Like the Globetrotters, Except It's a White Guy Bowling
The Legend of Andy Varipapa
Whenever I think I’m basically the same person I’ve always been, all I have to do is remind myself that I actually used to be a bowler. From the ages of roughly 11 to 14, I skipped watching Scooby Doo on Saturday mornings and bowled in a kids league with my brother Jim and my sister Christine.
I didn’t really enjoy it, though, so maybe I still am the same person.
Unlike baseball, basketball, and football, at which I always excelled as a kid, I simply wasn’t very good at bowling. I reached my personal degree of pseudo-competence after a year or so and just sort of straggled around in the middle of the pack from that point onward, sort of like David Lee Roth in his solo career, but without the assless chaps.
As a special bonus, I developed a recurring blister on my left thumb because my grip was wrong in some obscure way that I couldn’t comprehend, and the skin would peel up toward my thumbnail upon release of the ball.
It bled a lot and hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.
Eventually—and after far too long—I put my thumb out of its misery. I was in some sort of state tournament in Birmingham and bowled way over my head. For God knows what reason, I was suddenly nailing strikes left and right, and, with my considerable handicap tacked on at the end of each game, I wound up winning a trophy over about eighty other competitors.
In the car on the way home, I announced to my mom and dad that I still didn’t have much fun, and, if I couldn’t get a buzz from finishing with some displayable hardware in a big showcase event, I might as well not bowl anymore.
So I quit, right then and there. Like Daniel Day-Lewis, I bowed out while I was at my best.
My sudden withdrawal from the sport didn’t go over too well in the car that day. I come from a family of Cleveland-style, Polish, working-class bowlers. Bowling was part of our heritage, you see.
My mom, who’s now 89 years old and going strong, didn’t quit bowling until Covid hit (!), and my dad was throwing the ball—delicately and gracefully—until the lung cancer that would claim him made bowling an impossibility.
So bowlers come and bowlers go, just like everybody else, and usually with several beers in them on the way out. But there was one bowler whose name Dad used to cite as if it was the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx, or, at least, the bowling equivalent of Jim Brown.
And he was unlike just about every other bowler, because much of the time he wasn’t even keeping score.
This is Andy Varipapa. Say the name out loud. Dig its rhythmic bounce. Now say it again.
Now move on.
Varipapa, born in Italy in 1891, immigrated with his mom to Brooklyn at the age of 12, and was soon working as a pin boy at the local alley. From there, it didn’t take him long to figure out he was a superlative bowler.
Rather than simply being great, though, Varipapa eventually entered the stratosphere as a trick shot master. With a bowling ball! And he invented the concept!
Young Andy’s route to fame and a decent amount of fortune was circuitous, to say the least. In traditional immigrant style, he was willing to do anything he could to make a living in his new country.
He was doing okay as a bowler but didn’t like having to earn money via illegal gambling and consorting with lowlifes—one imagines him to be a good Catholic boy who loved his mama. So he quit bowling in favor of semi-pro baseball and boxing…although it’s never been explained how he managed to avoid shady types while boxing.
One day, fate intervened when he got hit by a truck while riding his bicycle, leaving him with unnamed nagging injuries. He was forced to return to the less intense sport that originally paid his bills.
Except this time he added a twist that turned him into a national celebrity.
I love how the ad is addressed to an ominous “Mr. Operator.”
There wasn’t much going on in professional bowling during the Great Depression. Possible prize money was being spent on silly things like food and shelter.
But that wasn’t going to stop Andy’s immigrant ascension. Rather than looking for non-existent tournaments, he somehow got the idea, in those escapism-hungry times, of putting on traveling exhibitions in which he pulled off the craziest shit anyone had ever attempted at a bowling alley.
Check this out! If ever there was a bowling visionary, it was Andy Varipapa. (Note that if you removed the music and added a low humming sound, this wouldn’t look out of place in a David Lynch movie.)
The mind boggles here, or at least mine does.
It’s crazy enough that Varipapa thought up these shots and actually managed to pull them off. I’m wondering who the poor bastard was who had to keep setting up the pins at precise points on the alley, only to have Andy blow the shot seconds later and force him to set them up all over again!
I’d like to think Andy trained a chimp to do it, which doesn’t seem totally out of the question when you consider his can-do spirit.
Varipapa even ended up working in Hollywood, which was about as far removed from a Brooklyn bowling alley as you can get. Here’s a pretty surreal “Pete Smith Short” that was made at MGM in 1934. (Apology in advance for the Black kid setting up the pins, who, in 1930s Hollywood tradition, is forced to perform like a clown).
People were desperate for work, and this is what Andy Varipapa was doing for a living!
Varipapa wasn’t all trick shots all the time. In 1946 he won the prestigious (I wouldn’t know) BAA All-Star tournament, making him the oldest winner ever at the age of 55. Then he won it again the next year, thus becoming the first person to manage the feat two years in a row.
Wait! There’s more!
When he was 78 years old, he developed arthritis in his right hand. Never one to quit, as already established, he taught himself to roll with his left hand. Within a couple of years, he was averaging 180, which was not anywhere near as good as he was at his peak, but hey—that’s the wrong hand!
As you might imagine, Andy Varipapa was eventually elected to the National Bowling Hall of Fame in 1957. And, somewhere along the line, he was presented with this commemorative clock.
If I had won something as cool as that back in the day, I might have kept on rolling!