I never anticipated I would go bowling in the UAE. I expected to find soccer here, sure, and traditional activities like sailing and falconry and horse racing and camel racing … but I did not anticipate doing one bit of kegling, never mind discovering a 40-lane bowling center not more than five miles from downtown Abu Dhabi.

If I hear the word “bowling” I tend to think of chubby guys from the Midwest wearing silly shirts, nursing beers and flattening vowels. The cast of the Drew Carey Show, basically.

But there it is … the Khalifa International Bowling Centre, housed in a sprawling building on the edge of Zayed Sports City, a collection of sports facilities on the southern edge of Abu Dhabi Island. A big bowling ball above the entrance, lots of glass and neon, 40 lanes and lots of Arabs inside … bowling.

Still, it seemed weird. Handing over my shoes for a pair of bowling shoes, finding Lane 26, scouting for a suitable ball … while living on the northeast tip of the Arabian Peninsula, which bears almost zero resemblance to Milwaukee or Cleveland.
We went mostly because inside the bowling center is a modest Chinese restaurant that may be the best Chinese in the city.

(The story that has been passed down is that when Zayed Sports City was being built, in the late 1990s, so many Asian expats were working in the area that they decided to open a Chinese restaurant for them in the bowling alley, and even after many of the workers left the resto stayed behind, and now it offers balcony-style views of the bowling alley.)

So, the bowling. We had bowled in a mall here once, back in late 2009, I’m thinking. A modest place with about 10 lanes and connected to a movie theater. And that was the first time I had bowled in five years, minimum.

In my experience, bowling has been one of those sports that was more trouble than it was worth — it looked simple, easy even, but it was considerably more difficult in practice. I vacillated between trying to put too much speed on the ball and trying to develop a hook and got a little of both, which tended to produce gutter balls, open frames, scores in the 90s and lots of frustration.

On this occasion, however, it was as if I had forgotten all my preconceptions about the sport, and reduced it to the basics: Roll the ball down the middle of the lane, hit the No. 1 pin, and do it with at least a fair bit of speed.

After a couple of open frames, I picked up a spare. Then, starting with the fifth frame … I rolled three consecutive strikes. I’m not at all sure I have ever done that. Three consecutive strikes? I think not. Going back 45 years to when my mother used to take me and my brother and the neighborhood kids to Java Lanes in Long Beach.

Before the game was over, I had rolled four strikes and picked up three spares and had a final score of 179 which, I do believe, represents a personal high.

What were the odds? Only my second siege of bowling in five years (and maybe third in 20 years) … and I roll a PR. Crazy. Or, maybe, it’s just bowling, where PRs in your 50s are possible!

The second game, I snapped back to a more typical level of performance. A gutter ball, about seven open frames and a total of 100, on the dot. I think my right forearm was tiring, and my form was going down the drain. Or I was just back to doing what I always have done.

If I think about this a bit more, I suppose the idea of bowling in the UAE makes a sort of strange sense. This is a country and a region where the weather tends to push everyone indoors for huge chunks of the year, and bowling is an indoor sport, and it’s not a sport that requires lots of equipment or training or high levels of physical prowess. In that sense, it’s well-suited to the region. Also, I think the locals, the Emiratis, sometimes like going out and wearing clothes other than the long white kandoura. Can’t bowl in a kandoura, so they dig out the “Western” style clothes and go bowling.

Anyway, the Chinese food was simple and the resto spartan, but it was good. And we had a great view of various Middle Eastern keglers banging bowling balls down the alleys. They filled nearly all 40 lanes. Wild. Weird. Very UAE.