowler. So when he started talking about oil patterns, I had to really research a lot of that stuff. I didn’t even realize that a lot of bowlers kept notes the way he did. Of course, there are a lot of people who keep track of the high records in each state and all sorts of things like that that I, as a recreational bowler, never even considered. Fong knows a hot streak is all about timing. So in practice that night, he breathed, he tried to erase all thoughts, and he tried to make his approach with each body part functioning as programmed. You keep coming back to this idea of the robot bowler. So I’m assuming that it was what Fong said he was trying to do? Yeah, this is his analogy. He understands that to be successful, you essentially have to shut down distractions, emotions, anything that might differentiate one particular roll. And so he really wants to be a robot when he’s bowling, which then of course, when he has this very, very human ending… I think it was even more poignant.

That night, he didn’t roll many strikes in practice. There was nothing to make him think this night would be anything special.

Fong’s team, the Crazy Eights (he picked the name because eights are lucky in Chinese culture), When you’re talking about the team name, it’s the first mention that he’s Chinese, or is of Chinese extraction. Was that a deliberate decision to hold off on that? Or that’s just where it came up? That’s really the first place it came up. Being Chinese is a big part of Bill’s identity, and it comes up pretty regularly in conversation. I think going through the story, that’s just the first time that it came up in terms of a place where I would have mentioned it. It was just a natural question that I asked him. Why is the team named that?was assigned lanes 27 and 28, one of Fong’s favorite pairs. The left lane, 27, hooks more, he says. The right lane, 28, tends to be more direct.

Frame one was on the left lane. As always, he was last in the bowling order, the anchor position. He watched his teammates roll and noticed each one throw a ball that hooked early and missed the pocket, the sweet spot between the head pin and the three pin on the right, the place that gives you the best chance of getting a strike. So when it was Fong’s turn, he opted to roll a deeper hook, to stay outside and ride the edge of the gutter a little longer.

The result was a loud, powerful strike. His ball slammed into the pocket with a vengeance, obliterating all 10 pins. His next roll, on 28, was another violent strike. All four of the first frames were robust strikes, actually. But his teammates barely took notice.

“To tell you the truth, that wasn’t that unusual,” says JoAnn Gibson, a sweet Southern woman who enjoys the company more than she does the actual bowling. Were you surprised that Fong’s teammates weren’t necessarily as serious about bowling as he was? No, I’m not surprised that anybody is not as serious about bowling as he is. Nobody is as serious about bowling as he is, that I’ve ever met probably. I was a little surprised by the interesting variety, by the real true dynamic that they have in terms of people who… It really is just kind of a fun Monday night out to Bill. He has different teams for every single night of the week. Yeah, he seems so serious about it that he wouldn’t necessarily work well with people who weren’t as serious. The really interesting aspect of it is that this incredible feat happened on a Monday. He has so many more serious teams, even more serious leagues. This would be like a hardcore fantasy football player playing in a casual office pool. Or an amateur professional poker player playing in a home five-dollar game. He just likes getting the rolls in. The fact that it happened on a Monday of all the places, of all the times, is just one of those small, little details I found interesting. Did he talk about that much? It seems like somebody like Bill would really want that to happen on a serious night, where the really good bowlers would recognize him. Does that make sense? He was happy that there happened to be a lot of the people in the bowling community there, who happened to be there that night. Or, at some point, somebody called them and they showed up, or they heard about it very quickly. On the other hand, he, in some ways, is glad that they weren’t there, right? He does think of this as a devastating moment. It’s still hard for me to remember that, and it’s hard for a lot of people to remember that. That it still is a devastating time for him.

“Bowlers like Bill can roll off mini-streaks like that all the time,” says Tom Dunn, a more serious bowler who sometimes flirts innocently with JoAnn.

Both Gibson and Dunn have bowled with or against Fong in this league since the Clinton administration. They’ve been teammates for nine years. James Race, who, with his perpetual smile and polite demeanor, reminds the other teammates of Mister Rogers, came a few years later. They don’t really hang out much outside the bowling alley, but no matter what’s going on in life, they go to Plano Super Bowl for a few hours on Monday nights.

Fong’s fifth roll of the night wasn’t so beautiful. His approach and release seemed the same—he was becoming the robot—and the ball hit the pocket, but the pins didn’t go down quickly. The 10 pin was wobbling upright, teetering, when Fong got what is called a “messenger.” From the left, one of the pins he’d just sent bouncing came back across the lane, clipping the 10 just enough to knock it off balance. How did you get these details, considering it happened two years earlier? So they are singed into his memory, right? And this is something I’m worried about. It’s not on video. A lot of the records show exactly where the splits were, but if it’s a strike, it’s a strike. It’s hard to tell just on the written record, on the printout sheet, what exactly happened. He has all of these little notes in his records that he’s kept. I wouldn’t say he remembers each frame, but he probably, of the 36, probably has a very, very, very good recollection of almost all of them, along with these little notes. And other people on his team remember a couple of these things. So, somebody else would say, “Oh the time that it looked like the seven and 10 were both going to stay up,” and then, “Oh it looked like you were going to cut in too deep.” And then nope, still a strike. And more as they went on, right? So fewer from the first game. His teammates vaguely remember the first game. It was only toward the end of the second game and then the third game. It’s a lot of like, “Oh man, do you remember that? Oh man, you remember that one?” When he got back to the table, his teammates congratulated him, but Fong called it what it was: a lucky strike.

