Kingpin of Junior Bowling : Royal High Senior Robert Smith Sets Blistering Pace With an Average of 210

Robert Smith remembers the date--May 12, 1989. He remembers the place--Canoga Park Bowl. He remembers the event--the West Coast Junior Elimination. He remembers everything about his first 300 game--except his last two shots. Those are a little fuzzy.

“It seemed that the ball took forever to get down the lane on my 11th shot,” said Smith, a senior at Royal High. “I don’t remember where the ball hit, only that all the pins fell down. Then on my 12th shot, I had no idea what I was doing.”

A 300-game should be the highlight of a career, but for Smith it was just the beginning. Since then, he has rolled five more perfect games, and he dazzled the bowling world by nearly making the six-member Team USA--which represents the United States in international competition--the only junior to come close last year. And Smith recently won amateur bowling’s top junior honor, the Chuck Hall Star of Tomorrow Award, a $4,000 scholarship named for the former executive director of the Young American Bowling Alliance.

Smith intends to compete for collegiate bowling factory San Diego State and then try to become a star of today on the Professional Bowlers Assn. Tour. It all fits in with his master plan, which he formulated when he was 6, the first day he bowled.

“From then on,” he said, “I wanted to be a pro bowler.”

Rather cocky for a kid whose first two games were 19 and 28, but Smith had bowling in his blood. His parents, Jim and Mary, are longtime bowlers who met at a bowling alley, so they had no reservations about their children hanging out at one. They just never expected Robert, the eldest of their three kids, to become the best junior bowler in the country.

“I never dreamed he’d be this good,” Jim Smith said. “As a kid, he could throw the ball straight, but then, all of sudden, when he was about 12, everything just fell into place.”

Not that Smith was a slouch before then. He averaged better than 160 in his preteen years, then added about 30 pins to his average in three years, an increase he attributes to his growth in height and size. Now about 6 feet, Smith averages 210, tops in the Greater Los Angeles Junior All-Star League.

“When he started beating me, I knew he’d do better than I ever did,” said Jim Smith, who averages about 195 in league play. (Mary’s average has slipped to 170 because of a bad shoulder, Robert pointed out.)

Robert does not lift weights but has a natural, chiseled frame, his right arm rock solid from years of hoisting 16-pound bowling balls. Clean-cut and polite, he is the antithesis of the stereotypical bowler, the “beer drinker and fat guy,” he said, non-athletes who give the sport a bad name.

“I’m trying to give bowling a different image,” he said. To be a great bowler, he says, athletic skill is a necessity. “I’d like to see the average person hit the mark 10 times in a row. You have to have real good hand-eye coordination to be a bowler.”

In the sports pantheon, amateur and pro, bowlers seldom get respect and recognition. At Royal, Smith said, hardly anybody knows about his achievements and “a lot of times that bothers me.” On the other hand, his anonymity does spare him unwanted attention.

“If you’re a big football player, you have people hanging all over you,” he said. “I can stay back and be like everybody else.”

Smith does not have many friends who share his dedication to and love for bowling. “It’s hard to find people my age who do it,” he said. “I’d say there are only 30 or 40 in the L.A. area who take the game seriously.”

Smith’s devotion to bowling comes at the expense of his participation in other sports: He has been able to play only junior varsity basketball. “Bowling is year-round,” he said. “That pretty much eliminates other sports. But bowling’s always been something fun I liked to do. It wasn’t a phase I was going through.”

This time of year, Smith practices two days a week at Conejo Village Bowl in Thousand Oaks, a few miles from his home in Moorpark. Practicing on two lanes, he is refining his game, working on a new release for more spin on the ball to negate the worn wax on the first 10 feet of most alleys.

The right-handed Smith, who has an unusually wide 5 1/4-inch span between thumb and finger holes, is called in bowling terms a “fingertip cranker,” meaning his shots go from left to right before hooking in. He aims for one of the first five arrows on the alley, not even looking at the pins.

“I try to keep my mind focused on my first step and it all falls in place after that,” Smith said.

Even though he has had six perfect games in competition plus seven or eight more in practice (which doesn’t count) and numerous games in which his first nine shots were strikes, he realizes that finesse, not brute force, is the most important element in bowling.

“Bowling is 95% accuracy, 5% power,” Smith said. “To keep your average up, you need spares.”

Watching him bowl recently, a visitor set up a scenario to put the pressure on Smith, who had left the Nos. 3 and 9 pins during a practice shot. “It’s the final game of the world championships and you need a spare to win,” the visitor said. Smith shrugged. “No problem,” he said, calmly mowing down the pins.