Category: Bowlers Journal International

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, February, 2023

As this issue hits mailboxes, newsstands and airplane seatback pockets worldwide, the U.S. Open—a short-duration event that qualifies competitors for discounted long-term hotel rates—is either about to begin or has begun, as have the discussions about fairness and how difficult or easy the lane conditions are in relation to how they should be, depending on any number of differing opinions.

Traditionally, the U.S. Open is known as one of the most difficult tournaments to win. The oil pattern(s) are extremely tough. The number of games throughout qualifying and match play are absurdly high (plus, with the challenging lane conditions, players strike less, requiring more shots over more games, and we haven’t even considered practice yet), leading to mutilated hands, burning legs and fatigued brains. If those reasons aren’t enough, add the fact the recent top seeds finish second more often than not (the No. 1 seed has finished second in eight out of the last 10 U.S. Opens) and it truly makes this thing almost impossible to win.

Almost impossible, yes, but it’s also true that someone wins every year (excluding years in which there is no U.S. Open). Someone overcomes all of that and more and adds a green jacket to his or her closet.

But what is the proper level of difficulty? Fans and players tend to enjoy the oft-cited “brutal grind” of the U.S. Open and believe players should have to struggle, make spares and endure hardships not only to win but to cash. The attitude is anyone who cashes earns it and anyone who misses deserves the beating.

Unless it’s too difficult. We can’t have the players struggling too much or some harmless viewer at home who happens upon the bowling show will think he can beat the top pros. But we certainly can’t make it too easy. Then it becomes a carry contest and the last thing we’d ever want is for a bowling tournament to be determined by who knocks over the most pins.

Somehow, we need to find just the right mix that allows the “correct” average at the cut line and the cash line as well as five or six people who truly stand out from the field and one guy who completely outclasses everyone on the way to a second-place finish.

What is the correct average? At its simplest, the correct average is the one that proves the tournament is fair to whoever is judging what’s fair. As for an actual correct number, it varies. We’ve been discussing the U.S. Open, but the correct average there is lower than the correct average at the Tournament of Champions, for example. There are some who say the correct average should always be around 190-200 to cash and 205-210 to make the cut to match play (almost exactly what was required at last year’s U.S. Open). There are others—not as many, but they exist—who say the correct average should always be 230 or more because strikes are fun.

There are still others—the vast majority of the television viewing audience—who don’t care what the correct average is because all they know and see is the people on TV bowling understandable, high-score-wins, head-to-head matches. When it’s 279-268, the casual viewer is amazed at how good the bowlers are. When it’s 192-184, the casual viewer is appalled at how awful the bowlers are, even if it’s very possibly true the better bowling was done on the lower-scoring show.

If bowlers are bowling for bowlers, low scores are better. If bowlers are bowling for mainstream society, high scores are better. If bowlers are bowling for the U.S. Open title, being any seed lower than one is better.

The correct average is whatever it actually takes on whatever oil pattern in whatever bowling center over however many games to make it inside the cut to whatever the next round is. Unless too many or not enough lefties make it, in which case we need an in-depth investigation from an independent investigator.

In other words: there is no correct average.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, January, 2023

*Based on entries

In The One Board’s seventh annual year-start countup, we prognosticate some of the most important and imminent bowling happenings.

