Geek Schemes and JumoTron Dreams

It’s Jan. 20, 2002, a typically momentous day in the world of American professional sports.

In St. Louis, Rams quarterback Kurt Warner (seven-year, $46-million contract) out-duels the Green Bay Packers’ Brett Favre (10 years, $100 million) to help his team win its NFC playoff game 45-17. In Pittsburgh, the Steelers wrap up their AFC division (total TV households: 18.9 million) by beating the Baltimore Ravens 27-10. At PGA West in La Quinta, Phil Mickelson wins the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic and pockets a check for $720,000.

And, oh, yes: in Las Vegas, it’s opening day of the annual Orleans Casino Open, the 14th stop on the 2001-2002 Professional Bowlers Assn. National Tour. This is competitive bowling at its highest level, and during the next few days 142 of the world’s finest bowlers will compete fiercely for a first prize of $40,000.

Before noon several hundred solid citizens--most carrying bowling bags--enter the Orleans Hotel and Casino, a mid-range, Big Easy-themed establishment about two miles off the Strip. They stride purposefully through the cacophonous casino and take the escalator up to the hotel’s 70-lane Bowling Center. A majority of them, as indicated by their ages and happy shouts of recognition, are longtime league bowlers and followers of the pro bowling tour. After paying their $129 entry fee, they are now entered in the tournament’s pro-am competition.

Happy entrants get to share a lane with fireballer Jason Couch or hot-blooded PBA scion Pete Weber or long-haired and leather-pantsed Danny Wiseman or, perhaps, another of the tour’s top contenders. All get a certificate of participation and a free Fuze Raging Red bowling ball (hole drilling at the pro shop: $25 extra).

There is no mistaking this for, say, the pro-am at the Professional Golfers’ Assn.’s Nissan Open at Riviera (entry fee: $3,800). The amateur bowlers, male and female, are dressed in everything from immaculate bowling attire to jeans and T-shirts that say things such as “Cisco’s Party Zone” and “Inyo-Mono Concrete & Construction Bishop California.” They refresh themselves with slushies and astoundingly large cups of Pepsi from the snack bar and Bud Lights from the cocktail lounge. A light haze of cigarette smoke drifts back to the shoe-rental counter.

They also get one last glance, most likely, at a sweet, down-to-earth and sadly archaic American institution.

While the pros bowl dozens of games and head-to-head matches to cut the field down to the mere five who will “make the show”-- i.e., appear on the upcoming ESPN telecast of the tournament--most, including the highest roller of all, current top dog Parker Bohn III, spend at least a few hours at the Orleans mingling with the fans and signing autographs. This quaint custom will likely end soon, because in a development only dimly understood by most of those present, their favorite spectator sport has been purchased--lock, stock and tournament schedule--by a trio of semi-anonymous young businessmen whose intent is to revamp, “relaunch” and propel pro bowling into the new millennium.

This means fiddling with the rules to speed it up and make it more palatable to modern television audiences; amping up the money and pressure to make the sport more dramatic; establishing a viable star system; giving said stars accessible “personalities” and enclosing them in the same gleaming bubble of fame that encases the idols of “major” sports.

If all goes according to a very ambitious (some might say unrealistic) plan, bowling will storm the airwaves, carve out a new niche in the national consciousness and regain its rightful place alongside football, baseball, basketball and hockey. The alternative--Plan B, if you will--is oblivion.

“I like bowling,” says Chris Peters, a recreational bowler with a respectable 160 per-game average. “I mean, it’s OK. I mean, I like bowling just like I like a lot of things. But I also like building things.”

Translation: right now the thing that Chris Peters is busy building is bowling’s new order, and he is confident that as the sport’s new czar--he’s chairman and one of the new owners of the Professional Bowlers Assn.--he can turn it into something huge and exponentially more valuable.

This makes absolutely no sense until you realize that for the past couple of decades, Peters, a self-described nerd, helped build Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, both ubiquitous bulwarks of the Information Age. As Microsoft employee No. 105, Peters joined Bill Gates’ shop in 1981, rose to a vice presidency and left the company in 1998, at age 39, with a fortune whose amount he’d rather not disclose.

In fact, there are other things he’d rather not disclose, including any of his hobbies. (“I try, actually, not to get too much into my personal life in publications and things,” he says.) But he will admit that he doesn’t attend as many PBA tournaments as he’d like, what with a year-old child and a strong aversion to taking anything more complicated than direct flights from his home base near Seattle.

