Out of the gutter

David Renzi

Friday, July 19, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Beer and bowling have a long and happy association. There is the time-honored beer frame. There were the national beer teams of the '50s and '60s, featuring crew-cut, no-nonsense men from Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and Bedrock. So it came as no surprise to learn that guys named Bud manage two Las Vegas-area bowling centers.

Just thought you'd like to know. Now, let's get rolling.

After careful consideration, I've decided to spare you any cheap bowling puns. Instead, I'd like to move right to the things that currently define the state of bowling, one of which is the term "bowling center."

Hate to break the bad news, but there are no more bowling alleys. Not in Las Vegas, which is considered the bowling capital of the world, or anywhere else, where league-bowling participation is in decline.

"It's kind of like a pool hall and a billiard room," says Bud Horn, who manages the Santa Fe bowling center, the politically correct term of a new generation. "We're clean, neat and bright. A bowling alley is dingy and dark, built in the 1950s, has ancient equipment, dirty. We take pride here with our bowling center. We have lanes, we don't have alleys."

And they don't have gutters, but "channels."

"That's part of the cleanup process," says Chuck Sosebee, director of the Southern Nevada Bowling Association. "The game has improved its image tremendously. The bowling center proprietors have cleaned up their places and made it more of a family-type sport, trying to increase their membership."

That bowling needed a make-over at all speaks to its image, acquired in its past.

"I can remember my mother and father wouldn't even let me go in a bowling center when I was young," Sosebee says. "It was noted for drunks and destitute people. It had a bad name. No one knows why, other than it was the people who hung out there (i.e., Lenny and Squiggy)."

Sosebee is quick to add it wasn't the bowlers that gave bowling a black eye.

"You'll notice any old picture you see of a bowler, he had a tie on."

"For many years bowling could be found as an adjunct to pool halls in smoke-filled environments -- mostly just for men," says a veteran of the Las Vegas league wars. "Unlike golf, tennis and other individual sports, the game has never achieved status with the 'beautiful people.' Instead, bowlers (are perceived) as ... crass, gross, fat and sloppy."

Code names, obviously, for Kramden, Norton, Flintstone and Rubble.

Whatever they are, there were about 4.5 million of them sanctioned by the American Bowling Congress, a national governing body, in 1980. By 1990, the number had dwindled by a million. Last year, there were 2.4 million ABC-sanctioned league bowlers -- still the No. 1 organized sport.

But the ABC and an alphabet soup of other bowling entities were sufficiently alarmed by the decrease to commission studies, none of which drew any conclusions.

Sosebee says the organizations turned over all the documentation to the Gallup Organization, which commissioned more research and concluded that American people had become watchers and not doers, didn't want to commit the time to a bowling league and that the centers themselves were providing poor service, equipment and atmosphere.

"In other words, (the bowling alleys) had basked in their glory when bowling was booming," Sosebee says, "and when it started going downhill, they didn't change their attitude toward the bowlers when they came into the centers."

Runaway lanes

Las Vegas is a different story. Bowling is booming here.

"We need more lanes," Sosebee says.

As it stands, there are 424 lanes at 12 centers in Southern Nevada, from the ones at the Boulder Bowl in Boulder City to the Primadonna hotel-casino at the California-Nevada border. There will be 70 more with the opening of the Orleans hotel-casino on West Tropicana Avenue in December.

Locally, the American Bowling Congress has 12,400 members. The local chapter of the Women's International Bowling Congress (WIBC) has 8,700.

Bud Lang, assistant general manager of the Sunset Lanes in Green Valley, attributes the appeal to modern centers operated better than centers in other areas of the country. The fact that they're attached to casinos also ensures steady business.

"The population and the growth (of Las Vegas) obviously have something to do with it," Lang says. "And we have a lot of people involved in the service industry (i.e. blue collar), which are typically the type of people that bowl."

Bowling, Horn says, "is very healthy in this town. One of the reasons is, there's no antiquated bowling centers here. Every center is state-of-the-art, well-run, well-maintained. We're very fortunate in Las Vegas. We probably have the best bowling conditions in the United States."

That's due in large part to bowling's affiliation with hotel-casinos. The Showboat, Sam's Town, Santa Fe, Gold Coast and Silver Nugget all house bowling centers. Arizona Charlie's did, but closed its bowling center in 1993 to increase the size of its casino. The new Terrible's Town (formerly the Lucky Strike), a 16-lane center in Henderson, and the Sunset Lanes are attached to video-poker palaces.

"They're really sticklers for cleanliness and customer service, that kind of thing. Naturally, the bowling centers are the same way," Horn says.

Sosebee says bowling's affiliation with casinos is advantageous because people walk in on their own.

"Here, you have a captive audience. Being an ex-manager of a bowling center in the Midwest (Illinois), we had to practically drag them off the street to get 'em in a league. In the days I was managing, you had to solicit. If they bowled the previous year, we'd get on the phone and make sure they were coming back before someone else grabbed 'em. You don't have to do that now. (In Las Vegas) you can sit back and wait for them to come to you."

In fact, most local lanes are monopolized by league bowlers until at least 9 p.m.