1. Live, televised match-play rounds of PBA majors give more viewers than ever a great perspective on what it takes to make it to the championship match: an unwavering trust of The Process.
2. Aside from a bunch of Super Bowls and the final episodes of M.A.S.H. and Dallas, nothing has captivated the television viewing audience like a heaping helping of Process trusting.
3. The USBC Masters moves into its fifth month of touting “selling out in 10 hours” before a single ticket for a fan is even offered for sale.
4. Related: every MLB team sells out all 162 games in 2023 by fielding nine players with 16 players on the waiting list for each team.
5. Baseball fans complain that the MLB should’ve “just added more defensive positions to increase the player salaries.”
6. When the sold-out Masters is finally complete, another PBA Tour superstar has another major championship.
7. At some point during the year, a bowling ball that changes the entire industry is released: The (brand confidential) Otra Bola.
8. Bowlers start to realize how untrustworthy The Process really is. With dozens of players trusting The Process throughout every event, but only one player winning each time, it’s undeniable The Process is not only untrustworthy, but a bit of a conniving, backstabbing, fickle jerk.
9. Players continue trusting The Process.
10. How can they not? It’s not about results.
11. Besides, the guy who picked up the trophy also trusted The Process and was rewarded with the ideal result even though results don’t matter. The only solution is to trust The Process even harder.
12. People start trusting The Process so hard they let it borrow their cars, live in their houses while they’re gone and take their significant others to dinner.
13. Cars get stolen. Houses get destroyed. Relationships end badly. But it’s okay; it’s not about results.
14. An alliance is formed among all major sports leagues to improve the pace of play. Bowling, obviously, opts out of the alliance.
15. Bowling objects so strongly to the alliance that the PWBA adds a D squad to every event.
16. Feeling challenged by the PWBA’s initiative, the PBA50 adds an E squad.
17. With PBA qualifying now streaming on BowlTV along with the PWBA and PBA50 Tours, collegiate high-fiving and a live look at some guy on his couch thinking about finger pitches, the why-can’t-bowling-be-in-one-place argument is moot, forcing fans to find something else to detest. They choose an old standby: formats.
18. Oh, man.
19. Writing of formats, the 17-player stepladder at the Tournament of Champions sets new ratings records as the No. 17 seed climbs all the way to the semifinal match, finishing third. Winning would be too much to ask and the top seed automatically finishes second, so the No. 2 seed wins.
20. “I like variety.” A million games this week, a dozen next week, match play without bonus pins next month, match play with bonus pins after that, bracket here, total pins there, all qualifying, no qualifying, practice, grueling grind, carry contest, Matrix of Fairness, a little of everything.
21. The NFL adopts a similar policy, varying the number of quarters (but still calling them quarters) and the lengths of those quarters from week to week. Field goals are worth four points in months ending in “ember” and three points in all other months. Extra points are still worth one point, but if the kicker is over 60 years old when making the point, he receives $1,000. Touchdowns are not allowed on Thursdays except in the third quarter, if there is a third quarter, during which touchdowns are worth 47 points each.
22. The bracket format at the PBA Players Championship leads to one of the best season-ending events in PBA history. Three Player of the Year candidates advance to the semifinals and two of them advance to the finals. The winner is ultimately voted Player of the Year.
23. Regardless of how exciting, engrossing and audience-building any of the 2023 PBA, PWBA and PBA50 seasons are, one thing remains undeniable: Need more games.

Happy New Year, bowling fans. May your yanks hold, your out-the-windows hit trees and your focus remain on The Process.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, December, 2022

By now, league bowlers have gotten into a nice rhythm and are carrying fairly accurate averages several weeks into the 2022-2023 league season. Some experienced veterans are wondering why this season appears to be so much harder or easier than last season with no discernible changes to their games. Other veterans are bowling the same scores for all three games they’ve always bowled, every week, for the last 25 years. Sandbaggers are trying to keep their scores low but not so low that too much suspicion arises. Honest beginners are seeing their averages steadily rise with no ill intent. Nachos are being consumed, beverages are being sipped and friends are having weekly fun competing.

League bowling is tremendous.

The midseason for league bowlers is also the off-season for professional bowlers, except we all know there is no true off-season for pro bowlers. They are genetically programmed to be rolling a bowling ball at all times with a complete inability to stop for even the shortest respite. In addition to practice, tournaments, every sweeper they can find and piling up an unquantifiable number of Instagram videos, pro bowlers also join leagues.

League bowling, as established, is tremendous, but even on challenging conditions, can’t prepare professionals for the level of competition they’ll face when the Tour resumes. There are obvious benefits to repeatedly throwing shots (for example, honing repeatability), working on developing or altering techniques without the pressure of a poor adjustment costing them six figures, and simply staying in bowling shape so their thighs aren’t on fire after their first 632-game qualifying block at the U.S. Open.

