This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, November, 2021
Coming soon to CBS: Smallwood, a half-hour sitcom based on the life of three-time PBA Tour champion Tom Smallwood. Great news, right? The bowling community will certainly support this with a zealousness not seen since the latest batch of ball releases.
Or, we’ll pre-loathe it because we fear it won’t “treat bowling right.”
Smallwood’s fellow PBA Tour competitors are excited for him and for the game (“One of our guys has a TV show”). Similarly, for-fun recreational bowlers are looking forward to a TV show that features bowling (“Hey, cool, I like bowling”). But there’s another group within bowling that finds a sitcom a personal affront to this great sport of ours. This is without having seen an episode, too. So, if that group is going to pre-detest Smallwood without seeing it, this column is going to pre-laud it without seeing it.
In the two-minute trailer, Smallwood wears a wrist brace (oh, no). His wife gives him a new bowling ball, his first in 10 years (as if the real Smallwood didn’t have a 4,000-ball arsenal before his Tour days). Smallwood sees a guy on TV (cleverly, the real Smallwood) bowl a score lower than he just bowled on presumably house conditions, leading to the erroneous I-can-beat-that-guy mindset. Perhaps the scariest is the dialogue about family life: precious words wasted on life lessons rather than contemplating pitch changes.
These types of things give pause to the detractors, and no, these things do not align with competitive bowling reality, but guess what percentage of the non-bowling sitcom-watching audience knows—or cares—about that? Zero percent.
So, maybe this is a chance to educate that audience and suddenly convert millions of people from complete obliviousness into obsessed pin-placement enthusiasts? No. This is a half-hour sitcom. They’re not going to spend each episode going through in-depth tutorials on how to apply the appropriate surface for the lane condition, when and why to use thumb tape or how to determine which shoe sole is best for the venue and humidity. There aren’t going to be any special five-hour episodes to show Smallwood grind his way through a grueling qualifying block nor will we see detailed descriptions of immensely complicated tournament formats.
It is a sitcom about a family. Being that Smallwood is the father, he will likely be a bumbling father who bowls, no different from Raymond being a bumbling father who is a sportswriter or that King of Queens guy being a bumbling father (was he a father or merely a bumbling husband?) who works for a fake UPS. Did Everybody Loves Raymond kill sportswriting? Was there an uprising among sportswriters demanding that show ignore the antics of Raymond and instead focus on the intricacies of covering an event and drafting a story? Did King of Queens destroy the logistics industry? Did Cheers put an end to bars?
Space Jam featured a cartoon bunny. Basketball remains fine. Field of Dreams used ghosts—ghosts!—and baseball somehow survived. But we’re worried about a custom bowling ball?
If Smallwood doesn’t fully understand the intricacies of the game or if it makes fun of bowling, who cares? And why worry about it in advance?
This is the first time a real PBA Tour player will have his story used as the basis for an actual TV show that will air on a major network to a completely new audience. The quality of the sitcom and its success will depend on the writing, the acting and the production, not whether or not they have explicitly defined rolloff rules or that they adequately explain the crossing procedure and how bonus pins work.
Just like we can’t teach a novice how oil breaks down until we first explain to the novice there is oil at all, we can’t attract a new audience until we show them a reason to care. The harsh reality too many people refuse to believe is that “Come watch 18 consecutive hours of people bowling and just trust us they’re really good and you’re enthralled and oh by the way you need to remain perfectly silent” is not an enticing sales pitch to an average consumer. But maybe seeing a fictionalized version of the real Tom Smallwood on television will entice a viewer to watch a few frames of an actual PBA Tour event the next time they come across it. Maybe that leads to a few more frames. Soon enough, that viewer who was hooked by a fictional sitcom is complaining that the pros don’t get enough practice on the TV pair. And isn’t that all we want?