Ball Review
THE SKINNY ON THE LATEST AND GREATEST
55 Hook 15 Length 16.5 Breakpoint Shape HAMMER: BAD ASS
Manufacturer’s Intent: “The Bad Ass is obviously not intended for those easily offended,” says Group Marketing Director for Communications, Bugsy Kelly. “It features our newly formulated cover, Juiced Solid, for the perfect combination of clean through the front of the lane and strong motion where you need it. We used less factory polish than normal for the underlying surface lines to be more promi- nent and to help our Juiced formula create great motion downlane. The Bad Ass contains a new core shape and some unique features for an HP ball. The Spheroid core was designed to create incredible ball reaction, but also a more usable product for any style of bowler.”
Core: The new Spheroid symmetric core’s RG is a low 2.48, with a differential of .048. We saw around four inches of flare.
Coverstock: The black and orange Juiced reactive cover is sanded with 500 and 2000-grit Abralon and polished with Hammer factory polish at 300-rpm.
Overview: When you see a name like this on the side of a ball, you’d likely think, “Okay, this ball is supposed to do something good.” The Bad Ass definitely does. It shows a cleaner motion through the heads than the Black Widow Legend (August 2014), with two or three more boards of back-end reaction. On Stone Street, we played the wall and more up the lane from 12 at the arrows out to the 8-board at the breakpoint. It definitely went longer than the Legend on this pattern. We wish we’d had this ball in Reno for the USBC Doubles/ Singles pattern. It opened up the pattern on the fresh with some hold, good recovery, a strong motion and surprising predictability. On the lighter house pattern, we had to play deeper, but we
“When you see a name like this on the side of a ball, you’d likely think, “Okay, this ball is supposed to do something good.”
were able to open up the lane from there. The ball stored its energy surprisingly well, unless we tried to cover too many boards. High-rev players will love this ball, because it gives you a good angle off the breakpoint with strong drive through the pins. Lower rev players will get the length with a strong back-end motion and an angular drive off their breakpoints. This ball is really good on medium patterns. For longer patterns or speed-dominant players, I would suggest cutting the shine off the ball to get even better results.
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