Posts Tagged ‘bowling’
“You don’t have to be in shape to bowl. It’s the only sport where there’s a way to signal for a cocktail waitress.”*…
Bowling has been around for over 5,000 years; it’s played by over 120 million people in more than 90 countries, almost 70 million of whom are in the U.S. But, as Dave Denison reports, the state of play is challenged…
Bowling is an old sport—ancient, really… There’s a lot of churn in the bowling world; alleys go out of business all the time. I bowled in leagues for several years at a venerable old heap just outside of Boston. Opened in 1942 and originally called the Turnpike Bowladrome (for its location on the Concord Turnpike in Cambridge), it had one level devoted to candlepin bowling, a once-popular New England variant, and an upper floor for regular tenpin. I met people in the leagues with whom I would otherwise never have rubbed shoulders: a genial postal worker with noticeably less genial political views; a retired military man who also ran the nearby Air Force base’s bowling alley; and a Thai immigrant who told me he developed his technique by watching YouTube videos—he delivered the ball with a precise, balletic style. I even got to know the mechanic who fixed the automatic pinsetters and ran the machine that oiled the lanes. But developers had been eyeing the land for years, and finally, in its seventy-fifth year, the place then called Lanes & Games fell to the wrecking ball, replaced by a “luxury” apartment complex.
Most longtime bowlers can tell a similar story. Their home lanes were sitting on land too valuable to justify its use as a bowling alley. Or their family-owned center had no one to maintain the business. Or there just weren’t as many regulars as there used to be. It’s been said that the industry overbuilt when the development of automatic pinsetters in the 1940s led to a bowling boom in the 1950s and 1960s. Bowling leagues were especially popular in the industrial Midwest, where factory workers could bowl and drink beer after a shift. Budweiser sponsored a team in 1954 that launched bowlers Dick Weber and Don Carter to fame. Four years later, the Professional Bowlers Association was founded in Akron, Ohio, giving superstars like Weber, Carter, and the dominant left-hander Earl Anthony the chance to go on tour and make a good living.
But the number of bowling centers in the United States, which peaked at about twelve thousand in the mid-1960s, has been steadily falling for four decades. The number was down to about 3,800 in 2023, according to the USBC. Political scientist Robert D. Putnam [see here] famously cited the decline of league bowling in his 2000 book Bowling Alone as one of many indicators that civic engagement was collapsing across America, noting that league bowling declined by 40 percent between 1980 and 1993. The updated figure is even more dramatic: from a high of about 9.8 million league bowlers at the end of the 1970s, the number of USBC members in leagues for the 2022–23 season was 1.09 million. That’s a decline of 89 percent…
Denison explores the consequences of the consolidation of ownership (of both lanes and equipment manufacturers– spoiler alert: private equity) and the impact of technology. But mostly (and best), he explores the culture of the pastime.
Bowling, America’s most popular declining sport: “Changing Lanes,” from @thebaffler.com
* Robin Roberts
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As we grab our balls, we might recall that it was on this date in 1960 that Marlene Dietrich visited a new bowling facility in Knokke-le Zoute, Belgium to roll a few frames and to inspect their new automatic pin-setting equipment.
“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation”*…
… and happily that prospect may be more likely than we’d been led to believe in works like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone…
Despite widespread worries that the social fabric is disintegrating, data from the American Psychological Association shows that since the 1950s, cooperation between strangers has steadily increased in the United States.
“We were surprised by our findings that Americans became more cooperative over the last six decades because many people believe U.S. society is becoming less socially connected, less trusting, and less committed to the common good,” said lead researcher Yu Kou, Ph.D., a professor of social psychology at Beijing Normal University. “Greater cooperation within and between societies may help us tackle global challenges, such as responses to pandemics, climate change, and immigrant crises.”
Over 63,000 people participated in 511 studies that were carried out in the US between 1956 and 2017 that were analyzed by the researchers. These studies included lab tests that evaluated strangers’ cooperation. The study was recently published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
The study discovered a slight, gradual rise in collaboration over the period of 61 years…
“Good News: Cooperation Among Strangers Has Increased for the Past 60 Years.” The full study is here.
