This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, February, 2021
According to olympic.org, there are at least 49 sports with a larger global appeal than bowling: breakdancing, surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing now among them. Bowling must be 50th.
The recent announcement of these sports being added to the Olympics was undoubtedly great news for fans of those sports. For bowlers and bowling fans, it was merely four new items to add to the Sports to Resent List.
Calling out other sports for taking a spot bowling “should” have isn’t the right way to behave. It’s like the kid who didn’t make the basketball team in high school not content with simply being upset with himself or the coach, but also choosing to chastise another kid who made the team but “shouldn’t have.” No. That kid deserved to be on the bench and breaking deserves to be in the Olympics.
Instead of resenting the good fortune of these other sports, we can find optimism. Each one of them thrives on attributes taken from bowling. Eventually, the subliminal messages will get through and bowling will have its endless qualifying rounds broadcast at 2 a.m. by a perplexed, longing-for-winter Pierre McGuire.
Breakdancing will be called by its original name, breaking, and should be embraced by bowlers who have often taken inspiration from breaking. Whether in triumph or misery, bowlers have been collapsing to the approach for years, even if they exhibit very little movement once they land.
Breaking, with such a wide appeal that many people think it’s called breakdancing, will require constant explanation as to what we’re actually watching—sort of like an event using the World Bowling scoring system—and will also lead to confusing news crawls. “Breaking: Breaking breaker breaks records in Paris, waves break in Tahiti.”
Yes, surfing will take place 15,000 kilometers away, near the beaches of Tahiti. It’s hard to surf in the Rive Seine. This multiple-venue thing is also stolen from bowling, which has employed the tactic many times, notably holding the 2013 U.S. Open in three different bowling centers in Columbus and, although not originally planned this way, as recently as the 2020 World Series of Bowling that began in Las Vegas and concluded in Centreville, Virginia. Nor can we forget the ongoing PBA Players Championship.
Surfing, like skateboarding and sport climbing, will actually debut in Tokyo this summer, while breaking will have to wait until 2024. In Japanese, bowling (ボウリング or, using romaji, bōringu) is pronounced—not joking—“boring.” And what says bōringu more than the Olympics?
Skateboarding is arguably most famous for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, a videogame franchise almost as popular as Bowling by Jason Belmonte. At the recreational level, sport climbing is an accessible, fun, indoor athletic endeavor in which novices can rent or borrow equipment while they play. What familiar sport does that sound like?
We can resent these other sports taking up spots in the Olympics if we want, but in reality, bowling’s doing pretty well. 39 PBA Tour national telecasts in 2020 alone is more than breaking, surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing combined. Each of the four will get a few televised hours over two weeks during the Olympics and then we’ll completely forget about them until the next time they usurp bowling’s rightful spot in the Olympics.
While it’s not right to criticize the sports that are in the Olympics instead of bowling, we must admit it would be nice to have bowling join the Olympic lineup. Finally, we’d get to see the best players from around the world compete with each other.
Oh, they already do that? On a near-weekly basis? Well, that’s good news.