USBC Mixed Team Challenge wraps up with West Coast events
On May - 29 - 2009
Fun 4 Pak
Katrina Fujikami entered this year’s United States Bowling Congress Storm Mixed Team Challenge with one thing on her mind – finding a way to match her husband’s victory in the event last year.
“My husband won last year, and I won this year,” said Fujikami. And when asked if the standings were close going into the final game, she offers three curt words that underscore the determination of someone who had been waiting for this day for a year: “Not so much.”
If Fujikami entered Strike Zone at Sunset Station in Henderson, Nev., looking for revenge in this year’s final weekend of Mixed Team Challenge action, she found it in the form of some Vegas-style beginner’s luck.
David Yamauchi, one of two first-time Mixed Team Challenge participants on Fujikama’s Big Dot Second Arrow team, posted a 707 series that cushioned them with a leading pin total of 2,982 after the first round of qualifying.
“We were ahead the whole tournament,” Fujikami said after captaining her team to a $1,100 payday for first place. “We remained in first by about a hundred pins.”
But as Fujikami learned throughout the Mixed Team Challenge’s 10 games of Baker-style competition, a comfortable lead can be one of the cruelest ironies in competitive sports, challenging players to remain aggressive even as circumstances tempt them to ease off.
“Our Baker scores were not that high, but good enough to stay ahead,” Fujikami said about braving the second-place team’s opening Baker series of 746.
But it was a different sort of revenge that brought Norm Palomares to Diablo Lanes in Concord, Calif., for the year’s final Mixed Team Challenge event the following day -revenge over a past in which Palomares, a bowler for 44 years who briefly left the Navy to pursue life as a professional bowler, grudgingly succumbed to the difficulties of competing against bowling’s greatest athletes.
With his dreams of glory on the pro tour behind him now, Palomares seeks the minor revenge of success at the local level, satisfying his competitive urge in tournaments closer to home.
“Being a good player at home is a lot different than being good on tour,” Palmores said of his tour days. “I had no business being out there, not with guys like (Mark) Roth and (Marshall) Holman who were in their prime back then.”
The reality of being a good player at home became a lot easier for Palomares to accept on Sunday, after clinching back-to-back Mixed Team Challenge championships by captaining a team to victory at the tournament for the second year in a row.
“It felt great. I bowled with my wife who is a 150-average bowler, but she shot 580 in qualifying. She never practices, and then shoots 580 in a tournament,” Palmores said.
Following a nearly 200-pin lead into Baker competition after a round of qualifying bolstered by the contribution of Curtis Woods Jr., a former exempt player on the Lumber Liquidators PBA Tour, Palmoares’s team, Fun 4 Pak, outpaced the competition by 112 pins with a total pin fall of 5,252, taking home a first-place check of $1,200.
By Gianmarc Manzione
USBC Communications
- Big Dot Second Arrow
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