Daniel P. Finney

dafinney@dmreg.com

Des Moines Police Officer Ryan Mann took the call over the radio on an early August afternoon. He was working the beat in the northwest Des Moines district. The complaint was a possible drunk driver in a navy blue pickup.

A camera crew from "Cops," the long-running reality TV series about law enforcement, rode with Mann. The episode runs at 7 p.m., Saturday, on the basic cable and satellite network Spike.

Here's a preview:

Mann caught up to the blue truck in the parking lot of Plaza Lanes, the bowling alley and bar at 2701 Douglas Ave.

"I thought it was going to turn out to be a whole lot of nothing," Mann said.

He got out of his car. The camera crew followed. The driver of the blue truck spied Mann approaching his vehicle from his rear-view mirror.

The driver threw his truck into gear and drove away.

Note: He drove away, not sped away.

Mann hustled back to his car, turned his lights on and gave pursuit.

But not hot pursuit, as Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane used to say on "The Dukes of Hazzard."

The truck refused to pull over. But he didn't speed up much, either.

"He never went above 25 miles an hour," Mann said.

This is O.J. Simpson in the white Bronco "low-speed chase" territory. Fred Flintstone in his pedal car could get up to 25 mph on Bedrock streets.

"It was totally bizarre," Mann said. "He wasn't going fast, but he would not pull over."

The chase went on for an awkward 7 minutes or so.

Mann's bosses back at Des Moines Police headquarters accused him of letting the chase go on for the sake of the "Cops" cameras.

Eventually, the driver stopped.

Mann pulled the driver out of the truck at gunpoint. He was cuffed and put in the back seat of a police car.

The driver offered a single explanation: "I just wanted to go bowling."

Why did he run?

"I just wanted to go bowling."

Why didn't you stop?

"I just wanted to go bowling."

And so on.

"Anything we asked him, all he said was, 'I just want to go bowling,' " Mann said.

Finally, Mann recalled one of his favorite movies, "The Big Lebowski," a film about a pot-smoking bowler who gets embroiled in a bizarre kidnapping plot.

"I'm just curious if you smoke weed before you bowl," Mann said. "Kind of a whole 'Lebowski' thing."

The suspect: "I just wanted to go bowling."

The only time the driver deviated from the script was when officers confiscated the contents of his pockets, which is standard procedure in an arrest.

The driver didn't care about his wallet, keys or even that his truck was being impounded.

But in his shirt pocket was a coupon for a free round of bowling at Plaza Lanes.

The guy practically begged Mann for the ticket back.

"You would have thought we pulled a gold bar off of him," Mann said. "He wanted us to put it back in his shirt pocket. He wanted to make sure he could get it back."

The suspect got a trip to jail. Unsurprisingly, police said he had marijuana on him as well as other drug paraphernalia. He faces a mess of drug and traffic charges.

He also didn't have a driver's license, just a precious coupon for 10 frames at Plaza Lanes.

"In the end, I felt kind of bad for him," Mann said. "In the academy, we watched part of 'The Big Lebowski' every day at lunch. The guy just wanted to roll."

DANIEL P. FINNEY, The Register's Metro Voice columnist, once watched "The Big Lebowski" 136 days in a row just because he could. Reach him at 515-284-8144 or dafinney@dmreg.com. Twitter: @newsmanone.