For LCO men’s champion, score isn’t the point

This is the first in a two-part series on the LCO bowlers of the year. Featured later will be women’s winner Catherine Rawsthorne.

A brief cellphone video, produced on the sly by one of his bowling-league buddies, demonstrates the craft and the casualness of Keith Wilponen’s delivery. His motion is concise, his release firm and assured. The ball glides down the lane, then veers languidly into the 1-3 pocket for a perfect strike.

Wilponen walks back, adjusting his glasses, and somebody points to the overhead score monitor. The beginning of an announcement can be heard from the front desk: “Ladies and gentlemen, on Lanes 3 and 4, Keith Wilponen ... ”

That’s where the video ends.

Why was it shot in the first place? That strike was Wilponen’s 12th in a row in that game, meaning he had just rolled a 300.

Here’s the strange part: He’d had no inkling of the perfect game until he was directed to check the monitor and heard the P.A. And that’s quintessential Wilponen, according to his friends.

“Scores are the last thing that matter to him,” said Robert Hagan, secretary of the NFL League on Sunday nights at Lancer Lanes in Clarkston, where the 300 game occurred in March.

Focusing on form and friendship instead of scores and statistics, Wilponen compiled 695 points in the scoring system used by the Lewiston-Clarkston-Orofino Bowling Association, giving him the 2019-20 Men’s bowler of the year award, the organization announced recently. It’s his first.

The coronavirus pandemic cut short the season by a few weeks, but the legitimacy of Wilponen’s title isn’t in question. The right-hander competed in five leagues per week, all at Lancer, averaging between 214 and 224 in all of them, and he claimed the LCO crown by a 152-point margin over second-place Mark Berreth.

His three-game high series was 827. But he doesn’t really think in those terms.

“I don’t play three games a night in league,” he said. “I play 36. Each frame is its individual thing.”

Wilponen, 51, said he retired early from a software corporation because of a job-related neck condition that has required six surgeries. In his bowling game, the injury has reinforced an emphasis on accuracy versus power, but he thinks that’s his best bet anyway. A certified bowling instructor, he advises his students to keep things simple and smooth — and let the score take care of itself.

“If I’m worried about the score, if I’m worried about how many pins I have to have to beat somebody, or to get a good series — all of that gets in your brain and muddies the waters,” Wilponen said. “To me, ignorance is bliss.”

He’s so indifferent to stats he’s not sure how many official 300 games he has rolled. He thinks it’s eight or nine. But he believes most of them have come in the past couple of years as he’s become increasingly committed to letting the ball do the work.

“I just finally relaxed and slowed down,” he said. “I can’t throw the ball hard, just because of my neck. So it’s nice and easy every time. When it happens, it happens. The way I look at it, if I have a bad night, it wasn’t my turn to bowl well — it was somebody else’s. That’s where I leave it. I don’t lose any sleep over it.”

As a teenager in Spokane in the 1970s, Wilponen averaged in the high 190s at North Bowl, before deciding at 16 that pursuing girls was more interesting than knocking down pins. Two decades ago he moved to Clarkston, where he’d been born, but he didn’t return seriously to bowling until 2013.

The game had dramatically changed in the interim, but he adapted. Like many of his peers, he bought multiple bowling balls, the better to adjust to varied lane conditions. He now shuffles five balls, all of them of the reactive resin variety.

“It’s much more of a mental game than it used to be,” he said. “You always have to be thinking ahead.”

His LCO championship breaks a seven-year streak of titles for Skip Olson, who took a hiatus from bowling this season in continuing a battle with cancer that he described to the Tribune a year ago. Wilponen suggested Olson would have kept his streak alive had he been healthy.

“I never set out saying, ‘I’m going to get bowler of the year this year,’ because that’s Skip Olson’s spot as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “I figure I’m just going to keep this chair warm for him. I don’t care. I’m just there to have fun.”

Joking with teammates and opponents is a big aspect of the game for Wilponen. He attributes his success this season partly to his friends’ ability to give him grief.

It even played a role in that 300 in March, in what turned out to be the final session of the NFL League this year. As Wilponen unwittingly drew closer and closer to a perfect game, his buddies did their part to make everything seem normal.

In other words, they harassed him to the end.

Grummert may be contacted at daleg@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2290.

Top 30 men

1, Keith Wilponen 695; 2, Mark Berreth 543; 3, Dustin Paris 461; 4, Nick Harris 446; 5, David Dufvenberg 438; 6, Kelly Crabb 387; 7, Dan Lovejoy 360; 8, Billy Kite 323; 9, Randy Isbelle 317; 10, Brett Cunnington 299; 11, Rodney Bonner 298; 12, Kyle Post 290; 13, Ryan Knierem 230; 14, Jon Stewart 214; 15, Verlon Cook 205; 16, Shane Post 198; 17, Kaden Lyda 189; 18, Robert Lashly 170; T19, David Hickle 166; T19. Rick Savage 166; 21, Joe Leitner 162; 22, Duane Thompson 155; 23, Eric Walter 153; 24, Trey Nielson 153; 25, Greg Rudd 151; 26, Jim Lashly 149; 27, Clint Olson 147; 28, Tony Barden 144; 29, Ed Ernsdorff 143; 30, Levi Taylor 142.

High average — Randy Isbelle, 50.