How this man turned a lifelong obsession of bowling into a perfect score
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IDAHO FALLS — It’s a Monday morning at Homestead Pizza and Bowling in Idaho Falls.
Mike Wallace shows up wearing a shirt that matches his bowling ball. He begins to polish it, puts on his shoes and gets to work.
“I remember a long time ago my mom used to take me to the bowling alley just for fun with my brothers,” Wallace tells EastIdahoNews.com. “I watched the people around me and wanted to be like them. I saw them curving the ball and getting higher scores. I wanted to be competitive and wanted to beat my brothers.”
Wallace, 23, grew up in Phoenix and remembers watching YouTube videos as a child to learn different bowling skills. He practiced a lot and over the years, developed his own style.
As someone with high-functioning autism, Wallace says he became hyperfixated on the sport. It became his escape to turn off the world around him and be in his “happy place.”
“The first thing I was taught, which was probably the best advice I was ever given, is not to look at the pins. You want to look at the markings on the lane,” Wallace explains.
Wallace moved to Rexburg four years ago to attend BYU-Idaho and quickly discovered the university’s Strike Zone Bowling Alley. He estimates that since coming to Idaho, he’s bowled 1,200 games.
“I would go in and spend a lot of my Pell grant money on tons of games. I actually had a record there of bowling 32 consecutive games and man, my legs and my arms were very tired,” he says with a smile.
Wallace has learned a few things over the years. Bowling lanes are covered with oil and he says the key to a good game is how your ball interacts with the oil as it rolls toward the pins.
“While you throw it in one direction, it’s also spinning in an opposite direction…but near the end of the lane, there’s no more oil. It grabs the wood and then it’s finally able to go in the direction it wants,” Wallace says.
The most important advice Wallace has received about bowling is not to focus on the pins but rather, the markings on the bowling lane.
“Look at the pins maybe after you’ve thrown the ball and after you’ve hit your marker,” he says. “You never want to throw straight down the middle. That is how you leave your splits. You want to aim for a little bit from the left or the right of the center.”
Wallace now has a job at the Strike Zone Bowling Alley and is majoring in mechanical engineering. He started a student bowling league and, just a few months ago, bowled his first game with a perfect 300 score.
“I’ve gotten to the very end a few times. I would throw that last shot and would butcher it because my arms are shaking,” Wallace explains.
But after getting continual strikes in a row, Wallace says, “it was probably the greatest feeling of my life” and he “put my hands behind my head, looked up, I thanked God and I’m like ‘I did it.'”
Wallace documents his bowling games on his Instagram page and plans to continue bowling for years to come. He encourages others to try out the sport.
“You only live once and life is a gift,” he says. “When I become really old and I know I can’t do it anymore, I don’t want to have the regret of not actually learning how to do it.”