Compared to other professional athletes, bowlers might have it more difficult than anyone else in preparing to resume the highest level of competition in the world. NHL players from multiple teams and without regard to their stick sponsors often form small groups and get together to skate throughout the summer. It’s not the pressure of a real game, but it is NHL-caliber passing, shooting and goaltending talent with whom they’re skating. They’re forced to stay sharp in order to keep up with other elite players, even at an informal skate.

Basketball and baseball players play in summer or winter leagues, respectively, again among other elite players. Football players await their discharges from the hospital just in time for training camp, putting them all on the same level entering the season.

But bowlers don’t necessarily get to compete with peers in leagues or even in many tournaments and sweepers. This means they don’t get to work on certain very important things, the most obvious being the lane conditions and how the oil changes. No matter what pattern is out there, it’s not going to break down the same way in a league as it would in a professional event. There also isn’t the same level of competitive drive among the league bowlers as compared to the professional players. Building a big lead over the guy who would rather play the crane game than take his turn doesn’t mean nearly as much as earning a 400-pin cushion over the entire U.S. Open field for guaranteed second-place money.

So, when a league bowler is in midseason form, a pro bowler is getting toward the end of his or her off-season preparation in an effort to turn midseason league form into preseason pro form, hoping he or she practiced all the right things and maintains the muscle memory and mental attitude to compete with the best. Then, after pre-bowling for 12 straight league weeks and shooting 10,800, loads up the SUV with the 98 latest bowling balls and hits the road.

Bowling is unique to (better than) other sports in this way as well: the acceleration into midseason form. After the first qualifying round is finished and the local restaurant is chosen for superstitious reasons and squad equity is questioned, all of us—pros, fans, disinterested bystanders—are thrust into midseason form.

Like it never stopped. Good luck and high scores. Pro bowling is tremendous.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, November, 2022

“O Captain! My Captain!” was Walt Whitman’s most popular poem while he was alive and, now that 130 years have passed since Whitman died, we can say it remains his most popular poem. Published in 1865, this poem was one of four Whitman wrote in tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president of the United States of America, who had recently been assassinated.

This is all common knowledge. What is less known is that Whitman’s poem is actually a parody of another poem written years prior. “O Captain! My Captain!” has always stood out from Whitman’s other work because of its style and rhyming scheme, but a recent discovery shows we finally know why: he was using the style of another poet and changing the words in tribute to his fallen president. Call him “Weird Walt” Whitman.

The original poem, “O Lane Man! My Lane Man!” was written in 1840 by I.T. Sunfair, an aspiring bowler who was never able to make a cut but would not stop trying because he knew it wasn’t his fault. He bowled at the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York City and competed with a few other guys who showed up for a one-day event hosted by the hotel general manager—who also acted as lane man—every weekend.

Whatever the cut was, Sunfair would miss by just a few pins despite rolling it better and with far more accuracy and knowledge than any of his competitors. This remained true even with the advent of the non-champions events in the 1850s. Sunfair knew he was the best player who ever lived but he didn’t have any of the official accolades to prove it. Also, as there was no national governing body at the time, none of those accolades would’ve meant anything anyway. Sunfair knew the only reason he couldn’t win was because of the lane conditions.

Sunfair was also a visionary. He knew what bowling would eventually become, with automatic oiling machines, multiple squads of bowlers, endless qualifying and the like, but he knew one thing would stay the same: the lane man.

Two months ago, on a construction site in New York, a crane operator found an old bowling ball. Stuffed inside its cracked thumbhole was a ravaged piece of paper with Sunfair’s unmistakable handwriting on it. When the crane operator realized what he’d found, he threw it in the trash, bowling ball and all. The first bowler who happened by that trash can yanked the ball out and wondered to himself whether it was clean through the heads before picking up in the midlane and hitting hard in the backend. He was certain it was all those things. Then he made the poem public.

