Ryan Brennecke / The BulletinToby Cundell prepares to bowl a frame while playing in a league at Lava Lanes in Bend on Wednesday.

By the time Earl Buck finally bowled his first perfect game in 2012, he had gotten so used to botching the final frame with a 300 score at stake that he fully expected to be disappointed once again.

“I was waiting to screw it up, so there really wasn’t any nerves there,” the 44-year-old Prineville resident recounted during Friday night league play earlier this month at his hometown Rimrock Lanes.“I was expecting to leave the 10 pin or the seven pin or do something completely wrong.”

But on that Friday night in January 2012, Buck’s final ball stayed true, and all 10 pins fell down.

“I about got mauled by my dad on the lane, so that was pretty cool,” Buck said.

It had taken Buck more than 15 years of bowling to roll his first 300 game. His second one came just a week later, and the third just five days after that. But he has not thrown a perfect game in a sanctioned league or tournament in the nearly five years since that torrid streak.

Plenty of local bowlers have rolled one 300 game (or two, or three, or, in the case of Bend’s Jayme Dahlke, 39), but even exceptional bowlers find perfect games — particularly that first one — elusive. Toby Cundell, who coaches the Mountain View High School bowling club, compared the feat to chasing a fly: It seems like it is within reach, but it slips away when you try to grab it.

Rick Mayers, 60 and of Prineville, said he still remembers how nervous he was when he rolled his first perfect game — 12 consecutive strikes — as a 16-year-old in Tracy, California.

“I remember shaking still,” Mayers said. “I had to back off like three times before I could throw the ball.”

Mayers has bowled four more perfect games since, including one earlier this month, and said he feels less and less pressure now that he is older and bowls mostly as a way to spend time with family and friends.

“Most of the time, when you get right (near 300), everybody stops,” Mayers said. “You can hear the whole bowling alley cheering ‘Yay!’ when you throw one. And it’s the biggest “Ahh!” you ever heard when you miss, if you get 299.”

Mayers, Cundell and Buck all insisted that most bowlers who come up just short of 300 do so because nerves cause them to change their approach on their final ball. Even small changes, such as a decrease in chitchat or background noise as the other bowlers pause to watch, can throw off a bowler to blow his or her perfect game.

“For me, I don’t want anyone else to stop doing what they’ve done (earlier),” Buck said. “I want it to stay the same, because if you start to change how you’re doing things, it makes me start to think about it more.”

Doug Gray, 74 and of Powell Butte, has 10 sanctioned 300 games to his name (the United States Bowling Congress counts only games bowled in sanctioned leagues or tournaments as true “perfect games”), but one attempt was foiled when he had to wait for an equipment repair.

“It was terrible: One time I had 11 strikes in a row, and I get up there to bowl the next ball, and the machine breaks,” Gray recounted. “And the mechanic was up at the counter, had to walk down and go all the way back and fix the chute. By the time he got back I couldn’t throw the ball to save my life.”

Ariana Mayers, Doug Mayers’ 24-year-old daughter, bowled a perfect game during a Thursday night women’s league in Prineville two years ago, and she suggested the smaller crowd made it easier for her to concentrate.

“Most of my family missed it, only my cousin, my mom and my aunt got to see it,” Ariana Mayers said. “But it was probably a little bit better that way, because sometimes if I’m around my dad I get really nervous. I went into the 10th frame, and nobody else in the house even knew what I was doing aside from my team and the team I was bowling against. My family owns (Rimrock Lanes), so they kind of were like, ‘Ooh, she’s going to do it. Nobody talk to her or tell her anything.’”

Much like Buck, many bowlers work up to their perfect game, accumulating numerous near-misses before hitting 300.

“At the beginning, where you’re hitting 279 — which is one strike less than a 300 — I did that probably 10 or 12 times before I ever got a 300,” said Jayme Dahlke, 50, who rolled his first at age 32. “Then, the first year after that, I got four 300s.”

Many bowlers said reaching 300 gets easier the more times you do it, but Dahlke, who said he has rolled 39 perfect games and 21 800 series (that is, when the total number of points from a three-game series adds up to at least 800) to his name, insisted he still gets nervous as he approaches one of those bowling milestones.

“You still want to do it (every time),” Dahlke said. “I usually have at least one or two a year, and I haven’t had any this year, so you want to have one.”

Most of the bowlers interviewed for this story could not put their finger on any one factor that made perfect games more likely. Generally speaking, synthetic lanes, such as those at Lava Lanes in Bend, are more predictable than wood lanes, but plenty of bowlers have rolled a 300 on Rimrock Lanes, which has wood lanes. The oil on the lanes tends to break down over the course of a three-game series, changing the way a ball will move down the lane, so Buck and Gray speculated that perfect games are more likely in the first or second games of the night. But most of all, you need some luck on your side.

“If you’re going to do it, you need that little bit of luck,” Rick Mayers said. “I can honestly say of all the 300s I’ve thrown, I’ve only thrown one that was what I would call a ‘true 300,’ where I put every ball in the pocket. There are some that I’ve shot where I got a lucky shot — I didn’t throw a great ball, but it carried.”

Those “lucky strikes” are part of what makes the 800 series more rare than a perfect game — you do not need to be perfect, but you do need to be really, really good for 36 frames. Even during Buck’s streak of three perfect games in 12 days, he came up just short of an 800 series.

“I threw 23 strikes in a row and only threw 798 one night,” Buck said. “That 170 game right after a 300, that killed me.”

And it is never too late to bowl that first 300 game. Shari Hamel, 70 and of Redmond, bowled her first perfect game at a tournament in Florence this past August, more than 50 years after she first started bowling.

“It doesn’t seem real yet, it really doesn’t,” Hamel said during a women’s league game at Lava Lanes in Bend on Thursday. “My (final) strike, I was really nervous, and it dawned on me I could have a perfect game. They were saying my knees were shaking. I gets in your head, the nerves, and most of the time you pull it and leave a 10 pin if you’re right-handed, or a seven pin if you’re a left-hander. But it was a good strike all the way.”

Hamel said she has always had excellent hand-eye coordination — she was also a competitive trap shooter when she was younger — and says she is probably a stronger bowler now than she was 10 or 15 years ago.

“I don’t think age has a lot to do with it, I think it’s the person,” Hamel said. “My hands are full of arthritis, but I can handle that 14-pound ball, only because I let it do its thing.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0305, vjacobsen@bendbulletin.com.