I actually used to work as a mechanic at a bowling alley while in college. Bowling is still popular on Long Island where I live but I think the demise of huge money pro bowling comes from 2 different aspects: 1. There are less amateur bowlers now and 2. Ball technology combined with illegal lane oiling patterns has made bowling too easy.
It was once a very rare feat to bowl a perfect game (300) Now it happens so much that when someone was on 10th frame carrying a perfect game I would not even bother to watch it. Bowling centers want to keep people coming so they make the lanes very easy with "walled shots" (no oil near gutters to allow for massive hooks). Now almost every reasonably good bowler bowls over 200 average, and the difference between winning or losing is much smaller to the point it becomes luck.
This is the same in the Pros minus the illegal pattern. So now there is much less differentiation between pro and amateur bowlers and it is hard to be consistently dominate as everyone is bowling very high scores. They need to make bowling more difficult again by regulating ball surface compounds more closely and making lane oil patterns more difficult. This will increase the divide between pros themselves and amateurs and make it more impressive to watch.
You know, I always bowled better drunk. I was in a league once. it was a handicap league and my average was like 95. And I played on one of the best teams - due to my huge handicap. I'd start out terrible and sober, and by the end of the game I was walking sideways and could barely see down the lane. But somehow I always bowled at least 95 (usually over 100). Which gave cover for the (much) better players to have a bad night and still keep the team's rating.
Applies to golf and pool for me. But I start off as a bit better than average while sober, in the zone at four or five beers, then I fall off a cliff after that. Relaxation and looseness apparently have a very narrow maximum window of effectiveness while drinking. Go past it, and you're hosed (but I always had fun getting there).
Me too. Snooker/Pool is also better. At the start of the night I'm sober and play a fair game, but at the end of the night after two/three pints I'm doing consistently and considerably better.
I keep meaning to take a night of not-drinking to see if is the beer that is responsible, of if it is just because I only carry out these activities every few months and I need a bit of time to relax and get back into the swing of things..
This. I bowled pretty well in college (back in the 90s). Well enough to get invited on Texas a&ms bowling team ~215 avg. I decided against it due to it being barely more than an intramural sport at the collegiate level and the huge time commitment. Then my bowling ball and shoes were stolen out of my car and I never bothered replacing them. Now I bowl 120-160 ish with house balls. Every lane has uv and laser light and bowling is not really that fun anymore. In the 90s I went to an old school smoke riddled over head projector scoring lane and now it's a kids laser show. I think bowling just suffers from being "mainstreamed" and diluted into a drinking game or birthday party activity.
I used to sit in with a folk band comprised of some guys who'd been in the music business since the sixties. I once told my mentor that it seemed to me that general talent and musicianship seemed to be higher in artists in the 1960s and 1970s. Surely this was just because time had passed and I'm only listening to the good stuff. Right?
He said, no, the music community is, in fact, less talented, as a whole, than it was in older days. He blamed MADD (mothers against drunk driving).
Here was his reasoning. In the older days, almost every bar, tavern, hotel, and other night spots would have a house band. This was the environment where you learned to play different musical styles for different types of crowds. It's also how you apprenticed with older musicians, learned the standard repertoire, etc.
With the rise in criminal consequences for impaired driving, people stopped going out as much. This had a ripple effect causing the end of the house band. Today, musicians don't get nearly the amount of stage time and access to mentors as they used to.
It was a compelling theory and I wonder if something similar could be at work here given the coincidence of the drop in popularity in the early 1980s.
As a musician, back in the day you had to learn to play your instrument without making mistakes in order to work and record. These days with software based recording you can edit so easily it's not a requirement to be that good - or even play an instrument. There's less demand in popular music for the professional musician of that type in the earlier days who can play a song 100 times without making a single mistake.
That being said, I think there are still plenty of good musicians out there. There's just a lot of other stuff as well.
"Making music has gotten easier; selling it has gotten harder. Making music has been democratized, but the market is in the hands of fascists." ~ Stewart Copeland, former drummer for The Police
I think part of the problem is that even if bowling is quite difficult it doesn't appear to be so. Even if the athletes are in great shape, you can't really tell at all. The great feat of a perfect 300 in bowling is accomplished regularly.
