Striking Out in Duel With 12-Year-Old Bowling Sensation

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Kamron Doyle, a pint-sized, 12-year-old dynamo became the youngest money-winner in the history of the Professional Bowling Association earlier this month.

Going against some of the top bowlers in the country, Kamron came in 30th out of 94 contestants, earning $400 in prize money. In the tournament, he bowled 13 games, carding an average of 213.1 per game.

Now it's a week later, a Saturday, and I'm bowling a three-game series against him. My knees tremble, the ball is heavy in my hands. Kamron has opened with a strike, sending the pins cartwheeling in a thousand different directions and now it's my turn to answer. The wooden bowling lane seems impossibly narrow, the gutters like great chasms waiting to swallow my ball.

My foe, not yet having achieved puberty, reaches up and slowly moves the bangs from in front of his eyes. It was only five years ago that Kamron Doyle, then 7, bowled for the first time at a friend's birthday party. Shortly thereafter, while bowling with two hands, Kamron broke 100 for the first time. It was the first of many numbers to tumble before his thin frame.

Kamron broke 150 at 8, and by 10 years and five days old, he'd carded his first perfect game, a 300 while bowling with a 12-pound ball. This made him the third youngest player to attain a perfect score. Even more impressive, he's the youngest bowler to have recorded an 800 series, having recorded a 279, 278, and 245 in consecutive games.


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I walk slowly up to the starting point, ball nestled in my right hand. Take one deep breath and one step forward. Then, I'm striding forward, ball swinging back behind me.

The bowl-off is on and I have zero confidence in my game.

There was a time when I had confidence in my bowling ability.

Growing up, my dad took me bowling. The two of us loved it. This was in the days back when you had to keep your own score with old brown pencils on projector screen devices. Twenty years later, I live in downtown Nashville and there are no bowling alleys within 20 minutes of my home. It's a shame, really, because the interior of bowling alleys are cleaner now than they've been in decades. Smoking is no longer allowed inside and games are cheap, affordable, family entertainment.

But the sport hasn't captured a younger generation. Show up in any bowling alley in the country and you're likely to see older men, bellies spilling over their jeans, spinning balls down hardwood lanes.

As I arrived for my bowl off with Kamron Doyle, it's worth noting that I'm not a bowling novice. In fact, I might still be a member of an august organization known as the American Bowling Congress.

That's because in my senior year of high school, I participated in a bowling league with three other guys from my high school class. We played every Monday night at Donelson Bowling Center, outside of Nashville in one of the early suburban towns surrounding downtown.

It was dark and dingy, full of smoke, the kind of place that smelled perpetually as if it had been raining and a school of wet dogs had just departed moments before we arrived.

Our league was called Monday Night Duos and the four of us comprised two teams.

As part of the league fee, my partner and I eagerly joined the American Bowling Congress and worked on recording our averages.

By the end of the season, I averaged 162.

Three months after our league ended, sometime after Christmas in 1996, I went to the mailbox and retrieved my card from the American Bowling Congress.

I was a member!

Except, according to the governing body, I was a member of the Monday Night Duds.

I liked to think it was a misprint.

But secretly, I wondered whether it wasn't an indictment of my own bowling ability.

Now I faced the Terminator of youth bowling, 12-year-old Kamron Doyle in a man-to-budding-man challenge.

My bowling future hung tenuously in the balance.

Was I, after all, a Monday Night Dud? (Who happened to be playing on Saturday afternoon this time.) My match against a kid who was born the year my league ended would tell the complete story.

I arrive at south Nashville's Tusculum Lanes at noon. The bowling alley is having a yard sale in the front parking lot so I drive around to the back and park. The parking lot is scruffy, with discarded candy wrappers and a few Coke cans crunched up on the hot asphalt. The yard sale and grime is fitting for bowling, a sport that has moved to the periphery of American life in recent decades.

Inside, the dimness of the bowling alley is off-putting after the brilliance of the afternoon sunlight. At the lane closest to the side door, my nemesis, Kamron Doyle, a thin kid with shaggy hair, is bowling wearing a white T-shirt and khaki shorts that hang past his knees. He's entered only his first initial on the screen, K, and as I watch he sweeps the ball back in his right hand and uncorks a smooth, powerful, and curving ball down the lane.

The pins spring into the air on impact and all crumble to the ground.

A strike.

Kamron betrays no reaction, calmly reaching up to move the long brown bangs from in front of his eyes.

His father, Sean, and mother, Cathy, greet me. Sean is tall, 41 years old, an orthodontist just outside the city.

"Don't worry," Sean says, shaking my hand, "he beats me too." This despite the fact that Sean, no slouch at bowling, averages 185 and has a high game of 267.

"Me too," echoes his mom Cathy.

Kamron joins us now. He's soft-spoken, his voice barely raising above the sound of pins crashing to the ground. "Mom's average is 125," he says.

