The Rise and Fall of Professional Bowling
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
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.
Granted I've bowled all of like 5 times in my life but still.
I was lots of fun.
Me too. Snooker/Pool is also better. At the start of the night I'm sober and play a fair game, but at the end of the night after two/three pints I'm doing consistently and considerably better.
I keep meaning to take a night of not-drinking to see if is the beer that is responsible, of if it is just because I only carry out these activities every few months and I need a bit of time to relax and get back into the swing of things..
I don't see why the USBC doesn't mandate sport shots for every sanctioned league.
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.
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.
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.
The only things that really seem to distinguish a great bowler are his/her speed and accuracy. That's basically it. There's no Michael Jordan running on thin air with his tongue out. There's no massive 7' Shaq shattering glass with the force of his dunks. There's no Peyton Manning watching over his team, radiating some austere strategic wisdom (barring this last Super Bowl...).
Frankly, I'd (very seriously) rather watch professional juggling than bowling.
Finally, the overall style of bowling as a sport is decidedly 1970s midwest America. The US is undergoing probably an unprecedented urban trend right now. As profoundly shallow as it might be, bowling is just not sexy at all.
I think that's the whole story right there.
They used the blue dyed oil on a televised match a few months ago as an attempt to show it, but I feel that gives the bowlers an unfair advantage.
If there were a way to show the oil moving in real time to both the TV and live audience, I think you could start getting people interested in the game at a high level. Much the same way embedding little cameras in a poker table enabled the audience to see a live poker game unfold.
I'd also like to see the PBA fully embrace video streaming, and no, Xtra Frame doesn't count. I want to be able to watch follow an individual player throughout the 4 days of a typical PBA tournament. I have my favorite bowlers and I want to see their scores in realtime. I want to see how the lanes are changing and how the bowlers are adapting.
I love the sport; I've been bowling since I was very young. But, I too, would rather watch anything other than a PBA telecast.
Isn't professional juggling specifically supposed to be entertaining to watch?
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.
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.
It probably could be at the level of golf if bowling companies were able to sell high-end products. But for better or worse, bowling is a pretty cheap sport to play and doesn't require owning any gear whatsoever.
It's always hard to tell if these things are actually less popular than in decades past, or if it's just that I'm no longer in elementary and middle school.
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...
Ford mustang wasn't introduced until 1964.
Something along these lines: http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/rare-mustang-boss-302... http://www.sportscardigest.com/wp-content/uploads/F193_Ford_... http://www.fultonleasing.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/...
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.
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It also doesn't suffer from the "too easy" problem of 10 pin. For example, no one has officially bowled a perfect candlepin game.
Interesting article all the same. Thanks for sharing.
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.