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The Rise and Fall of Professional Bowling
- massysett 13y agoPBS had a great documentary on bowling several years ago...I'm not sure this was it, but it looks familiar. http://www.bowlingmovie.com/ http://www.bowlingmovie.com/
- firebones 13y agoI 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- LandoCalrissian 13y agoI 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.
- redwall_hp 13y agoDefinitely 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.)
- trafficlight 13y agoIt'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.
- lennel 13y agoGiven 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.
- windowsworkstoo 13y agoIf anything T20 will replace the 50 over game. The recent ashes and the Aus v SA tour has definitely re-ignited interest in Test cricket though.
- specialp 13y agoI 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.
- mitchty 13y agoMan, now I feel even worse for not being able to ever bowl over a 100. Granted I've bowled all of like 5 times in my life but still.
- crag 13y agoYou 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. I was lots of fun.
- voidlogic 13y agoThis just goes to show that the Ballmer Peak [0] varies greatly by task. [0]: https://xkcd.com/323/ https://xkcd.com/323/
- lawncheer 13y ago"During one 1961 performance on ABC’s Make That Spare, pro bowler Don Carter won $19,000 ($149,000 in 2014 dollars), and a brand new Ford Mustang." Ford mustang wasn't introduced until 1964.
- zackcrockett 13y agoYou're correct; the show did offer Ford Mustangs as a prize (in addition to cash), but not until 1964. Fixed! Thank you sir.
- bsder 13y agoAnd yet he never addresses the "Why?" did this happen to bowling? I suspect it is socioeconomics. Bowling is kind of viewed as a lower-middle class sport, and the economy has wiped the lower-middle class out.
- taurath 13y agoHe does a bit. Bowling is far far easier than it once was due to ball technology.
- thaumasiotes 13y agoThis 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?
- CWuestefeld 13y agoBowling 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.
- derefr 13y agoI 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.
- bsder 13y ago> 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.
- joshrotenberg 13y agoJim Gaffigan has some interesting insights on bowling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5fm7QPA9zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5fm7QPA9zY
- chiph 13y agoFor 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. http://www.austincup.net/ http://www.austincup.net/
- ScottBurson 13y agoLots of people play ping pong too, but professional table tennis has never been big in the US.
- jameshart 13y agoSeems 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...
- nocoment 13y agoBummer, I thought this was on candlepin bowling! Last I heard a startup survived by taking over the league so it would make more sense on HN. It also doesn't suffer from the "too easy" problem of 10 pin. For example, no one has officially bowled a perfect candlepin game.
- loso 13y agoIt'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 http://www.brooklynbowl.com/bowl and popular DJ's that spin there http://www.brooklynbowl.com/calendar http://www.brooklynbowl.com/calendar.
- pfarrell 13y agoI 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.
- jakejake 13y agoThat sounds like a pretty sketchy theory to me! 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.
- wyclif 13y ago"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
- TwoBit 13y agoThe 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.
- marcelocamanho 13y agoThis 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.