First Member Of The 500 Club

First Member Of The 500 Club – First and foremost, 500 is a huge number. A few of the greatest rollers have flirted with 500 and by a few I mean two. Barfs and Shed. Both hit the 480’s before falling a hundo or two short. Pat has risen to elite status over the last couple skeesons and in Week 4 broke 500, rolling a 501 with an 81 on his final frame. Amazing finish, or was it? The rumor mills have been swirling and I’m actually on the fence now about whether or not it should have the dreaded asterisk.

The short story is… the machine turned off in the middle of the round. Standard protocol is to either finish the remaining balls, or re-start the frame. Ev asked what happened and Pat opted to re-roll the round. Can you say skeeball controversy!? If I walked up on a lane and that happened, I offer the same two options 100 out of 100 times. What changes things though is that Pat knew he needed an 81, and when he missed his 4th ball, he hit the machine. This actually caused the machine to turn off. It’s never happened before (but don’t hit my machines moving forward.) Anyways, the machine turned off, Pat obviously knew he couldn’t break 500 so he opted to re-roll.

Pat still needed an 81, which is stupid hard to roll and he did it, but he kind of had two chances. If the machine goes off and Pat made the first four hundos, does he opt to re-roll? No. If I had known the reasoning behind the machine, I most likely would have only allowed him to finish. So like I said, controversy!

I wrote this for two reasons. One, to let everyone know what happened. I’ve already heard some crazy rumors and when the machine was hit there was no intention of anything put competitive frustration of not breaking 500. But more importantly, I’m curious what the league thinks. Should the 500 stand or not? The skee’ers will decide… vote now!

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