Meanwhile in Michigan: Backyard With Hundreds of Buried Bowling Balls Prompts Immediate Dad Joke About Picking Up a Spare

Rarely does life give us the perfect setup for a dad joke, but the gods have smiled upon one Michigan father who discovered not one, but hundreds of bowling balls buried beneath the dirt in his backyard.

David Olson was demolishing the back steps of his house when he came across a solitary black sphere. Thinking it an odd fluke, he kept digging until he found a few more. By the end of the day, he’d uncovered 160 of them.

“That was one of the bowling balls. I didn’t think a whole lot of it. I was kind of assuming maybe there were just a couple in there just to fill in. The deeper I got into it the more I realized it was just basically an entire gridwork of them making up the weight in there,” Olson said.

Worried about the possible toxicity of his mysterious cache, he reached out to Brunswick Bowling Company, who promptly responded that the bowling balls, manufactured way back in the 1950s were perfectly safe to dispose of.

After posting his find on Facebook, former employees of the nearby Brunswick factory reached out to reveal many of them had used bowing balls as a cheap alternative to sand or gravel, meaning Olson didn’t exactly strike it rich. In fact, when polling 17 people at random, it was a 7-10 split on the value of his windfall, with some saying he was flush despite bowling balls not being worth their weight in gold.

Regardless, Olson is rolling with it. His new reputation as a Brunswick kingpin has led to some interesting philanthropic efforts. He recently donated eight balls to be fired from the church cannon during a pig roast. He’s also donated a few to his stepdad who plans to use them as novelty table legs. Fame and fortune aside, Olson says he’s going to stay in his lane and not open a bowling alley.

Whatever folks said about him in the past, no one can deny that Olson is now a bonafide baller.

Cover Photo: David Olson

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