The only things that really seem to distinguish a great bowler are his/her speed and accuracy. That's basically it. There's no Michael Jordan running on thin air with his tongue out. There's no massive 7' Shaq shattering glass with the force of his dunks. There's no Peyton Manning watching over his team, radiating some austere strategic wisdom (barring this last Super Bowl...).
Frankly, I'd (very seriously) rather watch professional juggling than bowling.
Finally, the overall style of bowling as a sport is decidedly 1970s midwest America. The US is undergoing probably an unprecedented urban trend right now. As profoundly shallow as it might be, bowling is just not sexy at all.
>Finally, the overall style of bowling as a sport is decidedly 1970s midwest America. The US is undergoing probably an unprecedented urban trend right now. As profoundly shallow as it might be, bowling is just not sexy at all.
It's the oil pattern that makes it difficult. Spectators can't see it, and thus can't appreciate the adjustments necessary to continue throwing good shots.
They used the blue dyed oil on a televised match a few months ago as an attempt to show it, but I feel that gives the bowlers an unfair advantage.
If there were a way to show the oil moving in real time to both the TV and live audience, I think you could start getting people interested in the game at a high level. Much the same way embedding little cameras in a poker table enabled the audience to see a live poker game unfold.
I'd also like to see the PBA fully embrace video streaming, and no, Xtra Frame doesn't count. I want to be able to watch follow an individual player throughout the 4 days of a typical PBA tournament. I have my favorite bowlers and I want to see their scores in realtime. I want to see how the lanes are changing and how the bowlers are adapting.
I love the sport; I've been bowling since I was very young. But, I too, would rather watch anything other than a PBA telecast.
Maybe they could inject a dye that was not visible to the eye, but that the cameras could pick up, and then overlay it digitally in some way to the tv audience.
Bowling is kind of viewed as a lower-middle class sport, and the economy has wiped the lower-middle class out.
I thought the complaint was that the center has been pushed a bit downwards, which would suggest to me that the lower-middle is at least as robust as ever.
My completely unfounded guess for the reason is due to fashion. It used to be OK to acknowledge one's working-man lifestyle (coincidence that the article cites bowling's heyday at the same time America was enjoying "Urban Cowboy" and "Smokey and the Bandit"?), but we're all supposed to pretend to have more sophistication today.
> I thought the complaint was that the center has been pushed a bit downwards, which would suggest to me that the lower-middle is at least as robust as ever.
I don't find this true, in my experience. The "smear" that used to characterize the people I knew is gone. There are a bunch of white collar "professionals". There are a bunch of low wage "service" people. However, the vast chunk of blue collar factory workers, machinists, welders, steelworkers, miners, etc. seems to just be gone.
I think you and the parent are saying the same thing. The lower-middle class no longer "exists"... because it now thinks of itself as upper-middle class. It's still there for anyone else to see, of course, but whether it embraces its own status determines a lot about its purchasing habits.
So, is there money in it for the person who makes it hip and ironic? No teenage boomer would have been caught playing kickball, but there are thriving leagues for the millenials.
It probably is just a death by a thousand cuts rather than any one specific thing. The pace of the sport is slow. It's doesn't have the level of physicality of other sports. The players are not necessarily good looking or in good physical condition. Some of the top guys are fairly old with beer guts and probably remind people of their grandparents. etc, etc.
It probably could be at the level of golf if bowling companies were able to sell high-end products. But for better or worse, bowling is a pretty cheap sport to play and doesn't require owning any gear whatsoever.
Predictability of the televised game for the average person, IMO. T20 cricket is a huge TV success in Australia because, on any given delivery, someone is likely to smack the ball recklessly or get out. In bowling, what's going to happen? Maybe a strike, maybe almost a strike! Unlikely to be as exciting for the average viewer.
Quite a few bowling alleys around my city have redecorated in the last few years. They are now painted black, with mood lighting, and giant projection screens at the end of the alleys. The background music is also much louder than it used to be. The bowling seems to have become just a distraction, not the purpose of going.
Interesting point. I wonder if arcades, bowling alleys, and roller rinks all followed the same trajectory. My local bowling alley actually had an extensive arcade in the late 80s to mid 90s. You'd go for the bowling and stay for the Cruis'n USA.