Here, for the first time in print, is Sunfair’s original poem that inspired Whitman’s much more famous piece:

O Lane Man! my Lane Man! the morning squad is done,

Now strip and oil every lane, from sixty down to one,

B squad is here, A squad has beer, the bowlers all complaining

Through tired eyes of every fan, and C squad still awaiting;

                        But O oil! oil! oil!

                                    With the faintest hint of blue,

                                                And on the lane my ball roll dies,

                                                            All because of you.

O Lane Man! my Lane Man! rise up before the dawn

Drive in—for you the doors are locked—the dew still on the lawn

For you complaints and diatribes—for you the schlubs a-shouting

For you they call, the angry lads, their hate-filled faces fuming;

                        Here Lane Man! dear oiler!

                                    That rag that you imbue!

                                                The carrydown that’s so unfair,

                                                            Is all because of you.

My Lane Man does not answer, his buttons have been pushed,

My oiler does not hear a sound, detractors have been shushed

The lane machine is on fifteen, its quest to strip and oil

From morning strikes to daytime yikes the players all recoil;

                        I bowled the best but got no breaks

                                    So I once more am through

                                                Missed the cut, my lane man friend

                                                            It’s all because of you.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, October, 2022

In another effort to add kindness to the world, it’s time to stand up for the poor, overly criticized, means-well-but-is-treated-as-evil house oil pattern. With its 6,000,000:1 ratio, underwhelming and varying volume and design intent to minimize mistakes and make people strike, it’s only natural we’d hate it. What kind of fool wants to strike while bowling?

Yes, the house pattern is forgiving. Miss outside and there’s plenty of friction to entice the ball to the pocket. Miss inside and there’s plenty of oil to keep the ball skidding toward the pocket. This leads to one of the main points of its detractors: schlubs can bowl scores that look a lot like the scores the professionals bowl on television, all while failing to understand the pros are bowling on much more difficult conditions.

This is true and everyone at the elite level, sub-elite level and even sub-sub-elite level knows this. Everyone reading this publication knows this. So, when we denigrate the house oil pattern or the league bowlers who participate on it, we’re complaining to no one.

As difficult as it may be to comprehend among the relatively small elite bowling community, not everyone who bowls has aspirations of winning the PBA Tournament of Champions. A lot of people who bowl (the overwhelming majority, in fact), enjoy having a fun activity to get away from working all day, mowing the lawn or shoveling the driveway depending on the season, cooking yet another meal for who knows how many people, tossing out the junk mail, sweeping the glass shards from last night’s broken dishes and whatever other mundane life task that awaits. These people want to order some food, maybe have a beverage, see their friends and roll some shots. If those shots are on the house pattern, there is nothing wrong with that. Why should they have to frustrate themselves on a flat pattern during their one night out that is supposed to alleviate frustration?

How often are recreational softball players heckled by elite baseball players? How dare you start with a 1-1 count? Why are the bases so close together? Why are the fences so far in? Why is the ball so big? Why is it pitched so slowly? This is a disgrace to the game. How can anyone ever respect professional baseball if all these fun-loving real-estate agents and orthodontists are going to spend an hour a week exercising and socializing with their friends?

Flag football? You mean the accountant who has to go to work in the morning doesn’t consider it a worthwhile risk to let untrained behemoths maul him all night? No one will ever watch the NFL as long as recreational flag football is a thing.

Recreational indoor soccer? What a disgrace that is. These former high-school players who enjoy getting together to reap cardiovascular benefits while relishing their favorite sport can’t even play on a full-sized pitch? Hideous. Soccer will never gain any traction around the world.

Beer-league hockey? Any sport you can play while drinking beer isn’t a sport (hey, that sounds familiar). The NHL is doomed as long as these lawyers, plumbers and restaurant managers huff their way through a running-clock hockey game with lenient icing and disinterested referees for the promise of a Pabst at the end.

If recreational softball leagues started requiring 400-foot fences, flag-football leagues introduced tackling, indoor-soccer leagues went outside and hockey leagues banned beer, they would lose players, teams and desperately needed revenue. The MLB, NFL, NHL and all international soccer organizations would be unaffected. So why should anyone expect all recreational bowling leagues to get rid of the house shot and irritate all their league players to the point of quitting?

