The secret to champion bowler New Hui Fen’s wins? Hard work and a new floor

Why do people play? For pride, we think. To prove a point and settle a grudge. To leave a legacy and write a noble history. But people also play for the most elemental reason. To eke out a living.

And earn enough to pay for a new floor in an HDB flat.

This is what New Hui Fen, the straight-talking bowler who became the

first Singaporean to win the Professional Women’s Bowling Association (PWBA) tour Player of the Year award

in 2025, will tell you. Consistency is usually her anthem. “(My) end goal is to come in the top three for every competition I go to.”

But she and her girlfriend have a new house and there’s renovation to be done and bills to pay and if some people crave a particular paint colour or kitchen cabinet, she wants a specific flooring. And so at the US Open, one of bowling’s majors, she performs on one surface while dreaming of another.

“I was just thinking about making good shots so that I get the (first-place prize money of) US$60,000 (S$77,000), then I can do whatever flooring I want.”

It worked, she won, she has the floor. Winning ensures freedom of choice.

New’s story is refreshing and real because professional sport is a competitive slog. Play is not just fun and trophies, play is work. Tennis forehands ensure livelihoods. Golf birdies pay your swing coach’s salary. Goals buy a house for your mum. Legacy is sweet but it can’t feed you.

But New’s story – after an eight-year wait on the PWBA Tour, she won one title in 2024 and three in 2025 – is not about a floor but a more challenging construction. Like all athletes she’s trying to assemble the 10,000-piece jigsaw which is her best self.

Every sporting story has threads similar yet unique. All athletes undergo the havoc of losing, despairing, overcoming. Yet no career unfolds to a predictable trajectory. Mijain Lopez won five successive Olympic golds in wrestling. Tommy Fleetwood, after 163 starts on the US PGA Tour, is still chasing his first title there. Others win and, like New, wait and wait.

New was Rookie of the Year in 2016 when she first won on the PWBA Tour and then stalled a little. She won in Asia, and at the SEA Games, but not on tour again. From the outside, if you don’t win, we crudely say you’re failing, but athletes are actually fighting, surviving, learning. We just don’t see it.

“So many,” sighs New when asked about her injuries. The right knee cartilage wearing away. The medial collateral ligament strain. The patella tendon injury to the left knee. The platelet-rich plasma treatment, the lubricant injected in the knee and more tape used to strap her than for an Egyptian mummy.

Injury doesn’t just delay progress, it makes her “hesitant to go all out”, it makes her question. “Did I get injured because of my bowling? So I changed my bowling technique to try to make my injury more comfortable for me to accept. But that took a toll on my bowling because I lost ball speed.”

So much she slowly fixes. It takes trial and error, knowledge and experience. It takes a supportive girlfriend, Koh Yi Teng, who is a life coach and gives her clarity. It takes an enthusiastic trainer who works on her core, her legs, her biceps.

It also takes trust in herself. She measures herself by victories and also by whether she’s made her own decisions. “If I feel very bad after a competition it’s because I listen to someone and I didn’t trust my gut. So that makes me very angry at myself.”

Athletes are akin to pieces of rock from which grand sculptures gradually emerge. They are both the raw material and the artist. But before they chisel, they get guidance. It might be consultant coach Shawn Ryan helping her understand the modern bowling ball and how to use it to her advantage. Or Singapore Bowling Federation high performance manager Ng Jing Hui, who makes life easier for the team.

Athletes evolve and see the world differently in time, as New, 33, does with winning and losing. “I used to believe that you got to be damn lucky to win. When I learn more things, it’s like there’s no such thing as luck. Now I’m in a place where you need a certain an element of luck but also you need to work hard enough so that you can get luckier.”

This is the new Hui Fen, an altered competitor, whose wallpaper on her phone has a picture of her French bulldog, named Hei Hei after the chicken in the animated film Moana. Among the phrases written on the wallpaper is Protect Your Peace. To find your best self is to find harmony within.

The athlete’s life is uncertain, for a new season offers no guarantee, But for now victory has arrived, her 25kg Player of the Year trophy is on its way and the metallic epoxy floor has been paid for. The house will be ready by October and the floor should be installed next week. Polished and durable. Just like the woman who earned it.