Leadoff bowler for the original team of the gods.
Teacher, coach and founder of a craft school licensed by Pharaoh.
Priests, scribes, carpenters, musicians, physicians, astrologers, masons, cooks, poets, warriors, athletes, cosmetologist, artists, orators, all sourced by Pharaoh.
Guided by their talents and Pharaoh’s wisdom, into the apprenticeship of Pharaoh’s choice.
Those chosen to be bowlers were initiated into the rites of imitation, competition and magnetism.
They were taught how to learn and to teach others to learn. Each of the crafts, talents and skills were a metaphor for making their work into love made visible, and extolling the divine nature of Pharaoh and the Gods.
The masters taught a channeled piece called innergy. It was all imitative. The masters modeled behavior, using ‘image-feel’ and inner-vision to attain mastery. The hieroglyphs showed AMENHOKIT in each phase of the grip, stance, approach, release and follow through with apprentices mirroring his movement. AMENHOKIT was the channeller of the lessons.
It was Amenhokit who established the perfect game.
The Pharaoh’s system of craft mastery turned those who failed into quarry workers, builders of pyramids, farmers, eunuchs and donors of body parts. It was a system that exhorted the power of the game, and the importance of relaxing and excelling.
The apprentices shaped the pins and the balls. With the carpenters they built the lanes, then watched with awe as the masters displayed the rhythm, grace, effortlessness, and finesse as they achieved the zone, becoming one with the pins.
AMENHOKIT was described as a god who guided bowlers through the slam seven, rip seven, soft seven, slam eight, soft eight, eight-tens, blow up four-sevens, solid nines, four-nines, seven-nines, seven-nine-tens, soft ten, solid ten, too softly tapped ten, ripped ten, and seven-tens, in order to save a bowler’s spirit for the one and only shot.
Balls came from rock quarries. The rarest balls were made of obsidian where pockets or bubbles of gas escaped the granite, left fissures in which lava flowed and cooled and formed the black or smoky glass. When the quarries were worked, the fissure lines became fault lines, opening and exposing the obsidian. Craftsman shaped the glass balls for use on quarry lanes where friction was the greatest. These balls had great length on the quarry lanes, whereas the granite, unpolished balls, overreacted on the rough quarry surface and were used on the alleys of Memphis where olive and almond oils eased the friction, smoothing and speeding the ball on wooden lanes.
Caravans were commissioned to search for the heartwood of the Ebony tree. They traveled as far east as Siam. Woodsmen shaped pins from trunks and limbs. The wood was hard, heavy and finished with gold gilt. Ebony sapwood was used in the fronts of the lanes, and a softer wood, perhaps Juniper, was used in the back ends.
The AMENHOKIT scroll is being sent to the National Museum of Bowling in St. Louis, Missouri.
In a related story, an elderly Bocce player at the Valona courts in Crockett told of the League of AMENHOKIT.
“AMENHOKIT rarely visits commercials lanes. He, like the great god Pan, maintains his grace and love in the simple places. The revival of non-commercial bowling in the form of Bocce, where no ball returns can be kicked, and outburst of anger unimaginable, and excellence is rewarded with Amenhokit’s presence, is growing.
“Those of us who have gone away from the game have returned with new eyes.
Our ages do not matter. The strength required feels like that of a butterfly. Bowling feels effortless and the ball returns never get stuck.
“We do not ask AMENHOKIT favors or take his name in vain. We are thankful to play and have the opportunity for perfection.
“To have that which is round and smooth in my hand, travel by my stroke and strike that which I aimed for, is rolling my soul to god. I am like a child again. I am one.
By Antonio De Marco, age 77, Crockett, California.
