Watching This Bowler Try To Roll A Perfect Game In Less Than 90 Seconds Is Mesmerizing

Bowling should be a lazy person’?s game. Hours of sitting around in rented shoes with friends, punctured by the occassional need to stand-up, select the proper weighted orb and then hurl it at some unsuspecting wood objects 60 feet away. That’s good living.

Ben Ketola doesn’?t bowl the way us mortals do. The 23-year-old from Upstate New York actually tries to break a sweat at the alley. After seeing a YouTube video of pro bowler Tom Doughtery set the unofficial record for fastest perfect game (12 strikes in a row, for a score of 300), Ketola—a bowler with a 225-average—has been attempting to beat that time. After multiple failed attempts, he decided to give it another go at the bowling alley he worked at. This time, he came through, scoring 300 with a blazing fast time of 86.9 seconds, smashing the previous record by more than 20 seconds.

"It was fun to do. I honestly wasn't expecting to do it," Ketola told Syracuse.com. "I just wanted to see how quickly I could get across the house and get strikes."

Me, after bowling a strike

What’?s incredible to watch in this video is how quickly Ketola has to move between lanes. On the rare occassion I bowl a strike, there’?s usually an elaborate celebration that takes 90 seconds on its own to complete. When Ketola rolls one, he doesn’?t even have time to watch it happen. He muscles the ball down the lane with his two-handed technique that maximizes spin and by the time the ball is halfway down the lane, he’s already hustling to the next frame to grab another ball, seemingly unaware of the ten pins collapsing to the ground behind him. It’s only at the end that Ketola finally gets to celebrate. And it’?s a well earned moment of joy.