Last week would have been my mother’s 91st birthday.
Today, I’ve started writing her eulogy for her memorial. She passed away on Sept. 11 of last year, so I will always have more than one reason to remember that date. We had to put off her memorial service until next month due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
My mother was an amazing athlete, though I don’t believe she ever realized it or was able to appreciate it. She played on a semi-pro women’s baseball team in Saskatchewan when she was 16-17 years old. She never actually told me a lot about this. Much of the details I heard came from an older brother. They barnstormed through little towns in Saskatchewan in the 1940s. Baseball was huge in the Canadian Midwest during that time — Keep in mind that the author of “Shoeless Joe,” which later became the film “Field of Dreams,” was born and raised in northern Alberta.
I wish I knew more about this side of mom. I’d like to visit the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame to learn more about these barnstorming women’s teams. They supposedly have an exhibit about them.
But what I do know a lot about is my mom’s bowling. She took up bowling some time in the early 1960s. I started off spending a day or two every week in the Cedar Lanes bowling alley day care center in Fresno, Calif. Later, as I got older, I could come out and watch her bowl.
My mom would never admit it, or perhaps she couldn’t admit it, but she was fantastically good at bowling, even though she took it up in her early 30s. Her and her various teams won numerous city league championships and went to all sorts of national tournaments in Las Vegas. And she won at some of those tournaments. I can’t tell you how many trophies she came home with over the years. She averaged in the high 190s, low 200s for several years. I started noticing that professional women’s bowlers average in the low 200s and her averages were just barely below the pros. I really wonder if she could have gone professional if she had taken bowling up at a younger age and if rheumatoid arthritis hadn’t become such a problem for her.
Every Saturday afternoon, she’d religiously watch the PBA Tour on ABC with Chris Schenkel. The 1970s was the height of the PBA with stars like Dick Weber, Don Johnson and Earl Anthony. She lived, breathed and ate bowling.
She had countless 700 series and a few 800 series. She never bowled a 300 to my knowledge, but she came incredibly close several times. She had a number of games of 299, 298, 297, etc. It always ate at her that she never got that 300 game.
The downside of her bowling
Here’s where I feel the need to get painfully honest. In my early teens, I started noticing there was a kind of black cloud over her bowling. She would come home from Cedar Lanes and I’d ask her how she did. “Terrible!” or “Awful!” was pretty much always the answer. I’d ask her what she bowled and she would answer, “Oh, a 752…”
And I’d always shake my head and laugh. She was angry because she only rolled a 750-something? That’s how it went with mom pretty much every week. She’d obsess on every missed spare or every 10th pin that wouldn’t drop. No matter how many 200+ games she bowled, how many 700 series, how many championships she won, she always seemed angry.
I didn’t understand this as a kid. It’s one thing to be a perfectionist, but to me, it just didn’t seem like she was actually enjoying her bowling. I believe now it was a symptom of her depression.
Mom moved back to Canada in the 1980s and found an American bowling alley in her town, continuing to bowl into the 1990s. While her scores gradually declined, her outlook and attitude seemed to improve for a few years. Canada was good for her.
She finally had to give bowling up in her 60s because her arthritis had become too much. Then, we didn’t know about the connection between RA and smoking, but we do now. I believe now that her RA got so bad because she chain-smoked. Depression was her one demon and her chain-smoking was the other. And the two likely fed each other.
She eventually developed COPD and heart problems and had two bouts of cancer. She didn’t quit smoking until 2011, only after she spent a week in the ICU after her second heart attack.
She was hooked up to oxygen 24 hours a day toward the end of her life. She had to use a walker because of her RA. Worst of all, she sat all day in a recliner in front of a TV, barely moving, barely interacting with the outside world, getting more and more crippled from lack of movement. She outlived almost all of her friends and outlived everyone in her immediate family. It became hard for her to see any reason to get up. In the end, depression won. It’s a soul-crushing condition.
One of the last times I saw mom a couple of years ago I had a football game on her TV. I got up to take a shower. When I got out of the shower, I found her sound asleep with the remote in her hand. She had turned the TV to ESPN Classic — I was amazed she even knew how to find it on the remote — and was watching an old bowling tournament from the 1970s with Earl Anthony and Dick Weber.
After all these years, Chris Schenkel’s voice was still a comfort to her and reminded her of better times. Though she was sound asleep, I left the remote alone.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at 360-417-3525 or plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
