Up my alley
When people ask me what my favorite sport is, I usually tell them it’s a toss-up between baseball and hockey. I probably lean toward baseball, but there are times (usually when the Mets are breaking my heart) when I think it might be hockey (though not at the times when the Islanders are breaking my heart). So I go with the toss-up answer.
It only occurred to me the other day that the correct answer to the question isn’t that it’s a toss-up. The correct answer also isn’t that it’s definitely baseball or definitely hockey. No, if I am really being honest, my favorite sport is bowling.
Bowling has never made me want to throw things in anger. Bowling has never broken my heart. Bowling has never made me shake my head at the out-of-control salaries its players receive.
Bowling was probably one of the first sports I watched on TV. Bowling was the backdrop of a bunch of fun birthday parties. Bowling is a sport I can make a decent showing at.
I know there are some of you who do not think bowling is a sport, that anything that can be done well by guys with big bellies while they drink beer can’t possibly be a sport. And to that, I say, to borrow the inscrutable words of the great Pete Weber, “Who do you think you are? I am!”
I gave you a glimpse of my love of bowling last year when I wrote about Columbian Lanes and when I briefly expressed my fondness for Rab’s Bowling on the Green earlier this year, but I’ll be taking a deep dive here, starting with Saturday afternoons with my dad when I was a kid.
Saturday mornings were for cartoons and wrestling, and my dad was sometimes in for the second part of that. But it was mid-afternoon, after the Charles Chips truck had come and gone and my dad had soaked his feet in the foot spa (I’m sure he didn’t call it a foot spa, but I think that’s what we’ll have to call it now), that the Professional Bowlers Aassociation Tour came on ABC, with Chris Schenkel and Nelson Burton Jr. handling the announcing duties and men in comfortable slacks and polo shirts throwing bowling balls down alleys and knocking down pins while rows of people sat behind them and cheered.
It was glorious.
Not glorious in a flashy way or in a way that would make you stop on ABC when you were flipping through channels and say, “I need to see this!” Actually, it was not glorious in any of the ways that a normal person would define something as glorious. So maybe it wasn’t really glorious at all.
Except it was.
Because I was watching it with my dad, and it was probably the first time I was watching something with him all week.
See, glorious.
And so the ordinary-looking men of the PBA became heroes because of the moment. Guys like Mark Roth, Johnny Petraglia, Del Ballard Jr., Mike Aulby, Marshall Holman, and Guppy Troup (who, to be fair, was not ordinary-looking) seemed to be doing something that I could do a lot easier than hitting a baseball (which I spent several years of little league proving I couldn’t do) but also seemed larger than life, like giants.
And in the years where my dad and I first started watching the PBA Tour, there was no giant larger than Earl Anthony, still widely considered one of the best bowlers of all time and on his way to becoming the first player to earn $1 million on tour when I first tuned in. He was smooth. Some of the players on the tour had a little flash in their game or injected some showmanship at the proper time, but Anthony was just always smooth and workmanlike. An outsider would probably label him boring. Stupid outsiders.
I can’t remember any of the details, but at some point after my dad and I began our Saturday-afternoon ritual, Earl Anthony came to Staten Island. I don’t know which alley it was (believe me, I’ve tried researching it) and though I’d have to assume my dad took me, I can’t be sure that was the case. But I do have a signed 8x10 from that day, and it might have been the first pro athlete autograph I ever got.
As you can see, it’s pretty banged up. It took me a while to learn how to properly care for autographs. But the bends and creases don’t make me love it any less. In fact, they kind of make me love it more.
I will forever associate Anthony with those Saturday afternoons with my dad, which partially explains why I decided it was worth walking through Buffalo with a mirror I found with Anthony’s likeness on it (a mirror advertising Kessler whiskey) in an antique store there. I worried about it surviving the train ride home, but it did just fine and has been on display in my apartment ever since.
And it also partially explains why when I found out Earl Anthony’s Dublin Bowl bowling alley was a short drive away from where my friend was getting married in California that I convinced another friend to go with me the morning of the wedding to roll a few games. I bought a pair of bowling shoes at the pro shop that day. I almost wore them to the wedding but I thought better of it.
I still have the shoes, though. I wear them whenever I go bowling. For Earl and my dad.