What Peters is relatively eager to share is one of the more interesting--and quirky--business stories of recent times; namely, how in March 2000 he and two buddies decided to buy a 42-year-old entity that not many people realized still existed, much less was available for immediate purchase.

“When I sort of retired,” says Peters, “I just wanted to do something new, and I decided that I was going to start getting more physically fit, which is not something I really was while sitting behind a desk for 16 years. So I wanted to learn a sport.” Admitting that he was much better at reading about sports than participating in them, Peters began perusing the bowling periodicals that nestle in odd, barely visible corners at most newsstands. “I learned about the PBA, started watching the TV shows and learning who the pros were and all that kind of stuff. I heard that they were sort of not doing that well, you know, from the magazines. You kind of read between the lines.”

At that time the PBA was a nonprofit organization located in Akron, Ohio, run by and for the bowlers themselves. Peters called, introduced himself and offered to help out. Placed on the board of directors by the slightly stunned then-PBA commissioner, Peters began offering advice. He concluded that the only logical way the PBA could survive was for him and two of his friends, fellow Microsoft alums Mike Slade and Rob Glaser, to pony up $5 million of their own money and buy the PBA outright. The deal was concluded in April 2000. Peters, Slade and Glaser--the latter two don’t give interviews--now compose the entire PBA board of directors. In short order Peters and his partners moved the headquarters to Seattle, nearer to Peters’ home, and converted the PBA into a for-profit organization.

They also hired Steve Miller and Ian Hamilton--two high-powered and high-priced former Nike marketing wizards--to handle the nuts and bolts of executing their towering vision. Since then, he and his mostly silent partners have pumped in another $10 million to $15 million of venture capital.

“I mean, there was an emotional aspect and then there was an intellectual aspect,” Peters says. “And it’s not often that both can happen, you know, at the same time. From an emotional point of view, it just seemed terrible to have a [bowling] Hall of Fame and national titles, and all the while people who are the best in the world at doing what they [do are] selling insurance in Chicago. I mean, it just doesn’t seem logical that all that would happen.”

He adds, “From an intellectual point of view, they were getting great ratings--their ratings were double that of hockey--with no marketing.”

As more proof of bowling’s great potential, Peters says that when he first arrived, the league’s crude Web site was getting a “tremendous” number of hits, about a quarter of them from bowling enthusiasts from “wealthy, First World” countries such as Korea, Japan, Germany and Sweden. “And again, from an intellectual point of view, the fact was that you could buy an international league for less than the cost of a Triple-A baseball team in a small town . . . .”

Financial opportunity, he implies, was knocking loudly enough to wake the dead. “It just seemed crazy,” he says. “You know what I mean?”

These days, peters spends much of his time writing code for a pay-per-Webcast feature of the revamped PBA Web site that will allow online fans, for a projected fee of $9.95, to view the quarter- and semifinal matches not shown on TV.

If all of this seems a bit esoteric to players whose lives revolve around subjects such as ball hardness, lane surfaces and the four- versus five-step approach, nobody is complaining. Before Chris Peters & Friends arrived on the scene, pro bowling was a dying sport--and its survival prospects were bleak at best.

Evidence of this is easy to see in Las Vegas. While the bowlers are attired in spiffy shirts with their names written on their backs, admission to the tournament is free to anyone who makes their way up from the casino below. Throughout the preliminary rounds there are plenty of empty seats on two small bleachers set up behind the lanes.

Anyone interested in keeping up with the action can walk to the rental counter to receive free pairing and score sheets as well as listings of current local league openings and invitations to upcoming events such as the Orleans Bowling Center Sweetheart Mixed Scotch Doubles Tourney. Although the wall behind the pin spotters is festooned with the establishment’s funky Day-Glo Cajun alligator mascot, banners and signs provided by sponsors and advertisers are scant.

That things have retrogressed this far might seem surprising, especially to Baby Boomers who have warm memories of watching weekly network pro bowling broadcasts hosted by Chris Schenkel on Saturday afternoons, just before ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” Superstar bowlers--among them Don Carter, Mark Roth, Dick Weber and Earl Anthony--occupied a secure place in the nation’s sports consciousness.

But around the time that baseball, football and basketball fans began to familiarize themselves with terms such as “free agency,” “signing bonus” and “lifetime endorsement deal,” bowling--whose first prizes rarely exceeded $25,000--began to sink into sporting obscurity.

