Joey Payeur
They had their eyes firmly on the prize but blinked at the wrong moment.
The Plaza Lanes team of Mildred Bedard, Ruth Bagacki, Gary Vittie, and Evelyn Barker came within inches of winning the Northern Ontario Club 55 Cup Provincials last Wednesday in Azilda (near Sudbury).
But after holding the lead following the third of four rounds, the local quartet faded in the final one and wound up finishing second at +64 in the pins-over-average competition.
Superior Bowl (Thunder Bay) also had a tough final game collectively but only were minus-13 compared to minus-34 for the local crew.
They held a four-pin lead heading into the last round but ended up losing by just 17 pins to Superior, whose +81 total earned it the right to represent Northern Ontario at the Club 55 Cup nationals July 8-9 in Winnipeg.
“You can’t win them all . . . second place is nothing to sneeze at,” reasoned an upbeat Vittie, whose scratch total of 728 put him at +36 in pins over average.
“Going in, we knew it was going to be tough for us against all the teams, but we really enjoyed ourselves and we’re quite happy with ourselves.
“Would gold be good?” he asked. “Yes. But silver is pretty great, too.”
Vittie, carrying a 173 average into the competition, opened with a 222 before slipping to 168 in his second one.
He improved to 180 in the third, but picked the wrong time for his worst game–a 158 in his finale.
“We were an inch here and an inch there from winning the game,” Vittie recalled.
“I had four headpins in the last game, and one or two of those being spares or strikes would have won us the game,” he lamented.
“Sometimes you can’t get off that headpin, even if you adjust your speed, move over one board . . . it just doesn’t work.”
Barker, who carried the team’s lowest average into the tourney at 136, went from a 122 to a 155 before setting the lanes ablaze with a 217 that turned out to be the best game thrown by any female at the provincials.
“That 217 was fantastic,” lauded Vittie.
“We were all cheering for each other, no matter what happened,” he added.
“Even the other team treated the game like it was special.
“All the bowlers there were great,” Vittie stressed. “It’s not like you were out there alone.
“The other teams would be cheering for you when you got strikes and spares.”
But Barker couldn’t maintain the momentum–falling to a 127 in her final game to finish with a 621 total and a team-high +77.
Bagacki bettered her 141 average right off the hop with a 151, but then gradually declined to 136, 135, and 115 to finish at 537 (minus-27).
Bedard saved her best for last–being the only local bowler to beat her average of 138 in the last game with a 154.
But that was the only time she did make her average all day after starting with games of 128, 122, and 126 to wind up at 530 (minus-22).
Superior was led by Don Gordon, a 163 bowler who rolled a 216 in his opener en route to a four-game total of 734 (+82).
River Bowl from Burk’s Falls, which carried the highest collective team average into the provincials at 195.5, ended up in third place (+15).
In the running after two games, it cut like a knife for Burk’s Falls when Brian Adams came off a big 253 to plummet to 135 in his third game as part of a disastrous minus-104 round that buried the team’s chances.
Venture Lanes (Espanola) was fourth at minus-13, followed by Mid-Town Bowl (Timmins) at minus-54 and Timber Lanes (Dryden) at minus-94.