My dad taught me how to bowl. Or he tried. I was a little stubborn, and I think he wished I was a little more attentive to his instructions. I remember bowling with him at Ten Pin Lanes in Windham, New York, one summer and he was trying to get me to stop wildly hooking the ball every time I threw it. “Shake a hand” was his guidance for the follow-through, meaning that your hand should end up in a position where you can shake the hand of the imaginary person directly in front of you. I’m not sure it works for all types of bowlers, but for the two of us, who didn’t use much of a hook, it was pretty sound advice. But I wasn’t hearing it for a long time. Then finally I decided it made sense and started telling other people to “shake a hand” as if it was advice that I came up with. Kids.
Despite my dad’s best efforts, I’ve never gotten particularly great at bowling, but I’ve gotten decent enough that I don’t embarrass myself (most of the time). And, even when I’m having a bad game, I still enjoy the game. It also comes in handy as a means to take out aggression while not harming anyone. When I was unemployed for a year and a half (what a time!), I used to go down to my local bowling alley (Victory Lanes) after another cycle of rejection letters or just plain no responses and throw the ball as hard as I possibly could at the pins. My thumb would be blistered by the end, but I did not really care. It was just something that had to be done. One day, I was throwing the ball so hard that the little boy a few lanes over remarked loud enough for me to hear, “He must hate those pins.” A proud moment in my bowling/employment career.
By my count, I’ve bowled in 15 states (too low of a number for my liking, but I’ll work on it) and dropped a couple of 200 games out there, with a high of 227 at Asbury Lanes in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and a 200+ game that I’m forgetting the exact score of at the Bowlerama in Rutland, Vermont, as I was killing time before a concert. I’ve been to both locations of the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame (formerly in St. Louis, Missouri, and now in Arlington, Texas) and currently possess three bowling-centric record albums, not to mention the countless times I’ve sung along to recordings of “Grab Your Balls, We’re Going Bowling.” I have spent hours watching bowling clips on YouTube, from trick shot compilations to Ernie Schlegel’s spectacular display of poor sportsmanship. I’ve owned three bowling balls over the course of my life, and my favorite one was a red, white, and blue swirl ball that I bought at a yard sale. I assume the previous owner’s name was Georgia, because that’s what was inscribed on the ball, and I loved that ball so much. I rolled it until it literally started coming back in the ball return with chunks missing from it. It was a good ball. RIP Georgia.
I also consider one of the finest moments in my life to be the time I finally made it to the Holler House in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Holler House is home to the oldest sanctioned bowling alley in the United States (1908), two lanes in the basement of the bar. It had been a life goal of mine to bowl there ever since I first read about it, and that goal was finally reached in January 2019 in the middle of a particularly harsh cold spell in Milwaukee. Because the lanes require a manual pinsetter, you have to call in advance to make sure said pinsetter is available. And they are rightfully hesitant to call the pinsetter in when it’s just one person bowling. But I called up anyway, pleaded my case, and they told me to come in before another group came in and they’d squeeze me in. And so I did. All the members of the Skowronski family I met there (sadly, not including proprietor and all-around beloved local legend Marcy, who was not there that night and passed away later that year) were really kind, and when the pinsetter asked me when I was done if I wanted to sign the wall, I could have died right there (after signing, of course) and been happy. But I didn’t die (I did almost wipe out on a sheet of ice a few blocks away), which is good. And my name is on the wall at the Holler House, which is so great I don’t even know how to properly explain it.
And the journey to the Holler House all started on those Saturday afternoons with my dad watching ABC. This weekend marked the beginning of the PBA Tour season (on Fox/FS1 now, and usually on Sunday afternoons), which is what made me start thinking about why bowling is really my favorite sport. I’ve been a pretty consistent watcher of the PBA Tour over the years. I enjoy watching bowling on TV just as much as (if not more than) I like watching baseball and hockey, and I am genuinely excited when it comes time for a new season. I like seeing the familiar faces and the rookies, the Hall of Famers and those surely on their way. And I like that bowling, unlike my other two favorite sports, is a one-on-one battle (there is a team set-up occasionally that I don’t care for) that requires focus and precision to succeed.
But, of course, I like watching bowling on TV because it brings me back to the living room of a house I don’t live in anymore, where I’m sitting with a guy who isn’t around anymore. And it feels good to be brought back there. And to Columbian Lanes and Victory Lanes and Rab’s Bowling on the Green and Sunset Lanes and all the other bowling alleys that are no more. And to the childhood birthday parties. And to Friday-afternoon intramural bowling in high school. And to every good time I’ve had with a bowling ball and people I love and a sport (yes, a sport) that’s been pretty good to me.
Shake a hand, everybody.