It's always hard to tell if these things are actually less popular than in decades past, or if it's just that I'm no longer in elementary and middle school.
This is true of baseball too (well, bat technology), but there the response was "hey, screw technology! We'll just ban modern equipment!" Why the difference in bowling?
Seems curiously parallel to the story of snooker and darts' popularity in the UK from the 60s through to the 80s - similar non-athletic 'leisure' sports that seem an unlikely candidate for professionalization. I wonder if the ease of televising it (it's in a small, indoor venue) has anything to do with it?
Couple of differences: in the UK, snooker was originally picked out as a good demonstration of the potential of color TV broadcasting; later on, it was boosted by tobacco sponsorships following the TV advertising ban - surprised in a way to see that the same didn't happen to bowling...
Professional snooker is still very popular and the best earn millions of USD pr. year. So the situation between snooker and bowling isn't quite the same.
1966 coupe, with the 200 sprint, because that was the car I bought when I was 16 (although I didn't get to drive it until I was 17, because I had to fix it up).
I'm a bit to young to have been driving the original mustangs but I am a Ford guy. If I were to get a mustang it would have to be manual no doubt. The 302 Boss has always appealed to me. I typically don't buy flashy stuff but in the case of the mustang I would go all out with the classic baby blue with black stripes or orange/red with black stripes.
Given the era of its collapse it seems to me that professional bowling missed out on the ride which modern sport packaged television brought. A Kerry Packer/Bernie Eccelstone type could perhaps have had bowling on every screen now.
As a side note, I am watching my favourite sport, Test cricket, die as well, replacing it is a glitzier, shorter less technically demanding version of cricket called T20. The appetite for 5 day matches seem to be on the wan, although any cricketer would tell you, the longest format of the game is where your mettle truly gets tested.
It's funny that while it seems like bowling has died out in the mainstream it has picked up really big in the hip hop community. Especially in the big cities. There are places where they even have a velvet rope to get into the bowling alley. The bowling alleys are hybrid of alleys & clubs. I think the biggest one in NYC right now has to be Brooklyn Bowl. http://www.brooklynbowl.com/bowl and popular DJ's that spin there http://www.brooklynbowl.com/calendar.
I highly recommend "A League of Ordinary Gentlemen". Great documentary and it really shows the human side of the tour. It is currently available on Netflix streaming.
For people in Austin, the annual Austin Cup is scheduled for May 3rd. I participated in it a couple of years ago, and it's lots of fun (one of our teams came in 2nd!)
Profits go towards the Center for Child Protection.
I didn't realize how much these guys once made during the bowling golden years. I'm surprised they haven't managed to make more out of this with livestreams, but I would wager the average bowling fan is probably up there in age and isn't really cued in to online streaming.
Interesting article all the same. Thanks for sharing.
It's because the PBA's livestream offering, Xtra Frame, is utter horseshit. It's a 320x240 stream that you can't even make out who is who. The live scoring is horrendous.
I would pay $25 or $30 a month to watch my favorite players throughout the course of a tournament. But I have no way to do so.
Definitely not. Competitive bowling is pretty big at a high school and college level, and there's the national Junior Gold program. (Plus the usual local youth leagues and tournaments.)
This can be fixed. Exteme bowling! New rules!
Stuff like obstacles, special balls, pins, etc. could make it fresher.
Much better than pretty much waiting people to get a almost-perfect score.
The article says bowling is the #1 recreational activity. There's no way, as cycling is easily #1. Surely they rigged their definition to somehow exclude cycling.
It was once a very rare feat to bowl a perfect game (300) Now it happens so much that when someone was on 10th frame carrying a perfect game I would not even bother to watch it. Bowling centers want to keep people coming so they make the lanes very easy with "walled shots" (no oil near gutters to allow for massive hooks). Now almost every reasonably good bowler bowls over 200 average, and the difference between winning or losing is much smaller to the point it becomes luck.
This is the same in the Pros minus the illegal pattern. So now there is much less differentiation between pro and amateur bowlers and it is hard to be consistently dominate as everyone is bowling very high scores. They need to make bowling more difficult again by regulating ball surface compounds more closely and making lane oil patterns more difficult. This will increase the divide between pros themselves and amateurs and make it more impressive to watch.