In the sixth frame, he had another loud, devastating strike. Then another. Then another. With each throw, he could tell it was a strike from the moment it left his hand. He’d watch as the pins were there one second, then gone the next. “It felt like driving and catching a green light, then the next one, then the next, then turning, and still catching every green light everywhere you go,” Fong says.

Before he knew it, it was the 10th frame. Back on the right lane, he again tried to swing the ball wide, let it run along the outside of the lane, next to the gutter. The first two rolls of the 10th frame both tucked into the pocket just as Fong hoped, and both were solid strikes.

On the last roll, though, something happened. He could tell from the sound of the pins. As the clutter at the end of the lane cleared, he could see the nine pin (the second from the right on the last row) still standing. He watched the chaos of the flying pins, each rotating right past the upright nine. Fong craned his neck, watching, hoping. Until one of the pins popped up from its side and swiped the nine down. Did you ever worry in the writing of this story that maybe, just maybe, memories weren’t clear as to what happened that night? I’m just curious how they remembered all this, but it seems like it was a communal thing. By the second game, everybody was kind of fully invested in what was going on. And so they’re validating each other’s memories in a way, you know? Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. So you know, I wasn’t there that night, but this is the way that these people have remembered it. And there was nobody arguing over each frame, so however they’ve come to these conclusions, this is established how it went that night.

“The best way to describe the first 300 was just ‘powerful,'” Race says.

One of the Super Bowl employees announced Fong’s name and score over the loudspeaker, something Fong is a particular fan of. There was a round of applause.

“Sometimes, when you have a lot of 300s, or if you get more than one in a week, they won’t announce it,” he says. I love that he really wants his name to be announced when he bowls a 300. And it’s also his kind of humble-braggy way of saying how often he gets 300s. That they don’t always announce his 300s. That’s a very Bill Fong thing to say.
The night was just beginning.You knew the structure as you sat down to write because you had outlined. Did you know the cliffhanger? Because there are kind of cliffhangers at the end of each section as well. Did you know what those were before you started writing? I knew some of them. So I knew that when things were just beginning, I knew that there was going to be something similar to that in that very spot. Fewer as the story goes on, I think. Those were the kind of things that just happened; those were the decisions that are just going to happen when you’re actually typing.

• • •

Aside from bowling, Bill Fong hasn’t had a lot of success in life. His Chinese mother demanded perfection, but he was a C student. He never finished college, he divorced young, and he never made a lot of money. By his own account, his parents didn’t like him much. As a bowler, his average in the high 230s means he’s probably better than anyone you know. But he’s still only tied as the 15th best bowler in Plano’s most competitive league. Almost nothing in life has gone according to plan. Was it hard to get Fong to talk about his past, given that nothing has gone according to plan? Yes, that was one of the most difficult parts. And there’s some reference to him having smoked pot when he was younger, and he was really worried about that at first, too. He just didn’t know—and it was actually, when I was talking to him, when he was putting a lot of these things together, realizing how much of his life had built up to these moments. So, him talking about bowling, he can go on forever. He would much rather talk about bowling than his own personal history, I think. Did you interview him outside of the bowling alley to get that information? Or was that all in the bowling alley as well? No, I talked to him outside the bowling alley, and we talked on the phone quite a bit, too. I think a lot of that stuff actually came in the phone conversations.That first paragraph—it’s not long but it tells you a lot. Did you feel like you had to pack a lot in given space considerations? It wasn’t really space, although I knew they were just not going to dedicate an enormous amount of space to a story about bowling, no matter what. I just wanted to keep the story moving as fast as possible. And I wanted it to be in scene as much as possible, so I wanted to hit these background bits as hard as I could and get people a very clear picture of Bill as fast as possible.

He likes to say he got his approach to bowling from the hard-hitting alleys in his native Chicago, where he went to high school with Michelle Obama. He was one of the few kids from Chinatown interested in bowling at the time. Despite his strict mother and the fact that his friends were all on the honor roll, little William preferred sports. He dreamed of being a professional athlete one day. He wasn’t big—too short for basketball, too slender for football—but he’d run up and down the block as a boy, racing imaginary friends.