(This excludes sandbaggers, of course. They need to be punished and this column has addressed that in the past. Currently, we’re focusing on the general sentiment and undeserved hate the house pattern gets.)

To personify the house oil pattern, we’d call it forgiving, inviting, encouraging and familiar. Friendly, even. Reliable. Trustworthy. What a ghastly set of attributes those are. We definitely wouldn’t want those qualities in a friend, so most certainly we don’t want those attributes on our bowling lanes.

Wait. We’re being told “ghastly” is the wrong word. We meant “magnificent.”

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, September, 2022

For decades, people have posited ideas on how to bring new fans to professional bowling. One theory that continues to be uttered by those already entrenched in the sport: we need to explain how difficult it is. Only then will new fans flock to pro bowling tournaments in droves.

This theory says if we could only make it clear to complete novices how difficult pro bowling is (a feat that has yet to be accomplished), everyone would want to pay to watch and we’d all be rich.

The most difficult thing in bowling is, apparently, explaining how difficult it is. But should we?

Consider: to whom are we addressing this fabled explanation? It’s useless to tell existing pro bowling fans how difficult it is. We already know. Telling casual fans—those who might go bowling a couple times a year with friends, maybe even participate in a casual league and occasionally watch when bowling is on TV—comes off as vastly insulting.

Essentially, we’re saying, “You’re a person with a passing interest in bowling, but if you weren’t so dense, you’d understand how difficult it is at the elite level—where you’ll never be, you donk—and thus you would throw money at the pro tours to watch the best compete.”

It gets worse when potential new fans take a liking to something they “shouldn’t.”

“Hey, who’s that cool guy with the funny pants and big hair?” asks an excited eight-year-old child at his first PBA Tour event.

“Never mind him,” we reply. “What you should really be interested in is how that guy in the normal pants on lane 24 just changed his slide sole from a six to an eight. That was a gutsy move to make during game five of round two B squad qualifying.”

As the kid walks out, never to return, an adult walks in. The first thing he sees is a bowler rolling a strike.

“Wow!” he exclaims. “Did you see how that one pin rolled around on the floor for a while and finally knocked down that last one to get the strike? That was really cool.”

“What you just saw is called rolling the 2-pin,” we reply, “and that bowler should be ashamed of himself and disowned by his family.”

Yes, as anyone reading this magazine knows, bowling is incredibly difficult and part of the reason it’s fascinating for people like us to watch. But why delude ourselves into thinking casual fans would start watching if only they understood the difficulty?

If H&R Block can figure out a way to explain how difficult it is to do taxes for all their many different types of clients, will they secure a TV rights deal? Finally, we can all watch accountants calculate numbers live on FOX. Imagine how riveting it will be, given how difficult it is.

Writing of difficult, how about water polo? These people have to try to get a slippery wet ball into a goal on the far end of a pool while fighting both above and below water with opponents, all the while staving off a horrific drowning death. They are putting their lives at stake just to play a game and yet they apparently can’t figure out how to explain how difficult it is either, because they’re certainly not on TV nearly as often as bowling is.

Bowlers don’t risk drowning—except in high humidity with the wrong slide sole—and yet bowling has more notoriety than almost any pro sport. In fact, the PBA is debatably the eighth most popular professional sports league in the United States. It’s probably 14^th or so on the world scale. That’s even more impressive when considering, according to the World Sports Encyclopaedia (2003), there are more than 8,000 sports in the world, and we challenge you to name 7,991 of them.

Sure, those of us in bowling know that in a sports world of alley-oops, one-timers and monstrous home runs, nothing can compare to the excitement of a crucial ball change in the sixth frame. Historically, though, that appears to be a tough starting point for new fans.

