Just watched an old show with Mark Roth yesterday on ESPN classic. It made me remember how great bowling used to be. When will the bowling community from the Pros down to the average league bowler admit that the game has been ruined because of technology. The lane conditions and new super balls have made the game a joke. The scores have gone wild. An average bowler can average 200 without practice by just getting an expensive ball and bowling on a soft shot. I yearn for the days when you had to do a lot of things right to get a strike. Accuracy, roll,speed, loft, turn, lift were all important now you have a 10 board miss area. Perhaps your too young to remember when bowling was bigger than golf on TV. Not untill the sport gets its integrity back will it ever again be recognized as a great sport.

Couldn't agree with you more, these days we have to find special sport leagues to find out our true average, anything else is usually adult bumper bowling.

Joe

Couldn't agree with you more, these days we have to find special sport leagues to find out our true average, anything else is usually adult bumper bowling.

Joe

Everyone says it's the technology, and I disagree. Take the newest, greatest ball and play a tough shot and you will find your true average. It's the lanes, plain and simple. You only need to look at last weeks show on the shark pattern and you will see how high tech balls don't make the difference. Those guys are the best of the best, using the best equipment and being pretty accurate and they still had trouble carrying. And the one guy, who had immaculate control of speed, revs, lift etc is the guy who won.

While I agree to a point does EVERYBODY average 200+? People make it sound like everyone has multiple 300s and 800s and on a bad game shoot low 200s almost like sub 200 games do not exist anymore.

The technology is better, the equipment is better and some houses cater to easier shots with wide margins for error. Not EVERY house is made this way, if a house is too easy stay away from it by all means, don't bowl there and whine about it(no offense to anyone). There are places that offer sport shots, I'm not so convinced dumping oil from channel to channel making it a spare fest will increase bowling's popularity either.

I'm not sure bowling will ever get the coverage it deserves, there's not enough excitement in the sport unless you truely love it which I do and I'm sure most of you do as well. It's still the most participated sports in the US. Most of the people I know don't all just buy a new ball and average 200+ with no practice. It still takes a certain amount of skill to average 200+ season in and season out. I bowl at 3 different centers just to vary my game, the one place with the most honor scores in the area I leave alone on purpose. Just my take on things.

Sure the house shots are easy. If every center put out hard shots then your average joe wouldnt bowl there. Why? Becuase if he cant score well hes not gonna keep trying. If he doesnt score high enough to keep himself interested hes gonna stop bowling all together and the center then loses that customer.

It is made to be a bit easier to score to get more people involved. If you were an average joe trying to learn on a Shark Pattern you would get discouraged at the complexity of the pattern and how it works until you burn a line and can make the ball move.

If you want to the game to be like it was "way back when" play on a Sports League or the NEW PBA Pattern leagues. They require accuracy, a balance of ball speed and revs, good follow through and a good read on the lanes to perform well.

Bowling will never get popular on a TV front because there is no instant action to an average joe watching it. Now if I watch it and Norm Duke has the front 9 then ill get excited but if your not into the sport, why watch it? Unless they add half naked female cheer leaders in the channel or they get helmets and make it a full contact sport its not gonna get big.

It's really a catch 22. You lose the marginal bowler who will suffer and bowl horribly on the PBA shot and lose interest. You gain the good bowler who will accept the challenge to improve by bowling on the tough shots. I personally don't think technology had anything to do with bowling losing interest. I think it was a combination of things. I believe Tiger had an impact with Golf gaining a load of popularity. Computers and video games keep kids indoors and away from other activities. Lots of other activities has drawn kids away from the bowling alley. Soccer, football, basketball, baseball, hockey, softball, lacrosse, cheerleading, gymnastics, you name it and kids are involved. Look at how basketball has blossomed with the dunk contest, the three point shooting contest, the NCAA tournament, and so on. Kids all accross america are trying to dunk like Michael Jordan and hoping to make it to the NBA or maybe even the And 1 tour. In Baseball, the average salary is over 2 million dollars. Basketball has similar numbers. Football is America's new favorite sport. There is no bigger game than the Super Bowl. Bowling has not enough sponsers to support the salaries that it would need to get back into the public eye again.

No offense, but Bowling is a blue collar sport. Golf is a white collar sport. At least that is the way they are viewed. So golf brings in big sponsers. Football brings in the most sponsers. They are the envy of all the other sports. They not only have the fans in the stands but they bring in plenty of sponsers. You can only have so many fans in the stands of a bowling match. With the interest seen as blue collar, sponsers don't have the same level of interest. It isn't the group they are looking for. The womens tour failed. The men's tour isn't far behind. They are failing financially. You wonder if they will be around in 10 years. How can any business continue if they are losing money? At some point, the owners will cut their loses. They have already made steps to cut their loses and look to make a profit.

I don't think the demise of bowling has anything to do with technology. Look at golf. They make the drivers better and better. They make them bigger and bigger. They discover ways of making the ball travel farther. The combination is the golf ball is travelling farther than it ever has before. That hasn't stopped anyone from playing golf. You have hard courses and easy courses. Golfers have their choice. Most choose the hardest course they can afford. Bowlers choose not to. Sport bowling leagues failed for the most part here in Long Island. There are none that still operate during the fall season. There are a couple that run in the summer. The tough shots are out there, bowlers by and large choose to bowl on the easy house shot. I would prefer to bowl on the PBA shot but most would rather not.