When Fong was young, his parents divorced. He remembers the man who would become his stepdad taking his mom out on dates to a local bowling alley, where they could bring the kids. He noticed that when he was bowling, he wasn’t thinking about whatever was going on behind him. His mind could focus on the ball, the lane, the pins—and the rest of the world would disappear. He had never been captivated by anything like that. How long did this story take you to report and write? I reported it over about two weeks while I was working on some other stuff. I was actually working on this story at the same time I was working on a crime story about a woman who was kidnapped and tortured and eventually escaped. And I actually wrote this story in the hotel room while I was covering that trial. So in a Holiday Express in Parker County somewhere was where I actually wrote almost all the story. Total writing time? Honestly, I think I wrote the majority of the entire draft over one night. Do you write as you report or do you wait until you’re completely done reporting? You will never be completely done reporting. That’s the hard part. I write when I have to write. I wish that I was more disciplined, and a lot [of writers] I know are really, really great at being able to pound out a certain number of words every single day. But, you know, generally my deadline or when I need to hand a story in… I’m writing a couple of days before that. And sometimes it'll be staring at a screen for a couple of hours or days until everything just falls into place. And then sometimes it’s not. Sometimes, you need to hammer it out. It’s weird. It’s like bowling. I never know exactly what’s going to hit the strike. I know I can type, if I’m going on a good day, I can do six, seven thousand words in a day. But that is followed and preceded by a lot of days of despair and not typing.

While still courting Fong’s mother, his stepdad promised that if the boy ever got a score higher than 120 he’d buy him his own ball. “He never did,” Fong says. “I bought it myself.”

After his mother remarried and moved away, he still had his siblings, his quiet, hard-working father, and his bowling. He joined the high school team. He went to the public library and checked out stacks of books about bowling theory. After a stint in college, he found himself smoking a lot of pot and staying out all night bowling, trying to hustle people out of small bets. He’d leave the alley after the sun came up, go out to breakfast, sleep until 6 pm, and then repeat the process. Can you talk about that interview, in which you got all that information? There’s so much there. I’m curious how you sorted through it and figured out what was relevant to the story and what wasn’t.I wanted to cull all of that information for the things that were most important to his personality and our understanding of what happened to him that night. So how important bowling is for him, how important his success is to him, how driven and kind of disappointing a lot of his life was. You know, those are the key things I wanted to get to before we got back into the bowling. Talking to him about things—he feels like his background, being from Chicago… The hard streets of Chicago were where hardcore bowlers come from, especially in his mind. Basically like, Rucker Park. From his perspective, the most important parts of his background were just the Chicago kind of born-and-bred aspects. The fact that he went to high school with Michelle Obama in Chicago, in his mind, tells people all they need to know about his bowling history, too.

At 22, he got married and his wife encouraged him to “grow up.” He realized he wasn’t ever going to become a professional bowler like the men he watched on TV every week, and he took a job cutting hair.

“It was just something I could always do for money,” he says. “I like the artistic side, but it’s not my passion.”

Soon he gave up bowling and took up golf. It was a lot like bowling—timing, balance, accuracy—and he’d heard that with 10 years of practice, anyone could become a top-level golfer. He read books about golf, took a job at a pro shop, and learned to cut his own clubs. For 10 years, through career changes, through his divorce, through his move to Dallas (several family members had moved to Texas for various reasons and he’d always enjoyed visiting), Fong played golf. His younger sister was by then a standout on the Baylor University golf team. But after all those years of playing nearly every day, he still wasn’t a scratch golfer. He couldn’t take the frustration, and he swore off the game for good.This is interesting, that someone would put so much effort into something and then just quit. Did he ever consider giving up bowling a second time in his life? No. He has never thought of giving up bowling that I know of. He basically regrets having given it up for the time that he did. And really feels like he’s being punished. He really feels like that pin was punishment for that time away... To my knowledge, he has never considered giving it up again and regrets having given it up the first time.

He remembered how much he’d enjoyed bowling. He didn’t miss the up-all-night-gambling lifestyle, but the game itself, shutting out the world and making himself robotic—those things he missed. In terms of going back to the whole robot theme, does he, outside the bowling alley, does he want to be a robot as well? Or no. I don’t know. I don’t think so. And honestly because he doesn’t spend an enormous time outside the bowling alley. He would be in the bowling alley constantly. And now he has a bowling shop, so he’s constantly thinking about bowling. I think he’s dedicated his life to bowling in a monastic way.

He joined a few leagues and bowled in tournaments all over North Texas, but no alley felt to him quite like the Super Bowl in Plano. There’s something about the friendly faces, the way a great strike sounded there. It felt right.

After 14 years, he knows all 48 lanes. He equates it to the way Tiger Woods knows the holes on his home golf course. Fong has rolled on each of these lanes dozens of times over the years, and he keeps detailed records.

“No two lanes are the same,” he says.

He documents which lanes hook better and which seem to suck the ball into the gutter. He notes any tiny divot and nearly imperceptible slope, any imperfection he can find. Lane five, for example, has a higher strike percentage when people throw straighter. On lane 16, the oil tends to swirl closer to the pins.

