"So I stopped and said to Gail, 'What's your point?' And he said, 'Don't let up. Be aggressive.'"
At first, Jim couldn't get over that Gail had broken protocol and come up and talked to him -- let alone touched him. But then, as he stood there facing the pins, Jim also began to wonder why Port had thought it was so imperative to say what he'd said. And that began to gnaw at him.
Dayton James enjoyed managing the Basemar Cinema Savers in Boulder. He died there on April 27, 1993.
Sean Hartgrove
Life in the best lane: On February 17, Jim Lambert had his friends on pins and needles.
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"As I was standing there, I wasn't nervous," Jim says. "I just thought, 'Why in the hell did he do that?' But then I started thinking, 'What is he seeing my ball doing that I'm not seeing?'"
It was like trying not to think of a bear in a room when someone tells you not to think of a bear in a room. Jim tried to concentrate. He took his position, stepped toward the pins -- and threw too hard. "I knew it when I let go," he says. "It came in real light. The head pin shot straight across, missed the two pin big time. The five carried out."
Never mind the mechanics. When the throw was done, the two pin still stood. It had tippled as the nine other pins swirled around it. Jim looked at it, and then looked at it again, hard. But it didn't move.
There was a groan from the crowd, though only a soft one. And then there was a terrific explosion of applause. And no one moved. The moment was still so charmed, and why should anyone cut that short if he didn't have to?
Jim spared, and he hit the next strike, too. "I went back to what I was doing before Gail spoke to me," he says. "It was perfect." Out of 36 throws he'd hit 34 strikes.
Jim bowled an 879 series that night. It was good enough to earn him the state record for highest score ever in Colorado, and another one for the most consecutive strikes, too. According to the bowling congress, the score ties for 31st best ever. When Jim first learned that he was -- momentarily -- disappointed.
"Thirty-first?" he wondered. "How can that be when it was only 21 pins away from a 900? From perfect?"
"'Lot of people bowling," replied Didi.
That was later, though. It was a magnificent moment in Jim's life, as much for the fact that he had done it as for the fact that he had done it surrounded by so many of his friends. "I don't think I missed hugging a person in that entire alley," he says. "I was grabbing people in the Dairy Queen afterwards. I've never felt anything like that."
On October 8, 1956, in the fifth game of the World Series, Don Larsen, pitching for the New York Yankees, threw a perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Yankees won the game 2-0. Among baseball fans, it is still, even today, nearly a half-century later, considered a singular moment of pure, undiluted beauty.
But what if things had been slightly different? What would Don Larsen have done if his catcher, Yogi Berra, had held up his hand and walked out to the mound just before the final pitch -- and following that Larsen had given up a single? What must become of the person who, when you are teetering on the brink -- immortality beckoning on one side and a merely superb moment waiting on the other -- might very well have nudged you in the lesser direction?
Well, Jim will say, bowling is a great way to spend an evening. But rolling a sixteen-pound ball at ten pins sixty feet up an oil-slicked hardwood floor is only part of the pleasure.
"I didn't say anything to Port afterwards, 'cause I didn't want him to feel bad," Jim says. "With really good friends, you know where the line is for what you can tease about and what you can't. He doesn't tease me about being short and ugly, and I don't tease him about being bald. Besides, subconsciously, I probably would've missed anyway. I was just thinking too much."
Later, Jim will lean back in his kitchen chair and look out his window at the Colorado mountains and ponder things. He will consider how, at times, the clearest glimpse of all of life's loveliness can be seen best from just this side of perfection.
"I think if I had bowled a 900, I would have had to pack up my equipment and quit. Somebody recently said to me, 'Well, you could take up golf.' And I said, 'Excuse me, have they put ball returns on golf courses and not told me?'
"Besides," Jim says, "I never thought of myself as perfect anyway. And I don't know anyone who is."