Ira Parker, 19, says bowling centers are a great pickup place because teens tend to congregate in them after hours. "All the beautiful girls go bowling," he says.

For Chris Schwartz, 18, bowling isn't about girls, but competition. "The competition of knocking down 10 little pins."

The hotel alliance also allows bowling centers to charge much less than independents. The last of those in Las Vegas, the West Hill Lanes, closed in 1993 when the City Council rejected a proposal that would have allowed 360 slot machines on the premises.

The property management company that ran the lanes believed the slot revenue would spare West Hill from the demolition ball, which knocked down the 30-year-old bowling alley in 1994.

High-tech bowling

As the two Buds were saying, Las Vegas has a premium of modern bowling palaces. All the centers have synthetic lanes; the Santa Fe advertises its bowling center as "the most unique and exciting in the Southwest."

It boasts a feature called BowlerVision, which Horn describes as a "training tool." Appearing at the bottom of the automatic scoring machine, it measures ball speed and the angle the ball travels.

"In bowling," Horn says, "you strive for consistency. One of the keys is throwing (the ball) the same speed. And the entry into the pocket will tell you if you have a consistent hand release."

"I never use it," says Ed Dickelman, who bowls in the Sun City Kings and Queens Scratch League on Tuesday afternoons. "I'm a pin bowler. Basically, BowlerVision measures ball speed, board and angle. That's for spot bowlers. I never pay any attention to speed. I look at the pins. I shoot for the 3 pin and hope for the best."

In a recent league game, Dickelman rolled seven strikes in a row and scored a 244.

"He does that every week," teammate Lou Albert says.

Down the lanes, Don Lomo is sitting in a chair next to a refuse bin, which were known as trash cans when bowling centers were bowling alleys. He's no BowlerVision man, either.

"I never use it," says Lomo, another Sun City league bowler. "I'm a spot bowler."

He averages 197.

"If I used it more," says Bill Watterworth, who doesn't use it at all, "it would probably help me." He averages 175.

Nevertheless, BowlerVision is illustrative of the many advances in bowling technology that have taken players to another level.

"I know of three people that don't carry above a 170 average that shot 300s," says Jerry Foster, who teaches the bowling class at UNLV and coached its now-defunct team for eight years. "It has to be the ball and the equipment."

"You gotta keep up with the new technology," says Nick Mountain, a 16-year-old junior bowler.

One of the more significant advancements was the invention of bowling balls that skid longer and hook harder -- also known as "reactive urethanes."

Ron Wood, in addition to running Las Vegas Bowling Supply, oversees a North Las Vegas company (Dyno-Thane) that markets a line of reactive balls called Concept.

"What the technology has done," Wood says, "is lowered the moment of inertia, lowered the radius of gyration and increased the coefficient of restitution, which means when the ball hits the pins ... the pins bounce off the ball a little harder."

Got that?

Maybe this, a passage from a Dyno-Thane promotional brochure for its Concept EFX polarized reactive ball, will help:

By careful manipulation of the polymer chain we have developed a revolutionary cross-linked polymer that utilizes a unique bivalent helix for its structural foundation. This associated molecular alignment is known as polarized reactive. Not to be confused with the now-common phenomenon of over-saturation of plasticizers to produce what is commonly called "phasing." The polarized reactive shell is an unsaturated branching of the polymers engineered to look different, feel different, skid longer and hook harder than standard reactive urethanes.

And to think all Fred Flintstone needed was a diminutive boulder.

Dyno-Thane has also increased the differential between a ball's roll axis and hook axis by changing the density of its core through the positioning of the weight block.

Result: As the ball rolls down the lane, its axis becomes wider and it hooks more later, increasing power in the pocket.

"The more hook you give a bowler -- the more controllable hook -- the better their scores, angle of entry and pin-carry are going to be," Wood says.

Sure enough, the scoring of ABC members has skyrocketed since the '50s and '60s, when the average for a male bowler was between 157-165.

"That average has skyrocketed to the 170-180 range, and that's due to the modernization of equipment -- synthetic lanes, the pins and the bowling balls," Sosebee says.

Solid maple pins were replaced by plastic-coated pins with a wood base in the early '60s, making them more lively.

Honor scores (a 900 series, an 800 series and games of 300, 299 and 298) are also up among ABC members, says Sosebee.

Wood says the next big step in bowling technology is creating a new cover stock to replace reactive urethanes.

"I haven't found it yet," he says. "What you're trying to do is build the perfect bowling ball. But I don't care how good the technology is, you still have to have the ability to use it."

People, he adds, "have become slaves to technology but have lost the desire to add skill to their game."

Bill Vint, editor of Bowling Magazine, the official publication of the American Bowling Congress in Greendale, Wis., sees nothing wrong with the technological advances.

"It's not the kind of thing that has terribly alarmed anybody right now, because it's basically true in every sport in the world," he says. "You have titanium golf drivers and balls that travel 25 yards further, and big tennis rackets that (allow) people to serve the ball 20 mph faster. Race cars go faster. You name it.

"The people who manufacture equipment look at the rules and build the best product they can within the rules. Products continue to get better and better and better. People who play the game get smarter and smarter, and learn how to do it better."

Despite the advances, however, "no one has ever averaged 300," Vint says.

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