In the years she’s known Fong, Gibson has had very few conversations with him that didn’t involve ball movement and oil patterns, though she admits most of the technical bowling talk flies right over her head. But she smiles, not wanting to offend anyone. “This really is Bill’s life,” she says. I can’t tell if she thinks that’s wonderful or if she thinks that’s sad. Yeah, I can’t tell either. What do you think?It’s both, right? It is both wonderful and sad. To a lot of people a life dedicated to bowling seems very sad and empty, but to Bill, he really does love bowling. He likes the pains of it, likes the technicality of it, likes the success, likes the glory, in whatever measure he can get it. And then when a lot of his teammates came to visit him in the hospital and a lot of his opponents and a lot of people from the bowling community kind of showed that they do care for him so much, I kind of thought of it as back to the wonderful part of it. It really was like, look at this life he’s built out of bowling. He didn’t even realize in some ways how appreciated he was. Well I wonder why would we think of bowling, dedicating your life to bowling, is being any less cool than dedicating your life to running or baseball, you know? I don’t know, bowling’s got a bad rap, I think.  It does. It has kind of a blue-collar, Midwestern, Americana association to it. For better or for worse. Although I think bowling is one of the few things that really unites an enormous amount of Americans. Whatever your race, creed, politics, gender, a lot of people at some point in their lives have thrown a bowling ball down an aisle, down some sort of alley.

“Looking back,” Fong says, “I guess bowling just always filled whatever emptiness I had.”

• • •

That night, people were still coming over to congratulate Bill Fong on the 300, when he did something unimaginable: for his second game, he switched bowling balls. Was it obvious to you, when you learned that he changed the balls before that second game, that that was how you were going to lead that section? I think so. I think it was pretty surprising to me and especially when I thought about from the perspective of wanting to repeat success over and over and over again. And it just seemed like an interesting, strange twist. I need to be able to relate his night bowling to general readers as much as possible. And so, little things like that help a lot. And generally, in the editing process, it was kind of a surgical removal of a little bit of bowling here, a little bit of bowling there. And that was most of the editing process on the backend. Can you talk about the editing process? Maybe the evolution the story went through in that process? Tim is an incredible editor. He trusted me to write the story, thought it was kind of an entertaining little tale. And then sat with me and we outlined it together. Honestly, it was a lot of his ideas on where to slot things. Once I kind of thought of the Ben Fountain-inspired beginning. Sometimes the draft, the story has to be completely rewritten from top to bottom five, six, seven times. This was one of those that was lucky enough that it didn’t really. On the first draft, most of the stuff was there. It was just kind of cutting out a couple hundred words of bowling.

He remembered, two weeks earlier, practicing on lanes 27 and 28. He remembered that after a few games, the oil pattern on the right lane shifted. So to start game two on the right lane, he switched to his more polished ball, the one that hooks less and rolls straighter.

Someone on another lane saw him making the change. “Is Bill Fong switching balls?” the man called out to his friends incredulously.

Fong heard him and turned around.

“Yep,” he said.

The man called back to him: “You’re crazy!”That’s a great little exchange that offers a glimpse into this world. How did you get that?So Bill mentioned it really off-handed, almost exactly describing that exact way. And I didn’t realize who he was talking about until I was talking to one of his other buddies who was there that night, and he was telling me like, “I saw it out of the corner of my eye,” and he recounted the exact same thing verbatim to me. And I’m like, alright, done. You know, this is excellent. So they both remembered it exactly the same way. Independently. Exactly verbatim. I mean obviously not independently, they’re friends. But me talking to them in completely separate times in separate places. And I wasn’t asking specifically about that. I didn’t even realize that was the guy who had said that. Does that show something about that night, you think? In terms of how these people… You use the phrase “seared into memory.” I thought it was pretty interesting, and I also really liked using the audience there as a kind of reflection of what was going on. Early on in the story, the fact that people were talking about this event, and we don’t know exactly what happened. And then at various points in the story, it’s Bill interacting with other people or the audience, whether it’s shaky phones or calling each other. So there’s some kind of reflection about, some sort of three-dimensional aspect of what’s going on. I like doing that when I can because in some ways it goes back to why old sitcom creators like having a studio audience. The little, subliminal cues that kind of signal audiences what to do.

Fong grinned and turned back toward the lane. He stepped forward and unleashed a solid, thorough strike—his 13th of the night. Then he stood there, arms wide, shaking his head. His gutsy move had paid off. Can you talk about recreating the scene that kind of follows him through that first ball that second game? How did you get those details from Fong? Notes I’m assuming, but how else?He remembers it really well. He’s stared at his own notes for hours, I’m sure. And his teammates remember it pretty well. And his friends, who were there and saw him switch balls, remember it pretty clearly, too.

Dunn remembers the feeling in the air. “Because he started out by switching balls, and that was so incredible, the second game was definitely more emotional,” he says.

