Watch: Legally Blind 96-Year-Old Great-Grandmother Is Probably a Better Bowler Than You
Bowling is one of those sports so dependent on muscle memory that the best bowlers could probably bowl with their eyes closed.
Case in point? Kathryn Robinson, who turns 97 on Friday and is legally blind, still bowls scores upward of 200.
Robinson took up bowling at the age of 37 as a way to keep herself busy and find something to do with her kids after her first husband was killed in a car accident.
That was 60 years ago. Robinson took to her newfound sporting diversion so well that it became a regular habit.
“We had so much fun, we started going every Sunday afternoon,” Robinson told the Palm Beach Post.
Back in those days, she had full use of her eyes. These days, she’s lost all sight in one eye and can barely see out of the other.
Even with that, she bowled a 202 last year, and her high score this year is 183.
In her glory days, she once bowled a 258, and she also claims “a lot of 250s” in 60 years of action.
Every Tuesday morning, she bowls in a league with her team, the Teslas, a motley bunch that features a man in a Superman tank top and a woman in a T-shirt with “Strike!” emblazoned on it like she got it at the angry labor union rummage sale.
Robinson is happily married to her second husband Lee, and even though they were married when Robinson was 47, they’re still approaching their golden anniversary, having passed the 49-year mark.
Lee, her husband, is 92, which caused Robinson to quip, “I robbed the cradle.”
Bowling isn’t the only thing Robinson does well at an advanced age, but her other in-spite-of-her-years talent nearly killed her.
According to her son, 74-year-old Ken Bradshaw, Robinson tried for her pilot’s license in her 70s, but during a landing while trying to get her pilot’s license, her plane flipped over.
She walked away unscathed, but she’s never stepped aboard a plane ever since.
Robinson is the matriarch of a family that spans five living generations.
She has two sons, three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and one great-great grandchild with another on the way. On top of that, her husband has two kids, eight grandkids, and five great-grandchildren of his own.
Since 1921, Robinson has been lighting up the lives of everyone who has crossed her path, and she’s still in love with the sport she took up to move past a terrible heartbreak.
On taking up bowling, Robinson calls it “the smartest thing I ever did.”
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