"It's 126!" interjects Cathy.

Kamron smiles, shyly, the grin of a boy who has not yet finished sixth grade and doesn't even talk about bowling with his school friends. Later his mom will say, "Some of them don't even know he bowls."

Kamron has long, thin arms and long thin legs that end in black bowling shoes. His strike ball is emblazoned with "800 series" on it, and he also has a second ball, used to pick up spares, made with less cork to allow for a straighter bowl.

"You haven't bowled in over a year?" Kamron asks, incredulous, as I put on my rented bowling shoes.

"No," I say, feeling ashamed of my lack of bowling. I lurch for my go-to excuse, "I have a 2-year old," I say. Having a 2-year old is my excuse for everything from not going to the doctor to failing to file my taxes on time.

"Oh," Kamron says.

Kamron does not and has not yet had a 2-year-old. If he had, he'd have said. "I know." Instead, he says, "Did you not bring a ball?"

I didn't. "No," I say.

I'm playing off the rack, selecting one of the many colorful and nicked balls that are on display behind me.

I select a 13-pound orange ball for our competition. This ball weighs one more pound than the blue ball I played with in the Monday Night Duos/Duds league. I believe this is the perfect choice to reflect the strength I've gained in the ensuing 13 years since I was last in a league.

Kamron's ball weighs 14 pounds.

"Thirteen?" he asks, upon seeing my selection, "Girls bowl with 13s."

Kamron weighs 80 pounds, I weigh 185 pounds. If I were bowling with a ball that represents the same proportion to my weight as Kamron's ball does to his, I'd need a 32-pound ball.

Trash talk complete, Kamron has entered our names on side-by-side lanes. And by "our names" I mean our initials, C for me and K for him.

We'll be bowling in both lanes, alternating turns. Each frame we'll switch back and forth to equalize the bowling conditions.

Equalizing bowling conditions is a big part of competitive bowling. For instance, Kamron has 50-55 bowling balls in his collection, many to use depending on the oil conditions of the lane. "These lanes (that we'll be bowling on) are easier than the professional lanes," Sean says, by way of explanation. "They have their own house blend. These lanes are easier and make for higher scores."

The oil blend in professional lanes is tougher, something more akin to the courses that are designed for golfers in major tournaments.

"You have to be really good at your control," Kamron tells me.

After watching Kamron's first strike, a perfect swerving piece of beauty that begins on the right side and swings into the heart of the pocket.

I follow him, knees shaking, where we opened this story.

My first ball is perfect, at least as perfect as you can be if you're a straight bowler. That is, I have none of the fancy spinning moves where the ball flirts with the side before swerving back to the center pocket.

Nope, I roll completely straight, right down the middle.

Every pin crumbles to the earth.

Only 12 more strikes and I'll have a perfect game.

"Somebody came to play," I say.

Kamron says nothing.

By the fifth frame, he has a 50-pin lead.

I am missing every spare pick-up, my aim displaying the knack of consistently heading in whatever direction the remaining pins are not standing. Conversely, Kamron is missing none. His father, says, "This is where he really distinguishes himself from other kids his age. He always gets at least a spare."

Having already established that I can't catch him by the fifth frame, Kamron is methodically, if a bit disinterestedly, pummeling me.

Given our match-play setting, I feel a bit like a boxer who has been placed in the ring with a boxer of far superior talent. I'm getting hit in the face on every frame.

On the sixth frame, my straight bowling shot caroms directly off the center pin, a sickening sound, the fingernails on the blackboard of bowling.

A split.

Kamron winces.

Two pins are on the far left, a single pin stands on the far right.

"Have you ever picked this up before?" I ask.

"Twice," Kamron says. "It's mostly luck."

"Where do I need to aim?"

"Do you know the pins by numbers?"

"Yes," I lie, because I'm embarrassed that I don't know the pins by numbers.

"You need to hit the four pin just to the right. Just barely graze it," Kamron says.

"The four pin is the one by itself, right?" I ask.

"No. I thought you said you knew the numbers."

"I lied."

Kamron shakes his head lightly. Not only am I 19 years older than he is, infinitely worse at bowling, but I'm lying about knowing the bowling pins by numbers.

He points. "Hit the pin on the right that is standing next to the other pin," he says.

I miss.

What's worse, I have managed to strain my right hamstring and am now attempting not to limp in his presence.

Show no bowling pain, I think. Kamron's dark eyes seem friendly, but I venture that if sees me limping he'll be like a shark that sniffs the scent of blood, a pit bull that can sense my fear.



Kamron puts up a subpar, for him, effort, notching a 197.

I've locked down a dud-like 128.

Kamron wins by 69 pins.

"You're just getting warmed up," says Sean.

Kamron says nothing, he's drying his hands on a rosin bag that he uses in between frames.

"You ready for another game?" he asks.

I am.

Sort of.