Throughout the second game, Fong continued using his more aggressive ball on the left lane, and the more polished, less aggressive ball on the right lane. And the strikes kept coming.

It seemed like even members of the other team were smiling when Fong was up to roll. Fong himself was laughing and smiling, pointing and calling out to friends at other lanes. He remembers shrugging a lot. “I felt loose as a goose,” he says.

As he sent strike after strike down the lanes, he began to feel magical. Literally, the way he was commanding the balls to turn and burrow into the unsuspecting pins, it felt a little like he was moving heavy objects with only the power of his mind. In the fourth frame, both the seven and the 10 pins stayed up just a bit longer than he wanted. As he gestured with both arms, they fell. Something similar happened in the eighth frame. That’s another detail that I think anybody’s who’s bowled can relate to. Yeah, and it slows down time. In their memories, they describe these things happening in slow motion basically. Because I think at the moment there was so much blood flowing and adrenaline going that it was really tense there. When you say slows down time, it slows down time for the people who are watching it, but are you thinking from a writer’s standpoint as well? From a story’s standpoint? And why there? Yeah. In terms of a montage, I want to get through that as much as possible as fast as possible, while still slowing down for little moments that people are going to be able to relate to. You can’t show every ball that he rolls in that game. But you also don’t want to just rush through it. You need those instances where everything slows down a bit. Right, those have to stand in, in a lot of ways, for the rest of the game.

“It was like Moses parting the sea,” he says. “I’d move my hands and everything would get out of the way.”

Soon the other bowlers began stepping back when he was up, taking extra precaution not to get in his way. “Nobody wants to mess up a streak like that,” Dunn says.

By the 10th frame, Fong found that most people around him wouldn’t make eye contact for fear they would be the last thing he would see before rolling a dud. On the first roll of the last frame, he had what he calls a “happy accident.” For the first time that night, one of his powerful throws missed its mark ever so slightly. But because the oil was now evaporating on the left lane, too, the ball found the pocket for a perfect strike. Noticing what happened on the first roll, he adjusted his position and finished the game with two more powerful strikes, Nos. 23 and 24 of the night.Would this story have been possible without Fong’s extensive note-taking? I don’t think so. It would be really, really hard to try and examine 36 frames of bowling two years after it happened without really extensive notes.

Once again, Fong got to hear his name called from the speakers. And again he took a moment to shake hands with the line of people waiting to congratulate him. A few were embarrassed that they hadn’t come over after the first 300. People were delightfully confused, shaking their heads as they patted Fong on the back.

“Never seen anything like it,” they said. “Back-to-back 300s.”

And Fong shook his own head. “Me neither,” he said. Here, you don’t really end on a cliffhanger. There’s really nothing hinting at something more incredible happening. Was that done on purpose, and if so, why? At this point in the story, we don’t have to push as hard. It’s not like it’s a mystery as to what happened. Exactly how it ends is still a mystery, but we’ve established a lot. At this point, you either want to know or you don’t. Here is where you’re going to stop reading the story or you’re not.• • •

There’s almost never a time when every decision you make is correct and every step is in the right direction. Life, like bowling, is full of complicating factors, unpredictable variables, plenty of times when there is no right answer. But Bill Fong had some experience with near-perfection prior to the night. He’d had another amazing run two years before that. He’d bowled a 297, then a 300.Why did you wait until this late in the story to let the reader know he’s kind of done something like this before? This just goes back to that slotting. This is just where this had to go. We’re either stacking a bunch of various background all in one place, or we kind of have to sprinkle it out throughout the story. And this just seemed like the most logical place to put it. It’s also foreshadowing, obviously. But this just seemed like the most obvious place to put that.

Someone mentioned to him that with another great game he could beat the Texas state series record, which was 890. Fong can admit it now: he choked in that third game. He could feel himself thinking too much, slipping out of the zone. Soon he was out of rhythm and his balance was off. That night he shot a 169 in the last game; he didn’t even break 800 for the series. It was exactly what he was trying to avoid after his two straight 300s.

So this time, before game three, he approached a friend who was bowling a few lanes down. Fong mentioned that he was thinking about switching balls again, using the less aggressive ball on both lanes in the final game. His friend, who had plenty of 300s under his own belt, was surprised but gave him simple advice: “Trust your instinct.”

When that first roll of the third game produced another strike—another risky decision rewarded—Fong felt like he was floating. He wasn’t drinking, but he felt a little drunk.I love this detail, especially after having read the story multiple times, because it foreshadows what is coming up. That was a conscious thing for you to do as a writer? It was both. I don’t think originally it was conscious. When he told me about it, certainly, I didn’t think about it in terms of the stroke. When he was first telling me, I’m asking questions like: “How do you feel at that moment? How are you acting when you’re not up there bowling?" “What are you doing?” And he’s like, “You know, I’ve never felt lighter, I felt drunk. Felt like I was floating around.” And you can even see in the video from those last frames, he does look a little drunk. And so obviously then, what I was thinking about—I think by the time I actually typed it up, I probably was pretty conscious of how that foreshadowed the ending because… it matches the back part of his story perfectly. It’s sad to think about it, right? It’s happy to think about him floating around and drunk and happy if it’s this kind of run that he’s on. It’s more sad to think about it in terms of the thing that potentially threw him off and threatened his life. Both his teammates and his opponents bowled as fast as they could to get out of his way. By the time he struck in the fifth frame, he realized he would almost certainly break the coveted 800 mark. He was relieved.