Instead of demanding everyone instantly understand and respect how difficult bowling is, why don’t we try being more welcoming to the kid enthralled by the goofy pants or the guy laughing with glee at the rolled 2-pin? Those are valid things to enjoy and if we can keep people like that around long enough, eventually they’ll understand how difficult it is and, naturally, demand others do too.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, August, 2022

Bowling “on TV” is one of the most important topics of discussion and desire within the highest levels of the sport. If you’re a new subscriber to this publication, you should send a note to the editor and inquire about purchasing the most recent 78 back issues, in which you’ll find several in-depth discussions in this very column of why bowling on TV is so important.

Or, you can read the following quick summary: bowling on TV generally means bowlers are competing for championships and large paychecks along with notoriety, experience under the non-heat-emitting hot lights and thrill of bowling in front of a raucous crowd.

But there’s another aspect of bowling on TV we rarely discuss: television commercials. Bowling is often involved in many different types of media, but lately, it seems more prevalent than ever in advertising.

The camera shots are always quick, usually focusing on a group of extraordinarily happy revelers basking in the thrill of a Brooklyn strike that sweeps the 4-7-8 late, and invariably used as an example of what a carefree life anyone who uses the advertised product can have.

Lately, a lot of those drug commercials featuring disclaimers as long as Infinite Jest have been using bowling stock footage to prove that whatever they’re selling—after talking to your doctor, of course—will have you psoriasis-, UC- and allergy-free on the lanes with six of your closest friends surrounding you at the foul line while you gleefully grin at your pink bowling ball heading straight for the 10-pin but then somehow connecting between the 1 and 2 for the afore-mentioned Brooklyn. These drugs apparently also make you a very talented bowler or magician or both, which may be considered side effects and thus will be listed by the narrator reciting all the other horrifying possibilities in a strangely jovial tone.

It’s not just drug commercials. Sometimes people are happy on the lanes because of all the money they saved on car insurance or because they drank the correct soda that afternoon or because they figured out how to avoid leaving the house with a trillion subscription services that is appropriately celebrated by leaving the house to roll a few.

Why? Because bowling is fun and recognizable. Everyone in mainstream society knows this (note: mainstream society excludes competitive bowlers). Advertisers know that the general audience can identify with the fun of rolling plastic balls down the lanes with friends, so of course it’s the perfect activity to showcase when attempting to explain the incredible effects of whatever product is being hawked.

All the strikes are Brooklyn. All the balls are house balls. All the rules are shunned. A quick search on stock-footage dealer Pond5’s website shows 7,177 results for “bowling,” which is coincidentally the same number of qualifying games that will be required of competitors in the two 2023 U.S. Open events. Watch a few of these stock videos and bask in the ignorance of the footage creators who think a strike is a strike and a ball is a ball and a spade is a spade. And yet that type of footage is what advertisers buy (or produce themselves) to show the fun of their products.

This ignorance is likely costing them billions of dollars. Why don’t these drug ads cut from the other generic happiness shots—a woman frolicking in a bright meadow, a couple smiling at each other while walking on the sidewalk, a beaming child mesmerized by a floating bubble—to some guy, his frustration increasing over the course of several frames, really grinding to find the right line to the pocket on a flat oil pattern, finally striking late in the game but unable to put a double up, but keeping his head in the game and making his spares to allow him to eek out a 180-178 victory? That would move some merchandise.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, July, 2022

Does it make sense that the two players who did the least amount of losing—in fact, the two players who combined to do less losing than each of their 126 match-play competitors—in the 2022 USBC Masters and USBC Queens, both finished second?

Yes. In a sport that considers one of its all-time greatest moments to be two broadcasters standing outside a bowling alley telling the ABC viewers there might be a bomb inside, of course this makes sense.

For real, though, yes, it makes sense. And neither of those least-losses-second-placers is complaining. But there are still some in bowling who do complain (the classic have-to-win-the-tournament-twice argument), though such complaints are generally not prevalent among the touring professionals.

The pros understand that without the stepladder, there’s no TV and thus less money in the purse. As we recall, the stepladder was invented to generate compelling TV content a general audience would want to watch and be able to comprehend. If titles and fairness are more important than money, then sure, let’s do away with TV and stepladders and bowl however many games it takes to ensure the best player wins in solitude.

