The short-oil pattern, which involves the conditioning oil being applied to a shorter distance of the lane, is not the condition the bowlers of Team USA were supposed to be good at. So when it was announced that this was the designated condition for the five-player team event at last week’s world championships, people said the U.S. men were in trouble.

But then Mr. Doesn’t-Know-How-to-Bowl-on-the-Short-Pattern, a.k.a. two-time U.S. Amateur champion Bill Hoffman, showed that indeed he did know how to bowl on the short pattern with a momentum-changing 300 in game five of six in the five-player team event.

And with that momentum-swinging perfect game, Team USA went on to a solid game six and ended not only a week’s worth of speculation and ridicule about its short pattern abilities, but also a 35-year gold medal drought by winning the five-player team event in impressive fashion by more than 100 pins.

And Mr. You-Know-Who’s perfect game and surrounding antics put the exclamation point on the historic win. With one ball to throw to complete that perfect game, Hoffman stopped and yelled to the 600-plus people in the bowling center. 

“I said that I wanted everybody to watch the last shot,” Hoffman said. “I mean, I yelled it at everybody!

“Just because I think, as a player, to be told you can’t accomplish something that you’ve been working on for 10 years only makes you want to accomplish it more,” he continued. “Then you want everybody who said you can’t accomplish it to watch!”

So with all the fans, coaches, staff, committee members and other competitors looking on and the media already swarming for the interview, Hoffman rolled the most pressure-packed shot in USA bowling since 1971 – and knocked it dead. But did he feel the pressure?

“I think the only pressure is that it’s a momentum killer for your team,” Hoffman laughed. “It’s like a story with rising action and then a bad ending if you screw up.

“So the way I looked at it was when you throw that 12th shot and everybody’s watching, even though we still had one game to play, it was a nail in their coffin.”

As soon as the 300th pin toppled over, Hoffman went wild, bellowing at the people who doubted him. 

“It was Bill at his finest,” USA Head Coach Jeri Edwards said. “Typically Billy is not tremendously vocal when he’s playing and he’s usually relatively reserved in his responses, so for him to become that animated, it gets everybody’s attention.”

“I knew a lot of the people who were saying we weren’t capable of winning were watching,” Hoffman said. “So I yelled at them.

“What I said was, ‘Yea, I’m Mr. Doesn’t-Know-How-to-Bowl-on-the-Short-Pattern!’ It was directly, directly for the people who made fun of me and my teammates.”

However, the match wasn’t won; there was still a game to play. 

“That was probably the most difficult part,” Hoffman said. “That’s one of the most exciting climaxes you can have in our sport, and we still had to play!

“It’s like a no-hitter going into extra innings. Emotionally you’re finished; it was the perfect ending, but it’s not an ending because you still have to play.”

The ensuing celebration posed a new coaching challenge for Edwards, as she had to keep her players focused for that final game.

“There was so much excitement and people came over and took pictures and said congratulations,” Edwards said. “And all of this knowing that we still had one more game to go and it was not won yet.

“The players responded really, really well,” she continued. “We all celebrated and did it as effectively as we could, but we were very, very aware of the task at hand yet.”

Hoffman described the last game as feeling like time stood still. “It’s the last leg of winning the gold medal, so you definitely feel a lot of anxiety and wonder when the moment’s going to end…You want it to end as soon as possible so that you know you’ve won.”

Hoffman, 32, not only had the weight of his doubters and the 35-year hiatus from victory on his shoulders; he was also the only member of the team who was part of both the 1999 and 2003 teams that came so close to ending the streak, each finishing with silver. 

“I guess you could say I have the whole perspective or the whole experience of our journey,” he said. “I thought of all the teammates we’ve had and all the people who have been through the program who haven’t accomplished this goal and I felt like it was for everybody who invested some time into the sport and into our team more than anything.”

Hoffman certainly invested his own time in order to help accomplish this long-overdue feat.

“I can tell you that Bill has been preparing for this event for a long time,” Edwards said. “He’s  been very diligent and been thinking through how he was going to prepare, not only himself physically, but he really put a lot of diligence into planning what his equipment arsenal was going to be when he arrived and looking at the patterns and just kind of thinking about every detail and aspect.

“To shoot a 300 in an event like that is just awesome.”

Once the gold medal victory was official, the fans went wild with excitement and relief.

“At some point with sports programs, it becomes a burden not winning for 35 years, and then people wonder if you can overcome that burden,” Hoffman said. “They see you doing it, but you have to complete it.”

And after 35 years of frustration, a week of questions about its short pattern skills and an enormously fun and distracting celebration before the final game, Team USA did just that.

“It’s what I always expected out of our program,” Hoffman said, “but it’s one thing to expect it and another thing to do it. I never imagined us as anything less, and I guess to add to it, if we hadn’t won I would’ve been really disappointed.”

Q&A: Gold medal bowler Bill Hoffman