When Chris Peters discovered the 100-year-old PBA was for sale, he recruited a couple of Microsoft pals to help buy and modernize the whole blooming league. Their years at Microsoft must have sensitized them to the payoff of owning the platform. $5M? For those chaps, chump change.

“We could have started our own bowling league, and not have paid off PBA’s debts, but we wanted to continue the organization’s tradition,” Chris states. “We wanted the right to call ourselves part of that history.” At the same time, "We could limp this thing along like a little toy; do a little improvement; or do it big. Because we're all Microsoft-type personalities, we went for the extra jumbo size” in improving, league-rebuilding, and institutional renewing.

James Dean asks what was the nature of that renewal? Barb says, “Good question.”

Danica Patrick intervenes, “I wager you trusted your instincts. I think that I trust my instincts a lot. I trust what I’ve learned and my ability. And I think that, you know, you have to have intuition as to what’s going to happen and how quick you’re catching your car, and how your car reacts within traffic, and a lot of traffic at that.”

James nods his pompadour, “You always have to trust the gods too.”

“Why yes,” Chris says, “that’s right. We definitely trusted our instincts -- our instincts led us to establish live webcasts, to revamp PBA’s website to capture about a million hits a day, and to set up an electronic bulletin board for excited bowlers and fans to enjoy the buzz. We threw out the old PBA rulebook, and invited a more emotional, in-your-face style of play.”

Chris mentions that the demographic that makes or breaks most pro sports -- 18 to 34 year-old males -- currently is up 80 percent for pro-bowling. Chris was seeking a Microsoft-type result that was SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-based).

Chris’s depiction is substantive, yet I notice Chris’s repeating Danica’s line about trusting one’s ‘instincts’ while ignoring James’s supplemental about heeding the gods’ too. I valued James’s add-on if only because it spurred Danica to introduce (a variation of) Aesop's proverb, "The gods trust those who trust themselves, yes?" Sure, a hard-nosed fact-checker would rule for the verb 'help' instead of 'trust, but no matter, Danica's point goes over well with all.

Chris has edged further away from James's second-hand smoke. Has he banned smoking in PBA?

It also strikes me that Chris and James figuratively have circled each other tonight, almost in a standoff, largely avoiding direct conversation. Now I amuse myself by mentally replaying Chris's omission of James's slight point about the gods. Agreed, it's trivial of me to do this, for Chris's omission doubtless was unconscious. Thing is, in my jejune late-teen days & nights when life was slow and, oh, so mellow, I’d try that same sort of linguistic bonding with girls -- you know, like others, I'd approach from the front, move in with head held high, lean forward with pelvis, introduce myself, raise eyebrows, and seek chemistry through body language as well as patter. Consciously too, I’d try steering the conversation so she'd talk about herself, just as I'd dismiss semantic contributions of chaps who were also trying to move in. That gamesmanship didn’t always work. Deep now in December, it somewhat hurts to remember that I was a ‘callow fellow’ well before that phrase was popularized in that “Try To Remember” song.