The villain, of course, was the evil god of demographics. In contrast to golf, the sports success story of the ‘90s, bowling has always had a blue-collar, Ralph Kramden image. It’s mostly true, unkind though it may be to admit. And although bowling’s raw TV ratings were always viable, its mostly couch-bound male viewers were more apt to buy Dr. Scholl’s corn plasters and Hagar slacks than Infinitis or Fidelity mutual funds. In other words, the typical bowler was the kudzu of the upscale marketing world.

Low commercial fees begat lesser prize money, and as the newly minted millionaires competing in other sports attracted more of our attention, the weekly bowling show’s ratings slipped from 9.1 in the mid-1970s to 2.0 in 1997. In that black year, research shows that 67% of its audience was more than 50 years of age. ABC retired Schenkel and canceled its bowling series after 36 years. Bowling on television became a hit-and-miss affair, popping up haphazardly on network or cable television via short-term contracts. Prize money began to drop; long-running tournaments began to fall off the schedule.

Long before that, the print media had virtually abandoned bowling. A search of periodical databases reveals that Sports Illustrated ran its last bowling article of any length in 1990, the same year, coincidentally, that the PBA tried to upgrade its image by banning its athletes from smoking in the player bench areas. The Los Angeles Times’ last bowling beat writer, a 48-year veteran sportswriter named Don Snyder, last had a byline in 1995. His Times obituary two years ago was 160 words long.

“Wait a minute. my name was in the times,” says eric forkel after a Monday morning practice session. “I think it was in the early ‘90s, somewhere around then.”

He smiles and shrugs. At 41, Forkel, who lives in Northridge, is a 21-year veteran of the pro bowling tour. He is a balding, outwardly calm man who looks a bit like the actor Jeffrey Tambor (“The Larry Sanders Show”), albeit 50 or 60 pounds lighter, and has won five tournaments, the last in 1999, and exactly $827,315 in prize money in his career.

“I consider myself a good journeyman out here,” he says. “I have had some great moments, but there are certain guys out there who are just at a different level and that’s OK. Every sport has [its] superstars. I don’t mind being a really good bowler. I’d love to be a great bowler, but you have to take what you can get.

“Without sounding strange,” says Forkel, “I was put on this earth to bowl--whatever the hell that means.”

That means that during the 2002 season, Forkel, like many of his competitors, drives from tournament to tournament. During the off-season he helps a friend out in the pro shop at Rocket Lanes in Chatsworth. Like many pros, Forkel earns extra income as a consultant/salesman for a bowling ball manufacturer, in his case, a Utah-based firm called Storm. He is married with two children; his wife works as a supervisor at a Vons supermarket.

In the mid-1980s, Forkel’s first marriage broke up because, he says, his wife objected to his spending so much time on the road. During the 1994 Northridge earthquake, he cut his foot on a shard of broken glass, keeping him out of action for several months. In 2000, he fell through his roof while trying to repair it and fractured his back. He won only $12,060 last year, but thanks to strenuous rehab and practice he feels back to about 80% of normal.

Forkel isn’t complaining and he’s by no means the worst off of his peers. Striking up conversations around the lanes elicits sadder stories: of touring pros, by most definitions homeless, traveling the circuit in small RVs with their wives while home schooling their children. There are tales of good games gone inexplicably sour and players losing their sponsorships and dropping off the tour to become car salesmen or join the family plumbing business. There’s talk of debilitating knee and shoulder injuries--no team physicians or injured reserve in this league--and scuffling during the off-season in local “amateur” tournaments with prize pots averaging $25,000 or less.

“It’s a lot of stress,” says Forkel of the life he’s chosen.

Added to this is a certain melancholy: while he’s an enthusiastic supporter of the PBA’s new management, Forkel realizes that, even if they succeed immediately, at his age he probably won’t be around more than four or five seasons to cash in. He says he was born a little too soon and, in another way, a little too late. “I’ve seen [films] of bowlers in the 1960s, and I think my game would have fit right in then. I’m not a real hard thrower. Just smooth and careful. Sort of right down the middle.”

But this is not the 1960s. It’s the dawn of a new era in professional bowling. Much of the talk around the Las Vegas lanes is about the future, including that of Steve Miller, the stocky, powerfully built president and CEO of the Professional Bowlers Assn. He’s talking forcefully about possibilities in a quiet corner of the cocktail lounge.

“Right now,” says Miller, “pro bowling is a third-tier sport. It’s on a tier with rodeo at the high end and tractor pulls at the low end. Where I’d like to get to is a place where [the PBA] becomes the value of a top National Hockey League team or a mid-level major league baseball team.”