A stepladder makes good TV. Casual fans can understand this person versus that person, high score wins. All the players know the tournament formats before they enter. There are no surprises. The top seed is not entitled to the trophy and the players compartmentalize the events. Before the first ball is rolled in qualifying, no matter what the format, players have the same goal: get to the show, win the show.

Other sports do the same thing. The stepladder finals are essentially bowling’s playoffs, not to be confused with the actual PBA Playoffs, which are not to be confused with the PBA Tour Finals, which are not to be confused with the colloquial finals of any given event, which is match play, which doesn’t exist at the PBA Tour Finals, unless you count the stepladder finals as match play, which you technically could but probably shouldn’t.

The top-seeded NHL and NBA teams don’t always win their league titles. After they slog through 82-game regular seasons (qualifying), they’re seeded into the playoffs (match play and stepladder finals), at which point winning has to happen quickly or they’re done. Granted, the NHL doesn’t suddenly shorten playoff games to a single period to fit better with TV, but in general, the concept is the same. Get to the show, win the show. It’s just that bowling holds a new set of playoffs every weekend.

Consider the majors on the PBA and PWBA Tours:

In the Masters and Queens, we’re going to bowl 15 games, try to crack the top 64 for three-game total-pinfall double-elimination bracket match play, then seed ourselves into a five-person one-game stepladder. In the two U.S. Opens, we’re going to bowl 56,000 games, including an all-important cashers round, in order to ensure the correct five players get 10 frames against each other on television. In the PBA World Championship and PWBA Tour Championship, we’re going to bowl several other events that make up the overall event and then bowl some more to make the top five. In the PBA Players Championship, we’re going to first have to qualify within the top five of our region, then win a stepladder, then re-seed ourselves against the other regional winners, then win another stepladder. In the PBA Tournament of Champions, we’re going to hope there’s no bomb inside.

We all know this and it’s part of the fun of the events for fans and better-than-it-would-be-otherwise prize funds for players. In every one of the above events, five people end up on television bowling single games head-to-head in a stepladder format, taking it one shot at a time.

At the end, we have a winner and, usually, a satisfied audience. Casual fans respect the athleticism and easy-to-understand one-on-one title match and bowling fans respect the determination of winning when it matters, no matter where the winner was originally seeded.

And that, along with trusting the process, is what truly matters.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, June, 2022

One argument that is often used by bowlers as to why professional bowling isn’t as popular as we think it should be among the general population, many of whom are recreational bowlers—either regular league bowlers, fairly frequent let’s-go-have-fun bowlers or the huge number of bowl-once-with-friends folks—is that the scores in professional bowling are too high.

“If people at home see someone bowl 270, they’ll think bowling is too easy and not respect it,” one might say. “We need to put out tougher conditions so the best in the world are averaging 200 or so, at which point the people at home will become obsessed bowling fans.”

This is a misdirected argument. It’s a perfectly valid opinion for someone to hold right up until the point it’s directed at casual viewers. The discussion belongs within the highest levels of the game, where all the players can understand such an argument as they have to grasp the varying difficulties involved in posting certain scores under certain circumstances even to make it that far in their careers. Perhaps harder conditions would ensure a more accurate and fair result as to who wins the tournament, and perhaps not, but only those in the tournament would understand.

A casual fan sitting at home happening upon bowling show on television and seeing someone win with a 180 game will not react with respect and adoration for how difficult it was for that player to overcome the oil pattern and topography while repeating shots to within a quarter of an inch and picking up all his or her spares. The casual fan sitting at home will say, “I shot 190 once. I’m better than these people.”

Saying casual fans need to see lower scores to respect professional bowling and its players achieves the opposite effect: abject disrespect.

This is neither the fault of the players nor the fans. It’s the fault of one of bowling’s superb quirks: you have to get good enough to know how bad you are.

A once-a-year bowler has no idea how bad he is (nor does he care). Him seeing a pro on TV bowl 180 might even seem like a good score while 270 would seem impossible. Only when someone begins to work at the game and see improvement does he truly start to realize how bad he is.

