Suburban athletes know pressure of the game
When Derrick Rose and his blue-collar Chicago Bulls lost to the star-studded Miami Heat 85-75 in Wednesday night's physical NBA playoff clash, we saw how quickly the fortunes of the game's biggest superstars can change when pressure is applied.
Miami's LaBron James went from Game 1 goat to Game 2 hero. So good under fire in the Bull's opening victory, Rose wilted under the pressure of Wednesday's loss. But even the greatest basketball players fall short of the perfection reached more than a decade ago by a suburban high school girl playing a sport that is all about the pressure to turn in a flawless game.
“I almost couldn't look at the last ball she threw,” Ray Maxwell, legendary bowling coach at Streamwood High School, says of the 1997 moment that is frozen in his mind and in the annals of Illinois high school sports.
“Bowling is one of those rare sports where you can say there is such a thing as perfect,” says Maxwell, who now works as an antiques dealer in Elgin. Even a pitcher who throws a perfect game in baseball could have done better by striking out every batter on three pitches. But in the state bowling championship of 1997, Stacy Shapiro, a junior on Maxwell's team, finished the tournament by bowling a perfect 300 to win the state championship for herself and her team. The teenager's 12th and final strike was the last ball of the tourney.
Going against perennial powerhouse Fenton High School of Bensenville and its favored No. 1 team, Streamwood soon fell to a distant second.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, that's not too bad,'” remembers Maxwell, who was in his second year as coach. Then the Fenton coach complained about the condition of the alley, forcing a delay halfway through the penultimate game, and stirring an anger in the Streamwood girls.
“You have a smile on your face and you support your teammates,” Maxwell told his girls, who responded with a rally.
“Stacy was an amazing girl. She was very, very smart. She wanted to make good grades. She wanted to be a good athlete. She wanted to be a good person,” Maxwell recalls. “Stacy was as cool as a cucumber. Everybody was watching this whole scenario unfold. Sometimes that muscle memory just takes over.”
Pressure is a top athlete's friend, says Bill Spigner, a Hall of Fame bowler who recently helped coached the Vernon Hills High School boys bowling team to second in the state. Just as extreme and unrelenting pressure is needed to turn a hunk of coal into a diamond, the stress of a big game brings out gems from top athletes.
“They know how to work themselves through the experience of doing it,” says Spigner, 61, a former pro who has thrown 37 perfect games during competition and doesn't even count the ones he's thrown for fun.
Sounding just like the Bulls' Rose, Spigner says the key to perfection is focusing only on the moment and the next shot. “You can't get ahead and start daydreaming about what could happen,” he says. “I appreciate every pin I could knock down.”
While both sports are played on shiny wooden floors, the path to perfection differs.
“Most people view bowling as one-dimensional, but it's very complicated,” Spigner says. Each ball rolling down a lane changes the amount of oil left in its path for the next ball. In the professional circuit, a bowler can even “play defense” by trying to bowl in a fashion that changes the lane to his opponent's disadvantage, Spigner says.
Still, that's not quite the same defensive pressure as applied by the Heat's quick Dwyane Wade or hulking LeBron James. “In basketball, you have phenomenal players, but you can only play as well as the defense allows you,” Spigner says. “In bowling, you're making your own shots.”
Just as we have witnessed in the first two games of the Bulls-Heat series, we'll see which players step up on Sunday when the action moves to Miami for Game 3.
“Usually the better athletes will rise to the occasion,” says Spigner, a Bulls fan. “They just suck up the pressure and go after it.”