Columnist Dean Juipe: Pro bowling hopes for a renaissance

Dean Juipe

Friday, Jan. 21, 2000 | 10:17 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@vegas.com or 259-4084.

It's the most primitive of games.

Find a large, heavy ball and roll it toward some pins. The more you knock down, the better your score.

Bowling likely existed in the stone age, acting as a diversion from the daily grind of uprooting berry bushes and dodging dinosaurs.

Apparently much of the modern world sees the sport in those prehistoric terms, as any pro bowling you come across on television these days is taped.

Once an absolute staple of weekend TV programming, the Professional Bowlers Association tour had a core audience that was faithful and enthusiastic. Its events, often from bowling hotbeds in the Midwest, were televised for 36 consecutive years by ABC until the giant network pulled the plug.

While ABC once paid the PBA $185,000 per televised event, times changed and the fee was reduced to $50,000 a few years ago and then, in a potentially fatal move for the tour, ABC completely withdrew its interest. Push having come to shove, the PBA then paid rival networks NBC and CBS to televise the occasional tournament.

Pro bowling has continued to backslide toward oblivion and this year only one of its events will be seen on live TV. Others, like The Orleans Casino Open that runs through today at the West Tropicana hotel, are taped for a later broadcast.

But a knight in shining armor has the PBA tour in his sights, and Wednesday the organization's 2,800 members voted to push ahead and attempt to reach an agreement with millionaire Chris Peters of Bellevue, Wash.

He's willing to buy the tour, which was founded in 1958, much as retired basketball star Isiah Thomas purchased the Continental Basketball Association en masse last year.

Peters will acquire the PBA, pay off its $3 million debt and sink another $1 million into tournament prize money.

Presumably he'll also do his best to maneuver the tour back on to live TV.

Tour members are predictably ecstatic about this prospective change in fortune and the topic dominates their conversation. A Thursday visit to The Orleans bowling center not only underscored the obvious, it served as a reminder of how efficient these men are at this age-old game.

Today's professional bowlers may be more anonymous than their predecessors, yet they're fitter and seemingly more stylish than many of the men who were household names some three decades ago.

Incongruous as it is, the players have improved while their stature has declined. It's easy to feel they deserve better, and maybe Peters will provide it.

Beyond the men's pro tour, bowling is in a peculiar state -- no thanks to Las Vegas. Something called Rockin' Bowl is taped at the All American SportPark and can be seen Tuesdays on the cable network TNN. It's a fairly bizarre mix of bowling and silly stunts, complete with the stereotypical buxom hostess, that's designed to appeal to a demographic group decidedly younger than the sport's traditional audience.

Rockin' Bowl isn't terrible but probably needs to be restricted to small dosages.

The fact that Madison Avenue thinks the same of the men's professional tour simply proves there is work to be done, work the cavemen couldn't have envisioned and work that Peters is going to have to fund.