A former track star and college sports administrator, the 58-year-old Miller joined Nike in 1991, moved up to higher-paying jobs as the swoosh conquered the sports world, and retired after the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, as the company’s director of global sports-marketing relations. When the PBA’s Chris Peters called, Miller admitted he knew practically nothing about bowling. But he decided to take the job after he noticed on an Italian vacation that the Prada store in Rome was selling a line of chic, expensive bowling-style shoes and accessories.

“We think we can reach a valuation of about $150 million,” he says, “which would give us an enormous return to our people and be a sum of money that Americans--because this is where we live--can relate to. If it’s worth $10 million, it’s the price of somebody’s big house in Bel-Air. If it’s worth $100 million, now, it’s real money.”

Miller adds: “Part of bowling’s credibility gap was caused by playing for $15,000 for first place instead of playing for $100,000. If I’m channel surfing and I come across bass fishing at just the right moment, and they’re weighing the last fish to win $100,000, I’m going to watch for that minute and a half. If they weigh it for $10,000, I’m flipping [the channel].”

Point made, he leans back. “Now, I don’t think we’re going to have a year in the near future when these guys are going to make a million dollars, but I believe we can get them up to $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 at the top end and $50,000 or $60,000 at the bottom.” His first major tasks, he says, were to define more clearly the PBA season as beginning in September and ending in March (it used to trickle along all year); more than double the prize money; sign a three-year contract with ESPN (whether ESPN is paying the PBA or vice versa is a closely guarded secret); tweak the tournament format to emphasize head-to-head matches instead of pin total; and begin signing up as many sponsors and marketing partners as possible.

Miller appears prominently in a promotional DVD produced recently by the PBA and distributed to potential sponsors. On it a narrator declares that corporate naming and signage rights are for sale--everything from the entire season to the shirts worn on television by the tournament finalists to the lettering on the lanes, balls and bowling pins.

At interview’s end Miller is asked whether he’d recently uttered a particular attention-getting quote--one attributed widely to him inside the bowling world. “Yes, I did,” he says. “I said that today everybody says our bowlers are accessible, they’re really wonderful guys, etcetera, etcetera. But when the players all get agents, and they’re all--” here he uses a colorful but unprintable synonym for selfish egomaniacs “--we’ll know that w1697085029 Later, back in the cocktail lounge, Robert Smith, a solidly built, fresh-faced 28-year-old from Simi Valley, ponders a question about whether he’d like to become very, very rich. “Yeah, I would,” he says. “I think everyone here in this association deserves it. To have the chance to be able to be among the elite athletes that are out there, like Jordan and Tiger. It’s just that we’re in a sport that is going to need a little help right now. And things are definitely turning around the right way, I believe.”

A bowler since age 6 and a junior champion, Smith’s high school friends dissed him for playing “a sport for drunks and losers.” But if pro bowling catches on this time around, Smith--tabbed as a future superstar by the league brass--has as good a chance to cash in as anyone. A hard-throwing “cranker” nonpareil, his ball has been clocked at 34 mph, the fastest on the tour. Last year he won two tournaments, and his ball sponsor, Storm, sent him to Japan along with Pete Weber to hold bowling clinics and play exhibition matches. “There were huge crowds,” Smith says. “I mean, there would be like 150 people bowling with us. But there were only two of us, so we’d have to jump around the whole house, meeting everyone. And there were probably about 300 people in the back watching, so as soon as we were done [there was] a big old line waiting for us to sign autographs.”

These days Smith drives a Honda Accord with 140,000 miles on it and shares hotel rooms at tournaments with one or two fellow bowlers. Recently, however, he starred in two 30-second spots in a series of PBA promos currently running on ESPN. Titled “Spare Thoughts,” the spots supposedly open a window into the world of professional bowling and offer scripted insights into the minds of the PBA pros. They’re supposed to be funny.

In one “Spare Thought” spot, Smith is shown throwing a strike to win a tournament. He pumps his fist in triumph, then bends down and sees something on the lane apron. “Cool! A dime!” Smith says in a voice-over. He picks up the coin and pockets it.

Steve Miller’s right-hand man, fellow Nike veteran Ian Hamilton, has a plan to change all that. “We’ve got to dimensionalize the players. Create stars. Build heroes and villains,” says Hamilton, who will resign as the PBA commissioner at the end of this season but will remain with the league as a consultant and executive producer of the ESPN telecasts.

