Putting some Wow! in the bag

I finally bought a new bowling ball a few weeks back and started using it a couple weeks before Christmas. First impressions on new balls are just flighty enough that I wanted to give it a little time. I think it's been long enough now and I really like the Columbia Wow!

When Brunswick phased out the original Red Alert, I bought one more, had it drilled about eight months later and that's been the ball I've used ever since. I'd never really made the jump from reactive to particle balls having tried twice; both were actually worse for me (we re-drilled the HPH for Adam and he likes it a lot, the other is useful on drier lanes but not on the oil we normally play on). As the amount of oil has increased (to deal with all the particle balls out there) and my ball has died, it's become progressively more exasperating. I've worked on reducing speed (which has always been an issue) but at some point a change was needed. With focus, I can get down to 16-17 mph and it can get up to nearly 20 if I'm wound up or paying too little attention. Slowing down also throws my timing right out the window at times. I was working too hard on something which is supposed to be fun and getting close to wanting to quit altogether.

As a 'tweener (neither a full roller nor a rev' master) with more speed than makes sense, I find this ball to be quite forgiving. It's a lot like discovering the Danger Zone all over again (the Red Alert was the last in the series of Danger Zone balls, all of them had a light bulb shaped core and for the time, a very aggressive cover stock — outer shell). Maybe it's new ball syndrome, but it's been a good three years since I felt like I could trust a ball to rollover on the backend on the swamp conditions we normally bowl on. The results have been better than expected and I'm actually looking forward to bowling on heavy oil again.