I strongly disagreee with you on this point. Since we sell many bowling balls to beginners and intermediates, and a lot of those bowling balls are from the mid to high range performace equipment, I still do NOT see these folks out there averaging over 200. I don't even see a lot of them over 180. I remember when I got my One when it first came on the market. I shot great with that ball and they flew off our Pro Shop shelves. I'd bowl league and you'd see at least a dozen of these ball in the ball returns. Yet the amount of 200 averaging bowlers did not increase.



I'd like to try this house. Because there are no houses in our area where I have 10 boards of miss area. Maybe one on each side of my target, but not 5, never 5.

I can tell you that I work extremely hard to maintain my average. Maybe 20 years ago, I'd be fighting just as hard to maintain 180, but I fight still. To intimate that 200 average bowlers today do not struggle is kind of insulting. Especially to those that do practise and bowl leagues and tournaments and such. I know of just a few bowlers that bowl league only and average over 200. But they are older, in their 50s and they have been good bowlers for a very long time. Many of them are averaging 200+, bowling once a week, but its lower then they were when they were practising and such. I don't know of anyone under 35 that bowls once a week and averages over 200.

I don't think making harder conditions is going to raise the integridy of the game. I think when bowlers get rid of cheating secretaries, the USBC stands behind their edicts and time lines (like those for sanctioning and registering honor scores) then maybe you'd start to see the bowlers taking this sport more seriously. But when the higher ups and those in charge of the sport do not take it seriously then its pretty tough for the bowlers, especially new bowlers to do so. I think bowlers need to stand behind the rules and that league officers need to uphold the USBC rules and their own league rules. But most bowlers are totally ignorant of any rules reguarding their leagues and sanctioned play.

You talk about the glory days when bowling was on ABC on Saturday afternoons. Do you remember what was on Sundays? The American Sportsman, i.e. hunting and fishing. Where do you think those activities have gone on the TV dial? Where else, cable. There's a lot of programming that was on the big three networks (especially when you didn't have cable available) that are now relegated to cable stations. In fact hunting and fishing has their own channel because even ESPN won't put them on.

Erin

Another point that I just thought of. Instant gratification.

Today's world wants instant gratification in all aspects of their lives. They want new cars, homes, expensive clothes, larger diamonds in engagement rings, high paying jobs right at the start.

Twenty years ago or even a generation ago, everyone knew they had to work to progress. You had to move up the job ladder to get to the higher paying job. You probably had to rent for 10 years or so and save up to buy your first house (or qualify for your first mortgage). You drove an old beater car while you worked up the job ladder. Now a days, high schoolers are driving a more expensive car then I am. Did they work to earn it? NO

People today want instant gratification. And you cannot fight the entire world by saying that's fine but you'll have to work harder to bowl. So the game has progressed as everything has. I'm not typing on an old Comador computer. I'm not watching the Cowboys and Eagles on a console black and white TV. Everything progresses. And today's society wants it all now.

Today bowling needs numbers. They need the numbers of bowlers to keep the doors open to the centers and keep the USBC employees working. If you do anything to drop the numbers any more then they already are, then you might see the end of bowling faster then you expected. So what if someone buys a $200 ball and throws a few high games or even raises their average 10 pins. They will hopefully keep bowling. They might even tell their friends how much fun they had with their new ball and shooting a few big numbers.

There are opportunities out there for those that want more challenging lane conditions. And I have to remind you, that those that do are in the very small minority of the number of sanctioned bowlers in the US. But yet, even though you make up an extremely small ratio of the bowlers, the USBC has a venue for you. Two in fact. The Sport League condition and the new PBA Experience. If no one in your area offers any of these programs, that should just illustrate to you now much in the minority you are. No busiess (that business being bowling as a whole) can survive on catering to an extremely small minority.

Erin

Equipments used in every sport changed and advanced dramatically. How about tennis? From wooden racquets to graphite and Kevlar racquets that are lightning fast and light. As simple as a baseball helmet worn today that is aerodynamically designed to get that extra millisecond worth of time in baserunning. How about the world records in the Olympics? Records in athletics and swimming are being broken with the help of their apparels. Lend those things to someone with no proper training and surely he will not get close to the record. The thing is, technology will help us but it is not the only thing needed to excel in a game. There are also governing bodies that control technological advancements in a particular sport. Formula1, see those 300mph racecars? That would have gone way far if not for the regulations of the FIA. Bowling is not different, that is why there are governing bodies like the USBC. They regulate ball issues like static ball balance to avoid extreme ball reactions.


Surely an average bowler can score 200+, not only by using an expensive ball but even by just using a houseball. So don't blame everything on technology. Well if you can use a nuclear ball and don’t have the proper techniques then I doubt you will get high scores all the time.


The game has changed, so you have to change your perspective about the game too. I don’t know how much difficult it is to get a strike back then as compared nowadays. So if you think that it is a lot easier to get a strike today, so why not change your goal like getting a double, or a turkey? Perhaps a 300! Maybe for you the difficulty of getting a strike the back then is the same as bowling a perfect game today. So you can use your accuracy, roll, speed, loft, turn and lift for your new goal now.

This game is not just about a strike, it’s about strikes, stringing strikes and making spares.