Have you heard about Dale Davis and his perfect game? Probably not. But it's a story worth telling and hearing. You can watch the video and then read the story as told by the
DesMoines Register. It's an amazing story about an ordinary man from
Alta, Iowa who decided to not let his disability stop him from achieving his dreams.
Dale Davis is 78 years old, weighs 115 pounds and walks in the bowling alley leaning on a cane. He can't believe the folks coming to his small northwest Iowa town of Alta, into the 90-year-old bar where they used to bowl in the basement. Sioux City television reporters are hanging around. ESPN called. And CBS reporters arrived early Friday for today's morning show.They all want to know how he bowled a perfect game, a 300, last Saturday.
"I look straight ahead and I'm totally blind," said Davis, who his fellow bowlers call "the Hammer." "If I turn my head I have a little peripheral vision, a fuzzy ball in my right eye. "Davis started going blind in 1996, the result of
macular degeneration, he says, and a lifestyle of sun-blinding, over-the-road trucking, welding, poor diet and smoking.
So here's how it went last Saturday night. It was the last night of the U.S. Bowling Association-sanctioned league. The bowlers were all crowded into the small space with four lanes, built adjacent to the Century Bar in the 1980s when old folks had trouble walking down the winding stairs to the basement to bowl.
Davis was clicking - five, then six strikes in a row. No one was too surprised just yet. He'd been a bowler since he was 11 and set pins down in the basement. He'd crouch behind the pins, picking them up to put in a feeder in the days before automation.Through the years, he bowled in leagues in California after World War II. He had served in the Pacific, lying about his age to enlist at 16, eager to fight.He was helping to build aircraft, then bowling lanes out in California. He bowled for leisure, a father of four boys who found out he wasn't bad, averaging 193 in his prime. One day he bowled a 299.
He can't see the pins at all. But if he turns his head he can see the spot on the approach and place his left foot on it. By muscle memory, he takes a four-step approach, smooth as the pros he watches on TV, sitting to the side of the screen about a foot away.
His sister, Thelma Sherwood, talked him into bowling again one day in 2004. He'd called her when it was too hard to live in California on his own. He moved in with her in Alta. After he got back, Davis went to a Veterans Affairs school for the blind in Illinois, learning how to get around and take care of himself. Now he has his own apartment, although he said he burns his food 50 percent of the time. But that first time bowling again, it felt right. A few good balls and he was hooked. He joined a league in nearby Sioux Rapids, averaging 160. His average steadily climbed the last three years in the Alta leagues to 188 this year.
The fellas pick him up on league nights. They tell him which is his ball and what pins are left after each roll so he can adjust his feet.
They didn't have to tell him anything last Saturday. On frame nine, he noticed a loud cheer after he heard the crack of his 16-pound Storm Agent bowling ball hit the pins. He knows by the crack if it's a strike. By the 10
th frame, another dozen from the bar gathered around the back of the lanes and everyone fell silent.
"Lord," he said to himself, "let me have three more good balls." Oddly, he didn't feel nervous. Everything felt right.
Backswing. Follow through. "No one has ever bowled a 300 here," said bar owner Clem
Ledoux. "One young guy bowled a 298 in February. And quite a few got 11 out of 12, but they missed in the middle frames. So by now everybody stopped and watched.
"The 10
th ball was perfect. The crowd erupted. The 11
th ball was also true, his ball arching wide right and spinning and curving into the pocket.
By now, Davis' hands were sweating a bit. His boys would like to see this. Two live in California, two in Illinois. Not to mention his late father, who nicknamed him "Hammer" because he'd gently knock on his head with his knuckles and the boy didn't even wince.
Others would like to see it, too. James Benton, president of the American Blind Bowlers Association, said he has never heard that any of his membership had ever rolled a perfect game. Typically the
ABBA's members - Davis is not a member - use a handrail to spot themselves and average between 80 and 100.
Davis heard nothing but silence as he prepared his final roll, stepped forward and let fly. "I tugged it just a bit. Tugged it with too much finger," he said. Then he heard a yell. "Brooklyn!" Brooklyn is when a right-
hander's ball pulls toward the left pocket of the front pin - and often ends up leaving one standing unless it's solid. "As soon as they said it, the ball hit," Davis said. "I heard everybody yelling and clapping. Everybody started hugging me. Some of those guys can hug pretty hard.
"I never thought I'd do it." Women kissed him. And that night his telephone started to ring in his apartment - and hasn't stopped. He doesn't call back because he doesn't have long-distance service.
But he wants to tell them something. "Perfect only comes once in a lifetime," he said." I'm glad I could do it for bowling. And for handicapped people. Shows them we can."
