onefrombills
08-04-2009, 07:50 PM
Only Rhino Page knows what flashed through his mind the moment he gathered his ball from the rack once again and found himself one strike away from becoming the only player to bowl a perfect game in the history of the Japan Cup?s televised finals. Maybe he heard the sound of plastic pins battering the walls of his mother?s kitchen again as family played cards in a neighboring room while Rhino, then a grade-school kid named Ryan whose ferocious drive would soon prompt a T-Ball coach to call him "Rhino," spent nearly every minute he was not in a bowling center practicing the forms of childhood gods like Mike Aulby on a bowling play set. Maybe he considered how far he had come from the furiously competitive boy whose father withdrew him from a junior tournament mid-match for kicking a ball return. "I had the worst attitude on Earth," Rhino concedes years later. "It came from dealing with failure. It is easy to learn how to win, but not so easy to learn how to lose." Or perhaps he remembered what may be the biggest reason why he now stood a single shot away from the kind of glory which, just months earlier, had become so cruelly unattainable despite having just completed the most spectacular rookie season in the history of the PBA - a reason by the name of USBC Gold Coach Ron Hatfield. "I didn?t even pick up a bowling ball," Rhino explains of the complacency he indulged in the downtime that followed that sensational start to his career. "I had this dream year and I thought 'I got it! This is it! I am that guy!" He may have been "that guy," but halfway into his sophomore season Rhino quickly learned that fortune offers its bounty only so long as you?re willing to work for it. "When the summer series came around I was not bowling very good. I didn?t put the work into it," Rhino admits. "All that work I put into that first year is the exact opposite of what I did after that season." But one thing Rhino learned when he was that grade-school kid making his mother?s kitchen sound like front row at a demolition derby was that a work ethic is easy to come by when you?re doing what you love. "I would tape every pro event on TV and just replay them over and over and try to bowl like the pros," Rhino recalls of those days. "I would go for hours a day. Whenever I couldn?t be at the center I would be doing something with bowling." Just two days before the fifth stop of the season - the Ultimate Scoring Championship in Taylor, Mich. - Rhino knew it was time to get back in the kitchen. He resorted to the one lifeline on which he has depended since he was a teenage kid with an attitude and a dream. "We joke about it all the time - 'If you could work with me at 17, you can work with anybody," Rhino says of Coach Hatfield, who has been Rhino?s principle coach since he became a member of Jr. Team USA nearly a decade ago. "I called him up just two days before the tournament, and I said 'I?ve got to have you here, I?m tired of bowling bad.? He travels all over the world and has a really big schedule, but he changed every plan for me that week and drove up the next day. That right there shows his commitment to me. I cannot speak highly enough about him." "Rhino is a great person with a big heart," Coach Hatfield says. "He has a lot of passion when he competes, and early on this passion gave people a negative impression of him on the lanes. He just needed someone he could talk to and someone who would be calm with him." But the one thing that Rhino did not have on his mind as he set up for that final strike on TV in Japan - a place where bowling is so big that you could almost fill a minor league ballpark with the amount of people who show up at the center just to watch a round of qualifying on a Wednesday afternoon - was the amount of money that awaited the bowler who shot 300 on the telecast at that event. "My jaw dropped when they told me I had won that money," Rhino says of receiving one of two 300-game bonus checks for $100,000 available at the Japan Cup finals. "The night before I am having dinner with Pete Weber and we were talking about the prize for shooting 300 on TV. Nobody knew what it was. I figured maybe it was for $25,000. I was just figuring how cool would it be to bowl 300 on TV - it was more about just doing it than the money." If it is safe to presume that a 7-year-old does not spend hours a day mauling a toy set of pins in his mother?s kitchen because it might help pay the bills someday, it is just as certain that money remains a secondary motive in Rhino?s life at 25. The scowl straight out of an Eastwood western that Rhino adopts on Sunday afternoons is more about earning respect than it is about the paycheck he will bank that day. The PBA trophies he raises over his head do as much to satisfy the dream that loudened his mother?s kitchen as they do to intensify a hunger to join his childhood gods in the Hall of Fame. And as anyone who has watched the man at a pro-am understands, every second he spends pursuing his personal ambition is meant as much to inspire other kids to make that same transition from the play set to the big time. "He loves bowling pro-ams," says Rhino?s former Team USA member, Bill Hoffman. "He just really enjoys interacting with people, especially the kids. He wants to have a positive affect on their life. During his years on Jr. Team USA - he would say that that?s when he grew up - but he realizes it?s because people helped him. More kids will love the sport as a result of his effort." "When we go to different cities, I try to meet a new kid - just one kid - I will give him a ball and hang out with him, just be a nice guy," Rhino, himself a former high school bowling coach, explains. "I find that that encourages them so much and turns them on to our sport and I love it. It is so much fun. You can influence somebody?s life just by talking to them and being a nice person. That?s what we as pros need to do. I love working with kids - I know how rewarding it can be." That Rhino Page finds his richest rewards in bowling is not exactly news to anyone; it is the rewards he is yet to seize that may raise eyebrows. Chief among them, perhaps, is a gnawing ambition to attain a rather unlikely intimidation factor. "I always wanted to have one of those goatees," Rhino explains. "It is intimidating, somebody that has that growl on their face like Ken Caminiti - he had that goatee and it?s like 'That?s a mean dude right there!? But if you see Rhino on a telecast next season and find that he is not yet sporting the goateed scowl that Ken Caminiti brought to his hometown San Diego Padres back in the day, there is a reason for that. "I am not the hairiest person. Facial hair I only get in patches," Rhino sighs. "Maybe if they come up with some kind of facial Rogaine, that might be my only hope." After an emotionally and psychologically tumultuous 2008-2009 season in which a humbled Rhino Page learned that even the Rookie of the Year must earn his keep, recovering from an early-season slump and, yes, that four-count at the Tournament of Champions to score the first televised 300 in Japan Cup history just a few months later, Rhino enters the upcoming season confident once again that any goal he works for is his to attain. But that "mean dude" goatee he wants to grow? Well, that may be one goal Rhino will have to wait on.