A perfect evening

Joellen White keeps glancing at her left ring finger. She just can’t help it.
She’s proud, and she knows her dad would be too.
For 12 days White has been wearing her new ring, which she earned on Feb. 15 for becoming the first woman in at least 30 years — and perhaps ever — to roll a 300 game at The Brown Bowl in Portland.
“I can’t stop looking at it,” White said. “It’s great. It’s awesome.”
White, 41, had a solid first game in the Pier Mac Mixers league on that Friday night. She was perfect in the final two frames, closing with four straight strikes.
And she carried that momentum into her second game, rolling strike after strike after strike.
“I started out and a few of them were lucky shots, but they were mostly in the pocket,” said White, who received her ring from the United States Bowling Congress on March 16. “They were all falling down.”
White, a Portland resident, had flirted with 300 before. Twice she had been perfect heading into the final frame.
Still, the possibility of perfection didn’t really enter her mind until she rolled her 11th strike.
“I got up there on the 12th ball and it was like I had an out of body experience or something,” White said. “My arms and my legs weighed a ton. I just did what I could to do my approach like I do and I released the ball … and the first thing I thought was ‘Oh lord, please just let it be close.’ … When they all fell down, I turned around and my legs gave out.”
She had been so focused on the task at hand that she hadn’t noticed all eyes in the packed bowling alley were on her.
“I was in my own world,” White said. “I did not even realize that the lanes next to me had stopped. …
“It was a good thing, because that probably would have been even worse.”
When she turned around and collapsed to the floor, Treva Newland was right there with her.
Newland, White’s best friend, had been trying to keep the mood calm as perfection approached. She had let out a yell after the 11th strike before gathering herself, but after the 12th, all bets were off.
The two collapsed to the floor together and started crying.
“When she released that ball and I saw it, I said, ‘Oh man, that’s going straight to the pocket. Oh my God, oh my God,’” said Newland. “By the time she turned around, I was right there with her.”
One of the first things White did in all of the excitement was call her mom, Carol Jarrett, who lives in Winchester.
“She started crying,” said White. “She was happy for me. She said, ‘I know your dad knows.’”
White’s father, Joe, who introduced her to the game, died in December.
Joe and Carol Jarrett used to bowl in a league together, and dad got his girls started early. Joellen and her older sisters, Janice and Joyce, were all involved in sports.
“He taught me how to bowl. He coached me. He showed me everything I know,” said White. “I remember bowling before my feet were big enough for rental shoes.”
And she’s been bowling ever since, only taking a break after having surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff.
She has been especially good on the lanes this year, having rolled games of 275 and 269 to go along with her 300. So while White wasn’t thinking about perfection until late in the game, Newland said she knew her friend had a great chance at perfection after the eighth frame.
“She just was on it,” said Newland, who is averaging 185 in the Pier Mac League. “There were no maybes. … They were all boom, boom, right there.”
After that eighth strike, Newland, who works at The Brown Bowl, went so far as to alert owner Gary Brown about the situation. Brown has owned and operated the bowling alley for 32 years and said he has seen about 50 perfect games.
But this was the first by a woman.
“There are a lot of good woman bowlers out here,” said White, who added a strike in the first frame of her third game of the evening to give her 17 in a row. “It’s incredible. It’s almost beyond comprehension for me, that I am the first woman to do that.”
She plans to do it again, and she’s looking forward to another woman joining the club.
“I want another woman to know the feeling that I had,” said White. “It’s awesome.”[[In-content Ad]]