NEW CASTLE, Ind. — If you’ve been bowling, you know how hard it is to bowl a perfect 300 score.
But last week at the Rose City Bowl in New Castle, Indiana, one bowler didn’t just have a perfect game – he had a perfect night!
Bryan Deck started hanging out at the bowling alley when he was just 7 years old, because his father loved to bowl.
“I grew up around it my whole life. That’s what I love. I love the competition, yes, I’m real competitive,” he said.
Last Monday, that competitive fire took over.
“I wasn’t feeling the greatest, I wasn’t really going to bowl. Then I went to my dad’s grave like I always do and kind of sit there and talk to him for about an hour and it was about 5:45 and I was like, ‘Eh,'” Deck recalled. “I was wore out from working, I didn’t really feel like bowling. I just felt that weird…like my dad said, ‘Just go bowl, son, do what you do best.'”
So he showed up for his Monday league and he had several strikes during his warmup.
“Right then and there, I was like, ‘It’s gonna be a pretty good night.’ The first game I had like the first four or five in a row and I was like, ‘It’s gonna be great,'” Deck said.
He wasn’t kidding.
Deck cruised through his first perfect game and then people started noticing as he went after another.
“I was up there, had the shakes…I was really nervous. I got to the ninth frame, threw another strike. I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got the tenth frame to do,’ so I went up there and it was like automatic. Three strikes again. I was like, ‘There ain’t no way,'” he said.
After the second 300 game, Deck started to run out of energy and said the nerves were really taking over.
“So I get up there and, like I said, I said, ‘C’mon, Dad, pull me through this last game. C’mon,’ you know?” he said. “And I get up there and like the fifth frame…or the sixth frame, it was like he just jumped inside my body. It was unreal.”
Unreal is the right word.
Deck rolled 36 consecutive strikes and became just the 39th person in the world to bowl three consecutive perfect games.
He knew his dad would have loved this moment.
“He would be more happier than I am. Because he loved watching us bowl, he was real competitive as well. He hated to lose, we all did. I went to the grave after this happened and just told him thank you for everything. It was unbelievable.”
Deck’s 900 series shattered the Rose City Bowl record that had stood for 61 years and will never be topped.