* Bertrand Russell
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As we bowl together, we might recall that any improvement on cooperation is on a base that’s not too high: it was on this date in 1957 that nine Black students, having been denied entrance to Little Rock, Arkansas’ Central High School (in defiance of a 1954 Supreme Court ruling), were escorted to school by soldiers of the Airborne Battle Group of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Two days earlier the Black students had faced an angry mob of over 1,000 Whites in front of Central High School who were protesting the integration project; as the students were escorted inside by the Little Rock police (supporting national Guard troops), violence escalated, and they were removed from the school. President Eisenhower responded by calling in the regular Army.
“One of the advantages bowling has over golf is that you seldom lose a bowling ball”*…
Bowling is easy to shrug off as a mere leisure pursuit—a boozy weekend pastime in which anyone with decent hand-eye coordination can perform well enough. But hardcore bowlers have a very different take on the sport: To them it’s a physics puzzle so elaborate that it can never be mastered, no matter how many thousands of hours they spend pondering the variables that can ruin a ball’s 60-foot journey to the pins. The athletes who obsess over this complexity also understand the debt they owe to Pinel, whose career as a ball designer was just beginning when he attended the Super Hoinke in 1993. Notorious as a bit of a colorful crank, he is also the figure most responsible for transforming how bowlers think about the scientific limits of their sport.
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After narrowly surviving two wrecks at a drag strip, Pinel thought it wise to find a safer way to satisfy his yen for competition. So he made the switch to bowling in 1969. He came to view the pastime as a spiritual cousin to drag racing: Both involve a few seconds of precise and rapid travel down a narrow path, and both appeal to those who relish technical conundrums. “A bowling ball is just a gyroscope that’s not on its preferred spin axis, right?” Pinel says when trying to describe his affection for the sport. “So ball motion is one gyroscope operating in the field of a bigger gyroscope, which is the earth.”
Pinel quickly taught himself the game well enough to win small purses at regional tournaments. He soon began to wonder whether he could reach the sport’s next tier by hacking his equipment. His main aim was to tease more flare potential out of a ball—in essence, reconfigure it to create a sharper hooking motion. That hook is essential because of how the sport’s pins are arrayed. There is an inches-wide “pocket” on either side of the front pin that all bowlers aim to hit at the optimum entry angle; if they manage to do so, they have a 95 percent chance of scoring a strike.
When Pinel looked into the discourse around ball performance, he found that most everyone believed that all that mattered was the quality of coverstock—that is, the exterior layer of a ball that is visible to the naked eye. Coverstocks are studded with microscopic spikes, the roughness of which is measured by the average distance from each spike’s peak to valley—a metric known as Ra. The higher a ball’s Ra, the more friction it can create with the lane and thus the greater the potential that it will hook well under the right circumstances. The hardness of the material that underlies the spikes is also an important factor. In the early 1970s, several pros had enjoyed great success by soaking their balls in methyl ethyl ketone, a flammable solvent that softened the coverstocks. (The balls became so gelatinous, in fact, that a bowler could indent the surface with a fingernail.) These softer balls gripped the lane much better than their harder counterparts, and so they tended not to skid unpredictably when encountering patches of oil used to dress the wooden boards. The use of methyl ethyl ketone had increased scores so much that rules were put in place mandating a degree of coverstock hardness as measured by a device known as a Shore durometer.
Pinel thought that too much attention was being paid to coverstocks and not nearly enough to what was inside the ball. The hearts of bowling balls, he discovered, were virtually all the same. Each had a round and centered core topped by a pancake-shaped weight block. Based on his experiences with drag racing, a sport in which the engine is every bit as important as the tires, Pinel figured he could change a ball’s dynamics by tweaking its internal structure…
And so he did. “One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball“: how Mo Pinel harnessed the power of physics to reshape the core of the ball– and the game of bowling itself. From Brendan Koerner (@brendankoerner)
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As we roll true, we might send relaxing birthday greetings to Edwin J. Shoemaker; he was born on this date in 1907. In 1928, he and his cousin Edward M. Knabusch prototyped a porch chair out of some wooden slats taken from orange crates; it would automatically recline as a sitter leaned back. Since it was a seasonal item, his sales improved when he added plush upholstery for year-round indoor use. Still, his chairs were for the most part locally/regionally sold. So he designed a manufacturing facility which utilized the mass-production methods of Detroit’s automotive industry– and in November of 1941 went national with the La-Z-Boy recliner.
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