(Hey, I know those shoes!)
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Maybe it snuck up on you. Maybe you got distracted and forgot. After all, it’s been an extremely not normal year, and we’ve all been busy trying not to touch anything, or go anywhere, or approach anyone. But it’s almost here: the second Sunday of August. That’s right, America – get ready for yet another historic celebration:
National Bowling Day.
Admit it. You’ve bowled. In fact, I can state with some confidence that every American guy, at some point in his childhood, has done three things at least once:
- you’ve gone bowling
- you’ve played air guitar
- you’ve giggled at somebody’s flatulence
But for many of us, bowling was something we left behind in our youth, usually about eight minutes after we “graduated” to more adult values, like girls, and misdemeanor alibis. Sure, there are plenty of adults who still bowl; in fact, there’s a whole professional bowlers league, if you have your own ball and a last name like “Brokowski.”
For the few of you who might not know, American bowling is a game that involves two or more opponents who agree to wear somebody else’s shoes while rolling a heavy ball down a narrow wooden path containing, at its end, ten large chess pawns (bowlers refer to them as “pins”). The point of this exercise is to knock down as many pins as possible with the ball, so that at the end of the evening you can buy back your shoes.
(By the way, bowlers refer to the wooden path as an “alley.” Along each side of the alley is a bowling ball hazard known as a “gutter.” If your ball veers into either gutter, your roll is invalidated, no matter how many times you yell words from Joe Pesci’s vocabulary.)
As you can see, bowling, like most sports, has its own lingo. An official game of bowling consists of each opponent taking ten turns; each turn is known as a “frame” (see misdemeanor alibis). In each frame, the players can sling up to two balls down the alley at the ten pins. For each pin knocked down, the player gets one point … usually. I say “usually” because scoring in the bowling world is open to interpretation and often involves heavy gambling, as if wearing aerosol-disinfected rented shoes wasn’t enough of a risk.
If a bowler manages, with their two allotted rolls, to knock down all ten pins, that is known as a “spare,” which earns her/him a bonus, and some extra shoe disinfectant. If the player manages to knock down all ten pins with the first ball, that is known as a “strike,” which is even better, but it also causes the player to break out in a spasm of involuntary dancing that makes them look like Richard Simmons wading through fire ants.
And speaking of risk, the science of bowling integrates several disciplines: physics, velocity, inertia, beer. The combination of these forces often results in challenging bowler scenarios, like the dreaded “seven-ten split,” in which, to earn a spare, the two pins farthest back – and farthest apart – must be knocked down by the bowler’s second roll. (Coincidentally, the “seven-ten split” also describes a common phenomenon in the business world, in which middle management mysteriously vanishes until mid-morning.)
If a bowler scores a strike in each of the ten frames, that is known as a perfect game, and he’s probably lying. In baseball, of course, a “strike” is a bad thing, but at least you get to wear your own shoes.
National Bowling Day was created in 1956 during the Eisenhower administration, a richly intellectual era that gave us Vietnam, interstates, and Richard Nixon (note: accomplishments listed by height). The first bowling day was sponsored by NBC and the General Cigar Company, which explains why bowling alleys smell the way they do. According to the internet, to observe National Bowling Day, you can “gather the family and go bowling,” an astute bit of advice that justifies why Al Gore invented the internet in the first place.
But the history of bowling itself goes back much farther than the Eisenhower administration, during which Al Gore invented NASA. Back in the 1930’s, a British anthropologist claimed that a collection of objects he’d found in the grave of an Egyptian child, from 3200 BC, appeared to be used for a “crude” form of bowling (shoes shared with reckless abandon, maybe). However, modern American bowling probably has its roots in third century Germany, an era which fortunately ended before Eisenhower arrived.
Germans call bowling kegel, because they have a thing for hard consonants. Kegels their word for the nine target pins at the end of the bowling lane (Kegelbahn), because when it was time to name the pins, it was already late Friday. (After bowling made its way to America, the pin count increased to ten because, you know, manifest destiny.)
One particularly unique form of bowling can be found in Edinburgh, Scotland, where the contestant swings a fingerless ball between his legs and heaves it at the pins, causing him to flop onto the lane on his stomach. Our research did not uncover the local name of this Gaelic game, but in America it’s known as “binge drinking.”
In any case, America, why not make this the year you give National Bowling Day the respect it so richly deserves? Grab a mask, corral your young ones (they’re busy texting, so they won’t even notice) and go knock out a few frames! Or, alternatively, consider making a visit to the International Bowling Museum in Arlington, Texas, boasting 18,000 square feet of fun! Free parking!
(shoe rentals available)