Bullish on Bowling

This article was taken from:
The Wall Street Journal
By SKIP ROZIN

The economic crisis that pushed the National Football League and National Basketball Association to announce staff cuts forced Honda out of Formula One racing and cost Tiger Woods his Buick sponsorship has reached a sport rarely in the news -- bowling.

M.E. Cohen

In the midst of what has been a renaissance bowling recently experienced a rare off-month. There was no press coverage because there was no official accounting, just conversation "that numbers were down in October," reported by John Berglund, executive director of the Bowling Proprietors' Association of America, upon returning early last month from a national meeting of bowling-center owners in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

No gasp here; bowling has essentially slipped from public consciousness. Most associations are conjured from the past and include stout men in gaudy shirts, smoked-filled alleys, and, for me, girls. After passing my driving test at 16, my destination of choice that memorable first weekend was the local bowling alley -- to flirt and to salve my teenage angst in the crashing of ball against pins, all to the sound of Fats Domino singing "Blueberry Hill."

That was in the late 1950s, when Richard Nixon was still only a vice president and gasoline sold for under 30 cents a gallon. Bowling was popular enough to warrant a prime-time television show, "Jackpot Bowling"; as late as 1978, "Celebrity Bowling" drew such stars of the day as the cast of "The Waltons."

Sometime after that, bowling lost its cachet. Leagues, then the heart of the sport, began to decline in the late 1980s. Registered membership in the official bowling organizations representing male, female and young bowlers -- a gauge, if not an absolute measure, of league activity -- fell to 2.4 million bowlers in 2008 from 8.4 million in 1983, near the height of league membership. Celebrities on prime-time TV have been replaced by pros on Sunday afternoon cable, the names known only to serious fans. As for teenagers, well, along the way they decided that bowling was no longer cool.

But away from the spotlight, the sport reinvented itself. While leagues are down, bowling overall is up. The number of people age 6 and older who bowled at least once last season was 67 million, according to the U.S. Bowling Congress (USBC), the national governing body. The National Sporting Goods Association says that 43.5 million people age 7 and older bowled more than once. Both numbers are close to all-time highs.

The decline was the result of the American public's changing habits; the resurgence, to innovations in bowling. "At one point, this was a sport of shift workers from factories and ladies who didn't work outside the home," says Kevin Dornberger, the USBC chief operating officer. "Now we have fewer factory shift workers and few ladies who don't work outside the home. Folks have found time to bowl, but not 35 times a year on a schedule."

In an effort to attract casual bowlers, centers now offer entertainment alternatives such as billiards and air hockey; bumpers keep balls from gutters for children's birthday parties. Keeping score, taxing for many, is now computerized. "Cosmic Bowling," a nighttime event in a darkened center, features laser lights and ear-splitting music.

But the biggest change is an eased route to higher scores. Bowling balls with sophisticated surfaces and lanes oiled in specific patterns have joined to produce better results than could reasonably be expected even from lots of practice.

During the 1979-80 season, before the current influx of technology, 5,373 "300 games" -- the mark of perfection, achieved by rolling 12 strikes in a row -- were recorded. This past season, 2007-08, there were 52,229 perfect games, according to the USBC. This huge increase came despite the fact that there were only 2.4 million registered bowlers in 2007-08, half the 1979-80 total. Nothing influences the escalation in strikes more than oil, originally used to protect lanes but now important for the manner in which it is spread by calibrated machines.

"Proprietors program the machines to spread more oil in the center of the lane than the sides," according to USBC Vice President Neil Stremmel. "If you miss a little right from your perfect strike shot, there is less oil out there and more friction, so the ball hooks a little more and gets more on target." New balls have a more porous surface, which increases how well they respond to the oil, he explained.

Oil patterns are more tightly controlled for pros; the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA) says it requires that patterns do not inflate scores. Concern that technology was endangering the integrity of the game for serious but not professional bowlers led, in the 2001-02 season, to the introduction of "sport bowling," where rules for spreading oil are strict. Sport bowling's 31,852 members bowled 132 perfect games this past season.

Bowling is also making a comeback among teenagers. The USBC reports that bowling is the fastest-growing high-school sport, the 51,744 young bowlers in the 2007-08 season representing an annual increase of 17%. This year, 200 colleges offer bowling as a varsity or club sport; in 2007, women bowlers at Vanderbilt University won the school's first national championship in any sport.

So while the drop in October is far from positive, it doesn't worry the industry. "Even in these economic conditions," says Mr. Berglund, "bowling is a good enough value to keep us strong."

That strength has proved to be resistant to past hard times. From the depths of the Depression in 1933 to the beginning of World War II in 1941, activity rose from 148,000 bowlers to 874,000, the biggest eight-year increase ever. During the recession years of the late 1980s, bowling began to reshape itself to fit the needs of a changing population, and its numbers rose.

Bowling's formula is simple: It is an activity that is social and physical, and secures participants a few hours of relief from whatever bleak reality lurks outside, all at a price that remains low compared with other escapist recreations.

Mr. Rozin writes about sports for the Journal.