My son absolutely loves to hear about the crazy things I did at the lanes when I was growing up. Particularly the things we did to draw large crowds. I had a friend Mike who was my best friend and team mate and he and I were pretty closely matched, I was only slightly better average wise than he was. One day we decided to do a little play acting at the crowded center. We had a (fake) heated loud shouting match of how each other was inferior to where people thought it would come to blows. We looked quite serious and kept in character and started shouting about how much $ we were going to bet against one another.

The employees were in on it too but they were smirking the whole time. Neither of us had squat for money on us but we convinced the crowd that we were bowling for very high stakes and the proprietor was going to get in on the action and back our bets. We went on the lanes serious as a heart attack staring each other down between shots. The crowd was acting like we were pros bowling, cheering and such each frame. In between you could hear a pin drop in the place because we were the only two actually bowling in a 32 lane house. In the end I won 2 out of 3 by a very close margin. When it was over we busted up laughing, shook hands and he said "Here's your dollar". The crowd grumbled and went back to their games. Man that was fun!

We became kinda "house famous" after that day and people knew who we were. People would come up and bring that match up to us more months. Even people who weren't even there heard about it. After that is when we started getting into serious pot games with others. Someone always wanted a piece of us. We made great doubles partners. Unfortunately Mike was a diabetic and by 19 he was blind and passed at 20. I miss Mike, he was a talented bowler even with his unorthodox 6 step approach. It's ashamed he's not around anymore. We'd likely be pulling similar pranks with our goofy antics to this day. Ah good times!

What bowling stories do you guys have? Besides bowling a 300 or being on the way to one, what did you do to draw a crowd?