Jim Stingl

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

This just in from the world of children's duckpin bowling. Max Kubiak has rolled a 300.

The second-grader nailed 12 strikes in a row at The Thirsty Duck, which offers a game that looks like bowling was hit with a shrink ray.

Max is by far the youngest among the 23 bowlers who have achieved perfection at the Wauwatosa bar, grill and duckpin bowling emporium, 11320 W. Blue Mound Road, since it opened in 2015. A second location, in Sussex, opens this week.

"It's pretty unusual," said general manager Jesse Eldridge. "I would say any of the other people who have gotten 300s here are at least in their 20s."

He snapped a photo of Max and put it right up on the Duck's Facebook page. And he comped the bowling as an additional reward.

Max, the son of Sara and Steve Kubiak of Racine, was enjoying a day of mini bowling last month with brother Tyler, 11, his grandparents, Gerry and Tek Kubiak, and the boys' aunt, Carolyn Bultman.

His first game was a 180. At The Thirsty Duck, the lanes are elevated, narrow and just 16 feet long. Pins are not quite 10 inches tall, and the balls are about the size of a large grapefruit and have no finger holes. Human pin setters work extra hard for tips. Max had done this kind of bowling a few times before.

Grandpa Gerry picks up the play-by-play from Max's second game: "I wasn't paying too much attention, and my daughter said, 'Hey, he's got four strikes in a row.' Sure enough, he gets five. Then he got six. Then it was seven. Then eight. At eight, I waved to the bartender, and when he got number nine I raised nine fingers and he gave me a thumbs up. And then, sure enough, he strikes out! Everybody was excited, but Max was kind of nonplussed."

Max actually was figuring a little math in his head. He's in a regular, big-bowling league on Saturdays, and his dad took to giving him and his brother $1 for each strike. "Papa, you know what?" Max said to his grandfather. "Daddy owes me 12 bucks!"

Gerry, a 75-year-old retiree from Greenfield, decided to contact the newspaper about the boy's triumph. "Am I just being overly proud as a grandfather? Or — what I really think — this is remarkable!" he said.

I looked up duckpin bowling 300 games online and was surprised to learn that it has never happened. Wait, then why does The Thirsty Duck have a wall of photos of two dozen people who did it?

Apples and oranges, as it turns out. Official certified duckpin bowling uses lanes that are 60 feet long, just like regular bowling. That's a long way to roll a 5-inch ball at miniature pins that don't topple each other as reliably as the larger pins. The highest score ever recorded was a 279 by Pete Signore Jr. in Connecticut in 1992.

"The game has been around for over 100 years and nobody has ever recorded a sanctioned 300 game," Stan Kellum said to drive the point home. He is executive director of the National Duckpin Bowling Congress in Linthicum, Md. He said Wisconsin's last duckpin bowling center with 60-foot lanes was Quackers in Thiensville, which is no longer there.

I had a chance to interview Max about his remarkable feat. He's a boy who enjoys basketball, soccer, baseball, golf, swimming and, of course, bowling.

Fueled by Sprite soda, his strategy was to throw the ball straight and sometimes try to curve it a bit.

"I felt happy when I kept getting strikes. And a little bit nervous," he said. "I thought I was going to get a 300 and then I did. It was kind of easy."

Is he that good, I wondered, or mostly lucky?

"I'd say lucky," he admitted.

Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist.Jim.Stingl