Found an old athletic shirt from college the other day. No it was not Football or Baseball. It was a Bowling Shirt. Yes, you heard me correctly, Bowling. You see I had a rowdy group of friends in college, a lot like a wrestling locker room today, full of all sorts of characters. A group of us that stayed during the summer and worked or went to summer school would find things to get into, play sports, and always know what place was having beer specials every night of the week. My genius roommate “Joey” did not sign our group of guys up in time for the summer softball league, so now we were stuck with nothing to do. Joey like the con that he is comes up with the solution the next day. Joey-“Fellas, I’ve got it! We are entering a bowling league. It’s cheap, it’s every Tuesday night, and you get ½ price pitchers of beer if you are in the league bowling. On top of all of that, at the end of the season the top 4 teams with the highest averages get cash prizes". We were sold. I might mention that Joey works in Las Vegas now. Every time I talk to him he tells me about the next “Big Thing” that is about to make him rich.
We split the softball team up into 3 bowling teams. The locals took this league serious, and hated the college guys from the get go. Joey was unaware as the rest of us that you could net heckle the other bowlers which led to us getting in trouble and in some near skirmishes. To get around this Joey would go to the bar in the bowling alley and yell from there to get around the rule. Joey was about 6’2 and weighed maybe 160lbs soaking weight. His size combined with his mouth made people want to kill him, but luckily he had some large friends. I was 210lbs at the time and was the smallest besides Joey. The kicker was that the majority of us were horrible, that combined with us downing pitcher after pitcher made our bowling handicap outrageous. We actually bounced around the top 2 teams for the first 2/3 of the season, which led to the locals hating us even more. We could not heckle the other team, but we could show off when we bowled. You would have thought we won the Super Bowl when someone got a strike, primetime dancing like Deion Sanders all the way back to the pitchers of beer. The thing that really set people off was our team name, the “Seven Ten Leg Splitters”. The 7/ 10 split is the hardest split to pick up in bowling, so we took it a step further with the name. After some debate, we were able to keep the name. The 1st week of play we did not have our bowling shirts yet, but we had them coming, hell, we were more excited for the bowling shirts and the cheap beer than actually playing. Finally the shirts came and you could hear the rush of whispering through the entire alley as we walked in. I guess you can say I was destined to be a “Heel”.
![]()
We ended up getting 4th place. It killed the manager to give us the check. The check was just enough to cover all our games, the shirts, and the beer for the season. So in the end it (the season) paid for itself.