The truth is, our frames are going so quickly that I can barely keep up. Our first game took no more than 15 minutes. Same with our second game, during which my hamstring begins to tighten. I feel a bit like a grenade is resting somewhere on my right thigh, ready to explode at any moment.

The pace, in conjunction with switching lanes after each frame, is like bowling on a treadmill. There is no rest, no relaxation, no beer.

Just a beating.

Kamron wins our second game 203 to my 127.

"Not that good," he says.

He has beaten me by 76 pins.

At this point, I have stopped to think of him as a 12-year-old, and started to think of him as a trained assassin, a ninja with bowling pins as throwing stars.

I ask him what video games he plays. "Wii bowling," he says. "I'm better on the Wii than in real life," he says.

Cathy arrives to check on our progress. "How's it going?" she asks.

"I might be able to beat you," I say.

She looks at the scoreboard. "Maybe," she says, with a voice that conveys great doubt.

"Another game?" Kamron asks.

We are rushing now because at one in the afternoon the Tusculum Lanes switches over to Cosmic Bowling. This is bowling's attempting to attract a younger audience, turn off the lights and shoot colorful lasers on the walls. It makes bowling virtually impossible, as if you were suddenly asked to play a basketball game amidst a high school dance.

Earlier, Kamron's mom had called to reschedule our match because of this. "Once they start Cosmic Bowling," she said, "there's no point in bowling."

So I stride back to the line, feeling a bit, I fancy, like Michael Jordan felt in his final season with the Washington Wizards, a gunslinger with no bullets left in the gun.

My arm is tired. You know, the arm that is carrying a bowling bowl that weighs one-pound less than my eighty pound foes.

I ask Kamron if his arm ever gets tired from bowling.

"No," he says.

When Kamron isn't dominating people in bowling, his favorite subject in school is science. "Other than PE," says his mom. He gets good grades, four A's and a B on his most recent report card, and his parents aren't concerned that his life is all bowling because he only bowls around 12 hours or so a week. "That's three or four days a week," says Kamron, "maybe 50 games a week."

In the third game, I finally put some pressure on Kamron.

A bit surprised, he looks up the scoreboard above us after six frames. "Hey," he says, as if he's just seen the Loch Ness Monster swim across the lanes in front of us, "you're only five pins back."

For a moment, I think the Tiger Woods of youth bowling may be in for a tough race, a duel to the finish. Maybe, after all, I'm a duo and not a dud.



But then Kamron starts to pay attention.

Here are his final four frames: spare, X, X, XX9

Here are mine: 8/1, X, a split 8/1, 7/1

Challenged, he destroys me.

Ultimately, he locks down his best score of our series, a 227 and I do the same with a rapidly fading 156.

He's won by 71 pins.

In three games, Kamron's posted a 627 total for a 209 average while I've managed a 411 for a 137 average.

He's beaten me by an average of 72 pins.

In fact, the evenness of all three beatings, 69, 76, and 71 pins, makes me believe that Kamron has been toying with me a bit, playing his game to my woeful competition.

After our third game, we talk about Kamron's performance last weekend in the PBA event. "I didn't think it was that big of a deal," Kamron says of the attention that came his way after he entered the professional bowling event.

Already, the media is taking note of Kamron Doyle's accomplishment. Presently, most of that media is from Nashville, but beginning with FanHouse and ESPN, the national media is starting to take note of his dominance. Asked if there's anything, they'd like to see their son do, Cathy responds, "Kamron would like to bowl against David Letterman in the street outside the studio. That would be fun."

Until then, the Doyle family will be playing in two major bowling tournaments this summer. The Junior Golds in Indianapolis and the Teen Masters in Reno, Nevada. Kamron, just finishing the sixth grade this week, will be participating as a high school student in both tournaments.

As he ages his game should improve, by velocity alone if nothing else.

"Right now I can bowl 16 miles an hour," says Kamron. "Most pro bowlers are 19 or 20 miles an hour."

The increased speed leads to more pin action, and more strikes.

As I record Kamron making strikes on my iPhone, I describe him as "the world's best 12-year-old golfer."

Kamron stops his bowling motion. "You said golfer," he says.

Duly noted.

Kamron Doyle is the world's best 12-year-old bowler, and maybe, just maybe, he's good enough to help begin to pull bowling out of the dumps, return some cachet to a sport that has fallen out of the national sporting conversation.

Until then, he'll focus on sixth grade. But not, let it be noted, on kid's birthday party bowling.

Asked if he still bowls at birthday parties, where he uncovered the love of the sport, Kamron shakes his head. "We don't have birthday parties at bowling alleys anymore," he says, "now they're at people's houses."

"Plus," interjects his father, "birthday party bowling doesn't make sense with all those people running around. You can't really practice. It's like Tiger Woods playing putt-putt."

Yep, write this down, the Tiger Woods of bowling doesn't do birthday parties.

He's too busy beating grown men.