How did you get started in bowling?
Bill - Real simple. I saw it on TV as a young child and my grandparents took me to the bowling lane when I was four. So I went every Monday and Wednesday for two years before I joined a league. 

How did your career develop?
Bill - It all started just simply by playing in junior leagues. I was the best bowler in the junior leagues every time, so I would have the high average and the high game. So when you start that when you’re six/seven years old…it didn’t really stop, and then I got into tennis when I was 14 years old, and I would get beat easily by a lot of athletes, and I think I...not winning in tennis helped me get more interested in bowling, if that makes any sense. So what really happened was that every time I played the bowling league, I was the best player there. When I was 18, I went to college, and at the time the Ohio State Buckeyes bowling team was ranked fourth in the nation. In my first year I was the College Rookie of the Year and the College Bowler of the Year and a First-Team All-American. So I think the way my career developed, more than anything, was I never received anything but positive reinforcement based on my results. You don’t quit doing something you’re good at. I don’t know how else to put it, I know it sounds simplistic but…

Tell me about your first world championship event.
Bill - My first world championship that I bowled was in 1999 in United Arab Emirates, and I think more than anything it simply gives you a measuring stick of how much you need to practice, how much you need to improve and what to work on for the future in order to prepare yourself to be a world champion. I guess my first experience, I went there expecting to figure out what I needed to work on, but I still expected to perform at a high level. There were about 60 countries in our world championships at that time. 

How do you prepare for a match?
Bill - Well, what you do is…when we bowl, we’re given a certain - what’s called a lane condition, and basically what happens is you train in different environments to simulate the environment you’ll see in competition, so you can try and duplicate what you’ll see in a world championship, but you essentially can’t. You still have to adapt. You have to adapt for what’s going to take place during the actual competition. I guess you could equate it to something like a tennis match, where you see the weakness and the strengths of an opponent on video tape and you train for them but you don’t know how the opponent’s going to behave. That’s similar to how a bowling lane is.

You had to use antique urethane balls in your gold medal match.
Bill - We don’t use those balls often at all. What happened is that we don’t have a very controlled playing environment at times, so you have to draw upon drastic measures.  Basically what we have is we have a corporate entity that controls the playing conditions. They dictate how they want the sport played. So essentially we used very old equipment because a corporate entity changed the rules on us, so we won because we were more open-minded than other people. We took a risk to get a result. I mean there’s no other way to put it, we were essentially using antique equipment, equipment that goes straighter because the new equipment was just too aggressive. How do you train for it though? All you do is just hope your plan works and enact your game plan, even if it’s not what you expected over the previous few years. I guess the way I look at it is it’s ok to take a big risk in a world championship as long as the data you have or the way you looked at it was the right way to do it. It’s ok to go down with the risk, instead of getting a third silver.

What do you envision before a match?  Do you imagine yourself going out there and bowling a perfect game?
Bill - No, before a match we imagine…see the lane is oiled before we start, then what happens is the bowling balls absorb the oil with each delivery, so from the first ball thrown, the lane starts changing how you would deliver the ball, so our job before a competition is to anticipate how those changes will occur and when they will occur. So you can’t really anticipate bowling a perfect game, but you can anticipate how you need to change how you throw the ball. So as an example, when I bowled the perfect game at a critical time, it was because I was assessing how the lane was changing and the variables around me more than anything else. There was no thought of a perfect game, you throw 12 balls, and not until the 10th, 11th and 12th shots was I even thinking of that. And to be honest when I knew I could do that - and basically everybody stops playing when you do that - I knew it would be a momentum killer for the other teams. It would make them nervous if I bowled 300. Which obviously in a competition you want to make your opponent as uncomfortable as possible.

What kinds of things do you take into account to prepare for a match?
Bill - Well, in our case, what you want to look for - you can use a ball in our sport where you don’t have to move around the lane or move your feet or change how you throw the ball. Meaning if you choose the right ball you have to make fewer adjustments. If you choose the wrong ball, you have to make more adjustments. Now does that mean your score might be the same? The answer is yes, but you get to the same score in two different ways. In other words, there are some bowling balls which hook more. If they hook more they see changes in how the lane is faster. If the player misses how the lane changes, then their score is going to be lower, so ideally a player will intuitively choose which ball will allow them to play the same for a longer period of time, which is what we did.

I’ve been told that your nickname is The Joker.
Bill - That’s true!

How did that come about?
Bill - Well my function on a team is – people can learn a lot about a sport and still have fun doing it, and I think sometimes we run into players and coaches who take things so seriously that they increase the level of anxiety amongst the players, particularly during competition. So I’m the person who tries to convey a clear message in competition and help the players out but still keep the atmosphere lighthearted. There’s no other way to put it.

What’s next for you now Bill?
Bill - Right now, I’m not sure. I’m actually doing quite a few educational tours through Europe and South America and I’m coaching a lot of developing federations in our sport.  I know one of our goals with our bowling program is not only to win world championships but to educate and encourage developing federations and that’s something that I do besides bowling the competitions. I’m actually going to go to Europe for a month right after this and then I’ll be heading to South America. So basically I’m going to go from athlete to coach. 

Feature: Hoffman perfect under fire