Jeff Grego hasn’t been around the way Pat Webster has been around, or the way Bob Gates has been around. And he for sure is no Jerry Rippe, who’s as much an institution on the bowling scene in these parts as the automatic pin-setter.

Grego knows this, though: It’s one fine city tournament they put on here every January.

“It’s a great tournament,” he said last weekend, while waiting for the festivities to get underway at Pro Bowl West on Goshen Road. “It’s the best of the best of Fort Wayne, and then everybody else that comes out to bowl. You get with your teammates and your friends and your family, and you come out here and bowl the city tournament.”

This from a guy who’s still so new to it, he might as well be wearing a nametag. Grego, 34, has been bowling in the Fort Wayne men’s city for only two years, having relocated from the metro Detroit area to work at the GM plant south of town.

He is, for all of that, pretty representative of the people who came through the doors last Sunday, drawn by the a monthlong tournament that, according to Rippe, the Fort Wayne Bowling Association executive director, is far and away the largest city tournament in the state.

Back in the meeting room at Pro Bowl West where he sits at a table awash with entry lists and registration forms, he crunches the numbers: There are 194 five-man teams, 325 doubles teams and 650 singles players entered in this year’s tournament, which runs every Saturday and Sunday from noon to 3 p.m. until Jan. 28.

“That makes this tournament by far the biggest tournament in the state,” said Rippe, who’s been involved in the local bowling scene in one capacity or another for three decades. “Indianapolis, for instance, only had 31 teams.”

Which might or might not have something to do with how long the Fort Wayne tournament goes on. Run at two sites – Pro Bowl West and Thunder Bowl out south on U.S. 27 – it includes both doubles and singles competitions, plus team events.

“They can bowl more than once in the team event, but in doubles and singles they can only bowl once,” said Gates, the tournament director, who helped build Pro Bowl West 30 years ago and then came back from Florida three years ago to help rebuild it after it had fallen into disrepair. “This is the doubles and singles house; they can shoot here today and they’re done Then they can go to Thunder Bowl and bowl two or three more times (in the team events).”

Gates won a doubles title in the 1980s. A few tables away this Sunday, meanwhile, is Webster, who’s from Columbia City and has been bowling since 1972. Come February, he’ll be back here in another capacity when the state tournament comes to Pro Bowl West, attracting about 4,500 to 5,000 bowlers.

“Yeah, we work with the Convention and Visitors Bureau when we put the bid in, and on a conservative estimate it should be bringing in about a million dollars to the community,” said Webster, the first vice president of the state bowling association.

That likely would sit well with a guy like Grego.

A bowler raised by bowlers – his parents were youth bowling coaches in the small town in Michigan where he grew up – Grego rolled his first ball when he was 6 years old, and he’s been doing it since. He grew up “taking scores for people and stuff like that,” he says, and started bowling in league play at 17.

Now it’s going on three decades, and he’s still out there flingin’ ’em – a 230 or so bowler on “house shot” lanes, a 210 bowler on more toughly oiled tournament lanes.

“Just trying to do better every time,” he said when asked what keeps him coming back. “You just keep getting better; you try to beat your last score. There’s an ultimate goal – you want to shoot a 900, which is three 300s in a set – but you still would never stop at that point, because you’d keep wanting to repeat it.”

And repeat it. And repeat it.

bensmith@jg.net