With a bit of work, it’s not too difficult to get someone to improve from a 140 average to a 180 average, but once someone is in that 180-200 range, that person now knows enough to know how far he has to go to somehow get past 200 or higher. Adjustments. Spare shooting. Ball layouts. Surface application or removal. An advanced understanding of psychrometrics.

It’s at that point a player might start respecting the hard-earned clean 180 games of difficult pro bowling tournaments. Players like that, though, make up less than one percent of the television viewing audience. The rest are people with absolutely no understanding of the game, no idea how to keep score other than wondering why the pros don’t strike every time (even if they strike almost every time) and no worry at all about whether the oil pattern is challenging enough. They simply enjoy watching it, the same as most fans of every sport.

So, sure, the bowling community can continue discussing what the “proper” scoring pace is for any given tournament. But to think that is what will turn casual viewers into die-hard fanatics is, as stated previously, misdirected.

Still, it’s helpful to all of us at all levels of bowling to define the answer of which is better: 270 or 180? 270, obviously. By 90.

This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, May, 2022

This month, in The One Board’s continued unofficial official unscheduled scheduled series on what makes bowling better than all other sports, we’ll get into one of the most unique aspects of competitive bowling that no other sport can approach: guaranteed second-place money.

When you lead a bowling tournament through qualifying or match play or whatever the penultimate round is, you have led the tournament, yes, but you’ve also done something no other sport holds in such regard: you’ve guaranteed second-place money. That is, you qualified first for the stepladder finals, so even if you lose your match, you will win the second-place prize check. Obviously, you want to win and receive the title, the trophy and the first-place prize check, but you already know you’re getting, at minimum, second-place money.

If you win your one game for the title, all is right with the world. If you lose, you can lament having to “win the tournament twice” while also acknowledging any times in the past you’ve won a tournament from lower than the top seed, hoping that it all evens out.

Related: all multi-time PBA and PWBA Tour champions can tell you how many times they’ve won from anywhere other than the No. 1 spot and they can also tell you how many times they’ve lost as the top seed. Often, but not always, these two figures are close.

Where else in the world of sports is talk of second-place money so prevalent? We’ve never heard a hockey player upon advancing out of the conference finals say, “Oh, good, we made it to the Stanley Cup Finals. We guaranteed second place.”

This isn’t a perfect comparison because, while NHL players do get monetary bonuses based on how well they do in the playoffs, they also make enough money during the season that they’re not worried about the difference between the runner-up bonus money and the lost-in-the-semifinals bonus money.

Consider Wimbledon. Is any tennis player excited about guaranteeing the second-place plate, which is smaller than the championship trophy, and then having to pose for a humiliating photo with the victor, each with his respective trophy? One hopes not.

A sport isn’t a sport if the athletes aren’t trying to win. No one is playing for second place. There’s a difference between bowling for second place and bowling for second-place money.Bowlers are simply resigned to the fact that the stepladder finals are not indicative of the tournament as a whole, so guaranteeing second-place money is also a way for a top seed to say, “I’ve done all I can do and I did it well.” This is similar to how a player can control everything about his or her shot until the ball is on the lane, at which point it can leave a stone 9 on a great shot or crumble the rack after going through the face.

If we want to prevent “having to win the tournament twice,” we can eliminate the stepladder. Let the players bowl a thousand games and hand the trophy to the leader at the end. Sure, that would be more fair (not fair, just more fair, and even more fair still if we give them 1,001 games), but we already know that doesn’t work on TV as that is why the stepladder was invented in the first place; rather, the guaranteed second place. No TV means less sponsorship money which means lower prize funds meaning chasing fairness gets the top prize into the right person’s hands, but the top prize may no longer be as large as the current guaranteed second-place money.

In the moment, bowlers compete to guarantee second-place money. However, after the tournament ends and forevermore, a player doesn’t reminisce about guaranteeing second-place money. He simply says, “I led.” And that’s indisputable, as is this: bowling is better than all other sports.