By the sixth frame, a large crowd had formed behind Fong. Dozens of people had stopped bowling to watch. Texts were sent and statuses posted to Facebook, and the audience grew.

“We were more nervous than he was at the time,” Gibson says. “It was almost like he was putting on a show up there.”

How many people did you talk to for the story? Because Fong is definitely kind of a loner, it seems. And we mostly hear from his teammates. Did you talk to other people? Did you talk to his family or other friends or anybody like that? I didn’t talk to his family. I talked to all of his teammates, and I talked to a bunch of people from the bowling alley that night. Probably like 15 to 20, including two or three of his really, really close friends. And they’re all bowlers, obviously. His close friends? Yeah, I mean his close bowling friends. People he knows through the bowling alley. One of which actually passed away only a couple weeks after the story came out. Yeah, it was one of Bill’s best friends in the world.

Each time he approached the lane, the entire bowling alley went silent. Every time he let fly another roll, there were audible moans from strangers and shouts from the crowd: “That’s it, baby!” Each time he struck, the room erupted with applause. In all his life, Bill Fong had never heard anyone cheering him like that.

He had 33 straight strikes entering the 10th frame of the third game. Out came the cell phone cameras. There were whispers, but as soon as Fong picked up his ball, it was dead quiet. He turned to look at the crowd behind him, now well over 100 people, densely packed from the end of the snack bar to the vending machines 80 feet away.

That’s when the magic left him. Fong began to feel nervous, like the world was watching him pee. He felt the buzz—whatever it had been—leave his body. As he stood in front of lane 28, he felt numb. He tried to push through it.

He lined up and threw a ball without much hook on it. As soon as it left his hand, Fong began waving at it, trying to will the ball left. It connected with the pocket but without the usual force. As the other pins dropped, the nine pin stayed up for what seemed like ages. But just as the gasp of the crowd reached a crescendo, one of the pins rolling meekly across the lane bumped the nine just enough to tip it. The room exploded with cheers and whistles. The sound was enough to shake one of the cameras now capturing the moment. How important were the videos shot on camera phones for you to recreate those last three rolls? That was really important. And not just that, but also to kind of confirm some of the earlier stuff too... Especially recounting those last couple frames, that was everything. Because Bill really does not like talking about that. Does he remember those last three frames? Given what he might have been going through, he does. He does remember them, yeah. And it is basically like hearing somebody talk about getting shot... I’m really glad I had the video. When I first started the story, I just assumed there would be video, and then at some point when I couldn’t find the video, when I couldn’t just find it somewhere posted, I was a little worried. And it’s also just a fantastic story, right? I just really wanted to make sure that this video just confirmed that all of these things even happened, and it wasn’t some sort of conspiracy against me, given all the recent bad news in journalism, especially now. I watched that video 50 or 60 times easily.

Fong looked dizzy as he walked back to the ball exchange. For the first time that night, he began sweating profusely. But he realized the mistake he’d made on his last throw, and the second roll was much cleaner. Again there were shouts from the audience as the ball blazed down the lane, zipping back in time to smash the pins apart in a powerful, driving strike. And there was even more cheering as all 10 pins fell. Thirty-five strikes down, one to go. The subhead in this story is, “In a bowling alley one night, Bill Fong came so close to perfection that it nearly killed him.” Do you feel like that gives away the ending? Yeah, I do. I am very trusting when it comes to headlines and deckheads. The editors, that’s their jobs. They know what they’re doing. They’re really good at that. The print headline for this story was “Near Miss,” [and] I’m really glad they ended up using a different headline on the web because I honestly don’t know if the story would’ve the traction that it got under “Near Miss”… I don’t know if it bothered me or not. It didn’t give away every aspect of the ending, and it worked out pretty well in terms of people getting the theme of the story. Right. I think “The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever” is clearly a headline written for search engine optimization, but it is a great headline, you know? Yeah. I was really glad. I think I first saw that—it was like a cover tag on the print issue, and I think they just used that for the web head. I liked it more than “Near Miss.” It’s a little presumptuous, but it’s certainly the most amazing story I’ve ever heard about a bowling alley. It baffles the mind to think of a bowling story that would—that’s actually about bowling—that would be more incredible than this.

Before his final roll, Fong wiped his ball with his towel. He heard a woman’s voice behind him, a stranger, saying, “We are having fun, aren’t we?” He lifted the ball to his chest and stood calmly for a moment. Then he took five steps and released the ball toward perfection.

