Barnes competes in World Games
July 24, 2009
Columbia 300’s Chris Barnes really has bowled the world over.
Barnes represented Team USA at the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung, Chinese Taipei. This year’s event featured 46 bowlers from 23 countries.
Barnes went into the singles preliminaries July 22, 2009 in second place and dominated in six of the ten round robin games.
After the ninth game, game officials collected scores to double check the calculations, Barnes said. The recalculation took about 10 minutes, he said, and the bowlers went straight into the final game without practice.
“During that break I sort of lost my feel for what I as doing,” he said. “I bowled my best game of the tournament in game nine.”
Barnes was a member of Team USA from 1994 until 1998 before going pro in 1999. Professional athletes were not allowed to compete in the international event until August 2007.
The World Games was established in the Netherlands 25 years ago in an effort to draw more attention to non-Olympic sports as well as provide a unique setting for thousands of athletes from different sports and countries. In the intervening years the World Games has become known as the “Olympic s of non-Olympic sports.”
“The World Games is one of the events I never got to participate in during my first go around with Team USA,” Barnes said. “I was really honored to be selected to compete.”
Barnes finished competition with 2161 points and 60 bonus points.
“Columbia 300 is always proud of what Chris accomplishes,” Columbia 300 Brand Manager Chad Murphy said. “Finishing first place is always nice, but in the long run, the first place winner doesn’t always end up with the crown.”
Hong Kong’s Wu Siu Hany took the top post with 2,259, (including 80 bonus points); Colombia’s Manuel Otalora grabbed second with 2190 points and 50 bonus points; and Malaysia’s Adrian Ang finished third, netting 2,234 points and 70 bonus points.
Bowling is one of more than 30 sports not included in the Olympics games held every four years.
The sport of bowling is believed to date back to 3200 B.C. In the 1930s a British Anthropologist uncovered remnants of a “bowling-like game” in the grave of an Egyptian child. The first written mention of bowling is dated back to 1366 in England when King Edward III outlawed the game to keep soldiers focused on archery. By the reign of womanizing Henry VIII the game was very much in vogue and legal; many forms of bowling have derived from Europe but it is uncertain when and how the sport of ten pin bowling was introduced to the United States.
The earliest mention of American bowling comes from a quote in Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving. It is a story of a Dutchman escaping his wife’s nagging by going high upon the Catskill Mountain with his dog, Wolf. Rip and Wolf sat for hours until Rip realized that he could not make it to the village before nightfall but rued the thought of going back to his wife when he heard someone calling his name. Approaching was a square shaped man in old style Dutch clothing carrying a keg; Rip helped the man with his load and together the pair began a long and silent journey farther up the mountain side.
“As they ascended, Rip every now and then heard long rolling peals, like distant thunder, that seemed to issue out of a deep ravine or rather cleft between lofty rocks, toward which their rugged path conducted. He paused for an instant, but supposing it to be the muttering of one of those transient thunder-showers … in entering the amphitheatre, new objects of wonder presented themselves. On a level spot in the center was a company of odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins.”
But nothing did more for the popularity of bowling than the first broadcast of “Championship Bowling” by NBC in the 1950’s and is currently played in some form by 95 million people in more than 90 countries world wide.
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