At 44, Hamilton is a tall, thin, former junior tennis star who for 14 years was Nike’s global director of tennis sports marketing. His proudest accomplishment during that tenure, he says, was creating something called the Nike Cup. For the Nike Cup, played in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Hamilton threw out the slow, old rules of tennis and had four top players, all Nike clients, compete in 20-minute-long elimination matches--one serve apiece, pingpong scoring, no linesmen.

“So anyhow,” he says, “I will never forget that night as long as I live. I want to have that same moment in bowling, when I can walk into the Garden--and the whole world will see the greatest bowlers in the world compete in the greatest forum in the world.”

Hamilton concedes that his fantasy probably won’t happen soon but says that if the PBA’s relaunching is on target, the tournament’s final matches will soon move out of bowling centers and into 10,000- or 15,000-seat arenas. The pro-am competitions also will take on a more corporate flavor and entry fees may rise considerably north of $129.

The majority opinion in the sports business world is that many of the new PBA visionaries have as much chance of success as they might have to convert a difficult split. The consensus is that, 1) bowling’s demographic woes still plague it; 2) most people think of bowling as Saturday afternoon recreation, not a true sport; 3) in the new Internet-and-multichannel universe, even “must see” sports are losing money for their networks.

Still, Hamilton spends most of his time tuning up the TV bowling broadcasts--the “guttercam” is a recent innovation--and the bowlers’ public demeanor. Before each telecast Hamilton coaches the five bowlers to remember that they’re miked--boasts and challenges to their opponents are strongly encouraged--and that the reason the man with the hand-held camera is hovering around them is to catch that bead of sweat, and that it would be really great to see it rolling down their foreheads. Hamilton constantly encourages them to showcase their emotions--the right ones--on the lanes.

“I mean, when we first got here,” Hamilton says, shaking his head, “these guys, when their opponents bowled a strike, they’d actually give them a high five! I said: ‘Guys, do you think Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, when they change sides in the middle of the game, do you think Pete says, ‘Hey, nice return,’ and Andre says, ‘Yeah, great serve’? Are you kidding me? They keep their heads down and don’t say a word and don’t even give the other guy an inch. That is competition. And you guys better be that competitive because there is a title at stake and there is a lot of money at stake.

“They weren’t thinking about it that way. So, you know, while I’m not saying this is the WWF [World Wrestling Federation], I am saying, ‘Guys, don’t forget: Sports is entertainment.’ ”

Indeed, over the next four days sports and entertainment of the Darwinian kind--”terminal competition,” as Hamilton calls it--are in plentiful supply in Las Vegas. On Monday morning the 142 pros are divided into two flights and each competitor bowls nine games. After their pin totals are added up, the top 64 move on to the next round. On Tuesday morning the survivors bowl nine more games, with their totals from Monday carried over. The field is cut in half.

Both Eric Forkel, averaging 228 of a possible 300, and Robert Smith, averaging 226, make it to the single-elimination phase. At noon on Tuesday, Forkel shakes hands with Joe Ciccone, a 26-year-old from Buffalo, N.Y., and begins their best-three-out-of-five match. Forkel starts slowly, losing the first game 213-196, but then finds his groove and sees his medium-pace hook yield strikes. Ciccone has the curious habit of staring blankly at the side wall of the bowling center and taking long walks away from the lanes while his opponent is bowling. It doesn’t work. Forkel wins the next three games and advances to the round of 16 finalists.

At 2 p.m. Smith cranks up against Amleto Monacelli, a dangerous 18-time tournament winner from Venezuela and one of the few foreigners on the tour. From the first frame it’s obvious that Smith’s fastball is missing the strike zone: he has several hot streaks, but instead of producing thunderous strikes, he leaves a series of disappointing spares and improbable splits. Smith loses the match. He wins $2,250--a little more than twice the amount he figures will cover his week’s expenses.

On Wednesday at noon Forkel faces off against Ricky Ward, a dangerous 33-year-old left-handed semi-cranker from Florida and former rookie of the year. Forkel loses the first game 227-225 but beats Ward in the next two, shouting, “Carry!” as his balls head unerringly into the pins. He controls the fourth game up to the 10th frame, and all he has to do is score a strike or spare to win the game and the match.

Alas, he throws a difficult 6-8-10 split and fails to get the spare. He loses that game and the final two in quick succession. He exits the tournament with a grand total of $3,500. Forkel returns to his hotel room to cool down, then comes back 45 minutes later, subdued but surprisingly composed.