It looked good from his hand, arcing out the way so many of his great strikes that night had, cutting back to the pocket just in time. Several people started applauding before the ball even reached the end of the lane—that’s how good it looked. But this time, as the pins scrambled, something unimaginable happened. The 10 pin, farthest to the right, wobbled. But it didn’t fall.I still get goose bumps reading this paragraph. And I’ve read it, I don’t know, four, five, six times maybe. What was it like writing—can you remember writing that specific paragraph? Or that entire section? I don’t really remember… I mean you go into the trance where you’re actually typing stuff up from your outline. Watching that video though, I think I knew exactly how it was going to go. Because it is just devastating to watch. You could hear all the cheers, and then it turns to that moment where you hear everybody simultaneous moan, “Ohh..” And it’s just so, so sad.
Some of the people in the room couldn’t process what they’d just witnessed. How could the last roll, like the 35 before it, not be a strike?

Strangers fell to their knees. It was hard for anyone to breathe. How did you get that detail, especially the breathing?You could probably watch them fall to their knees maybe in the video, but the breathing one, I can’t remember. In the video... you can hear them gasp. You can hear people just gasp. And then somebody actually told me, that was actually one of the details that I had in my notes, that when they were watching—I don’t remember if that was a direct quote or not—they said, “I couldn’t breathe. After he… he kind of spun away and was walking away. I’m guessing I just couldn’t breathe watching him.” Like wow, that’s a great line.

Fong turned and walked to his right. He was empty. Blank.

His friends, the ones who were prepared seconds ago to tackle him in celebration, grabbed him and held him still. As he stood there, Fong wanted to say something—anything—but he couldn’t make a sound. I’m curious what you did writing-wise to make sure the reader gets to this point in the story, in terms of narrative engine, setting up early so you know they’ll get to this point.This is what everything was building up to. This is why you start with a bookend beginning. Why you kind of slowly build into something. Why you want to get things going as fast as you possibly can. Why you want to add in a bunch of reasons to care about these characters, this character in particular. And little things that might have readers relate to these people. That’s everything that went into that right at these moments.

• • •

Sitting around the table two years after that night, Bill Fong and his teammates still argue. Fong truly believes that the last pin could have made his life perfect. “It would have made all the difference,” he says. With a 900, he theorizes, he might have made SportsCenter, and he would surely have sponsors. He thinks he might have had a chance to join the pro tour. At least, he figures, he’d be the best of all time at something, with the name Bill Fong immortalized above even the legends of the game—and he wouldn’t be just a regular guy. We go back to the night you’re there. So we’re jumping two years into the future. Why do you do that here and not just push straight through to the big surprise at the end? Well, probably the most common question I got about this story with writers is how and why I didn’t mention the stroke earlier. For me, that was never really a question, you know? Medical stories or illness stories are really hard to make not follow the same kind of tropes, right? So if you mention the stroke early in the story, it’s a stroke story. It’s not a bowling story; it’s not a story about perfection. It’s about somebody who had a stroke. And it’s really hard. Really good writers can do it, but it’s really a challenge to make that, if it’s about that, to avoid clichés and tropes. And I generally like chronology. I might start out of chronological order, but generally I try and have things come in chronological order. So it was never really a question of where it was going to go for me. I just wanted to come back and put this in present tense a little bit so that we kind of have some recovery time. That hits really hard, and I kind of wanted to debate over what that was before we get into this other twist.

“That pin makes me like the Rodney Dangerfield of bowling,” he says. “I get no respect.”

He goes over that last roll in his mind all the time. He watches the shaky cell phone video.

“It looked so good as it left my hand,” he says.

When that 15-pound sphere collides with the pins, so many things happen so fast that there’s no way of knowing exactly what went wrong in those milliseconds.

That hasn’t stopped Fong from searching for some reason. He wonders if he could have practiced more. He blames the 10 years he was away from bowling. Like that single pin represents the Bowling Fates punishing him for his insolence.

His teammates disagree. They don’t think that pin would have made much of a difference in Bill Fong’s life at all. What he did was amazing, something that will come up in conversation around the Plano Super Bowl for years. This is a lovely, subtle sentence that drives home exactly Fong’s point, that his life hasn’t changed, that it wasn’t amazing, that it’s just the fodder for another Monday night at the Plano Super Bowl. That’s interesting that’s how you think of that. In this world, his life did change, right? We don’t know. We honestly don’t know what would’ve happened if the pin had fallen or not. There’s a lot of people—or not a lot. There’s a couple people who’ve bowled 900. I don’t know if any of them immediately got pro sponsorship or went on tour. But in this world, in this subculture, in this community, it is the greatest feat that has been accomplished. They still talk about it with reverence. Does he open a pro shop? Does he open his own bowling shop if he doesn’t roll that series? I don’t know. He and I have discussed that, and he doesn’t know, one way or the other. It’s hard to say. I don’t know.