“I was just tense, tight,” he says of his fatal throw. “I put a little extra on the ball. I shouldn’t have done it. I’ve had trouble with that in the past, getting past that pressure point. I’ve maybe lost five tournaments in my career that way. That’s the one moment when everything is in the balance. The new owners love that concept. That’s what they think bowling ought to be. Well, I guess they’re right. I just have to confront it.”

If you are from one of the 574,799 households that tuned in to the taped ESPN telecast that Sunday in January--a pitiful fraction of the TV bowling audience at its height--you know what happened next. The televised portion consists of four single-game eliminations; the championship match was between Ward and Brian Voss, a slim, good-looking 43-year-old fading star who had won 20 tournaments but none since 1998.

Voss played his TV role perfectly, pumping his fist, yelling at his balls to behave, shaking his head in disgust and talking to himself on the bench while his opponent bowled. These moments received much instant replay. In the ninth frame Ward missed an easy 4-7 spare--a little poetic justice for Forkel--to hand the championship to his opponent.

“I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to win,” Voss says after the match. Two local newspaper reporters take down his words. They will appear in two small articles the following day.

And, yes: Ian Hamilton wants to apologize because the PBA’s flashy new set--including heavy metal trusses holding 51-inch plasma screens enabling spectators to watch the same moments they’re looking at live--isn’t present at the Orleans. Unfortunately, the bowling center floor isn’t strong enough to support it.

“Looking forward,” Hamilton says quietly, “we may have to go to a new venue. Or even a different city.”

Hamilton’s eyes flash. Directly in his line of sight sits a happy crowd of bowling-mad retirees and blue-collar workers. In his mind’s eye, though, perhaps he is in Madison Square Garden or Staples Center or Network Associates Coliseum in Oakland. Parker Bohn versus Pete Weber in the final match of the $1-million ABC “Monday Night Bowling Championship.” Five frames for all the marbles. Spike Lee and Mike Wallace in their $150 lane-side seats. And there, high above it all, giant beads of sweat on the JumboTron. Postscript: On Feb. 10, the ESPN audience for pro bowling topped 1 million households for the first time this season. On Feb. 17, Robert Smith won the PBA Empire State Open at Latham, N.Y., near Albany.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The Art and Science of the Elite Bowler

Despite their unearned reputation as the only overweight, overaged white guys in professional sports--David Wells, Craig Stadler, Tony Siragusa, anyone?--pro bowlers are, for the most part, elite athletes. Though approximately the height and weight of normal human beings, they walk among the estimated 3.5 million sanctioned league bowlers as gods. A pro bowler flings a 15- or 16-pound ball toward a precise spot 60 feet away thousands of times in competition--tens of thousands in practice--each year. The approach and delivery must be practiced, analyzed and changed as subtly and as often as any professional golfer’s swing. Speed, balance and accuracy are constantly juggled: slow- and moderate-throwing bowlers trade control for striking power; hard-throwing “crankers” employ dramatic backswings that end two or three feet above their heads.

As the pros stride toward the foul line they try to dance themselves into the perfect position to apply the perfect amount of spin to their (hopefully) perfectly balanced ball. Then they hope for enough pure luck to achieve sufficient pin “carry” for strikes and avoid spare-leaving “wraps,” “taps” and, worst of all, unmakeable splits in which the remaining pins are so far apart that they’re nearly impossible to knock down with the bowler’s final ball.

Lastly--and infuriatingly frustrating to anyone trying to explain the intricacies of the pro game--is that bowling lanes are cleaned daily, then covered with a sheet of transparent oil. Spinning bowling balls skid straight ahead on heavily oiled areas and grip, then hook, on lightly oiled or unoiled patches, which is why recreational lanes are oiled with a higher concentration in the middle. That creates a funnel effect that guides hooking balls into the pocket--the sweet spot between the head pin and its left or right companion. In PBA tournaments, the lanes are oiled evenly and smoothly from the foul line to approximately two-thirds down the lane, with devilishly different minor variations each week. The bowler must “read” his lane to guess exactly where his spinning ball will start to hook--even as lane conditions change over the course of a game, because each thrown ball absorbs excess oil and lays a new oil patch farther down the lane.

To complicate matters, left-handers and right-handers face completely different conditions, and in qualifying rounds bowlers move left to right from one pair of lanes to another, facing new conditions each game. The best way to describe it is that bowling and golf have much in common, nerves included, except that in bowling the equivalents of sand traps and water hazards are invisible.

Once this abstract concept is grasped, pro bowlers believe, fandom will follow.

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Andy Meisler is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.