“It was mind-boggling,” Gibson says.

The fact that he missed perfection by the last pin on the last roll—that makes the whole thing more human, less robotic. And that, somehow, makes it seem almost beautiful. Besides, they argue, Fong still holds the Texas state record. And because there have been only 21 perfect 900s, he is technically tied for the 22nd greatest night in the annals of bowling history. (There have been only 11 899s.)

His life is also better now. Around the time of the 899, Fong got a part-time job at the pro shop at the Super Bowl. Recently, he opened his own place down the road, Bowling Medic Pro Shop. A lot of people from his four leagues come by to have him drill their balls. Sometimes he cuts their hair, too.

There’s also this: that night, after the 899, his friends bought him a few beers. He doesn’t usually drink, but at the time, he felt like the best day of his life had just turned into the worst. After a beer or two—and at least an hour of excited congratulations from strangers—he felt dizzy. When he got home, he went into the bathroom and vomited in the toilet. The walls were spinning.

It turns out Bill Fong was having a stroke. Did you have discussions with editors or Tim about whether that should go there or somewhere else in the story? Or was he on board with that, too?Yeah, I think he was on board with it too. I think we both just kind of assumed, for some reason, that that was about where it was going to come. The hardest part for that was the actual convincing, right? How do you bring this into, “Oh by the way… In the entire thing he was having a stroke.” So, “There’s also this.” That’s the transition. Which I love. It’s a great transition. It comes in that paragraph before, “There’s also this.” I mean it’s really simple, but it accomplishes what it needs to accomplish. Of all the amount of time I’ve spent writing, I probably spent more time on that very sentence, just debating what that transition was going to be. That sounds a little bit like Tim. That may be even his final edit, actually. I don’t remember who wrote that.

With the stress, the tension of the night, his already high blood pressure had surpassed dangerous levels. Not long after, he had another stroke. When the doctor saw the scar tissue and heard about the night of dizziness, he explained to Fong that he had suffered what could very easily have been a fatal stroke. That night at the bowling alley, had things gone differently, he could have died.

It also means that with the sweating and dizziness he was feeling in the third game, it’s likely that Fong bowled the last few frames through the beginning of that stroke—which makes the accomplishment that much more amazing.

When he had his heart surgery, he was in the hospital for a week. Not many family members visited him. Nobody came from his haircutting days. But he didn’t lack for visitors. Plenty of people from the bowling alley took the time to see him, not just teammates but also some longtime opponents. They asked him how he felt and encouraged him to get well quickly. And, one by one, they each mentioned that incredible night in January, when Bill Fong fell just one pin short of perfect. Did you ever think about ending the story here? I did. And that’s also the kind of line that an editor might have just cut the rest and left it right there. I think when I was with him, especially watching him bowl where he’s taking extensive notes, even after a strike. You know, especially after a strike. When I saw that, I think I was pretty convinced that I had the idea of ending it there. He’s working hard to get back in groove. Because I like stories to work in perpetuity, I like endings that kind of signify that the story exists in perpetuity. Still ongoing. But I actually did think about that when I was looking at the piece.

Rehab was hard at first. The strokes took a lot of his strength. But within a few months—earlier than doctors recommend—Fong was back to his usual form, back to rolling five days a week. More recently, he’s been sharper than ever. Since that night, Fong has rolled 10 more 300s and four series of at least 800.

As they’re talking about that night, one of his teammates poses the question: wouldn’t Fong rather be alive with an 899 than dead with a 900? It’s really a rhetorical question, but Fong takes a moment to consider it seriously. It takes him awhile, but eventually Fong says he’d rather be alive. Would you have still done this story if he had bowled the 900?I don’t think so. I am a firm believer that the more interesting story is the miss. The imperfection, the loss. Almost winning and not winning is in some ways the perfect story, right? It’s not the perfect experience by any means. It’s a devastating human experience. But especially in the context of sports, where there isn’t actually, generally going to be life and death, it really is the perfect story because that is the majority of us. That’s the human experience.

“Well,” says Race, the Mister Rogers of the group, “we’re sure happy to have you still here and bowling with us.”

Tonight, Fong struggles through the first few games. But in the final game of the night, he starts with three straight strikes. Then a fourth. Then a fifth. In the sixth frame, he throws it well but leaves the 10 pin standing, taunting him.

After picking up the spare, Fong comes back to the table, shaking his head and looking at his teammates.

“I’ve got to make adjustments,” he says, and he begins making notes. Can you talk about why you had it end with him making adjustments? I really wanted the story to exist in a perpetuity. I want to be ending to kind of signify that the story is ongoing. He is still struggling, he is still trying for perfection. When Joey, the filmmaker who made the documentary, got in touch with me, and he asked, “Is he still trying for 900? Do you think he’ll try for a 900 when I’m there?” He’s trying for a 900 every day, man. This is the kind of thing that he’s always, always working for.