I told myself it was a matter of gaining “tournament experience.” The bowling coach in my head was barking encouragement. Get out there and compete. You miss every shot you don’t take. You think you’re a good bowler? How well can you bowl when there’s money on the line? But by now, after a couple decades of trying, I have low expectations. I’m an underachiever under pressure. I’ve bowled poorly in every tournament I’ve ever entered. This one would be the same.
It was the first day of March, and I was driving two hours north to Vermont from my home in Massachusetts to take part in the fifty-second annual Green Mountain Open. By the time I got to the Rutland Bowlerama, the sleet had turned to spitting snow. Getting out of my car, I took a moment to admire the vintage sign that beckons to drivers along this commercial strip: four jumbo colored letters that spell bowl, with the O in the shape of a black bowling ball. I wheeled my ball caddy into the Bowlerama. It carries my best strike ball, a fifteen-pound Hammer Black Widow, and two fourteen-pound balls I use for spares.
Inside, the noon squads were in full swing. The roll and the clatter. To me, the place looked like the perfect bowling center: traditional but modern, with thirty-two well-lit lanes. Buzzing with activity. My usual pre-bowling mood—why am I doing this?—instantly changed to this is exactly where I want to be. I sized up the bowlers. Men and women of all styles, mostly middle-aged or older. There were five-person teams down toward one end and doubles teams filling up most of the rest of the lanes. I was set to bowl in the singles competition at 2:30 p.m. I noticed a banner above the pins in the middle lanes commemorating a rare event: a local bowler named Jon Wilbur rolled a 900 series here on January 14, 2019. That’s the pinnacle of bowling: three consecutive 300 games, which means thirty-six strikes in a row. There are only forty bowlers in America who have achieved that feat in the last three decades, according to the United States Bowling Congress (USBC), which maintains records and sets the rules for league bowling and tournaments.
I headed down to the office marked “Tournament Director” and introduced myself to presiding honcho Tom Smyrski. Yes, he had received the entry form I’d faxed to him in February; all that was left now was paying the $36 fee and getting my lane assignment. Reentries were allowed, meaning if I didn’t like the result of my three games, I could pay another $36 and bowl again in the 4:30 p.m. slot. For that matter, I could come back later in the season; the tournament ran on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays all the way through May 4. The prize fund, assuming this year’s number of entries would be similar to last year’s, was estimated to be around $60,000. That gets divided up between a lot of winners and strong finishers. Let’s just say if I’d happened to get an extremely hot hand and notched the highest score in the singles category—and nobody from then until May topped it—I could have walked away with about $2,000.
I did not register such a score, of course. In fact, I bowled below my regular league average in the first two games and only managed a ho-hum 197 in the third. Alternating between two lanes, as one does in competitive play, I bowled with three gentlemen from Connecticut. They introduced themselves. I remarked to the one named Lou Weber that he had a good name for a bowler; Dick Weber was one of the greatest bowlers in the sport’s heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. His son Pete Weber is perhaps the most famous pro bowler in America today, known to even non-bowlers because of the viral video of the time he won a tournament with a clutch strike in his final shot. Pumping his fist and gesticulating wildly, Weber turned toward a young fan he thought was rooting against him and shouted the now-immortal koan, “Who do you think you are? I am!” Lou Weber laughed and said he wished he was from that Weber family.
The number of bowling centers in the United States, which peaked at about twelve thousand in the mid-1960s, has been steadily falling for four decades.
As I struggled to find a good shot, I glanced up at the monitor a couple lanes to my right and noticed that a woman named Darlene, looking like she had just walked off the set of Laverne and Shirley, was hitting all her spares and closed out with six straight strikes. This is what is called for in tournament play: you have to be touched by an angel. You’ve got to be in the zone. You have to bowl above your usual capabilities—in all three games. One of the men on our lane, Charlie Laskowski, reeled off six strikes and recorded a 247 in his second game. But he dropped to 156 in the third. Lou Weber threw three solid games above 220 and finished three pins short of a 700 series. At the end of the tournament’s first weekend, he was in first place in the singles category. I thought, Enjoy it while it lasts! The top bowlers tend to hang back and swoop in later when they’ve gauged what they’re up against. Last year’s winner broke 800.
When our round was over, I learned that Laskowski was the organizer of thirty-one bowlers who drove up from Connecticut. Many of them made a weekend out of it, skiing and bowling. He’s got an arthritic knee and hip, he told me, which limits his time on the slopes. He was limping while bowling, and by the third game, the stiffness seemed to catch up with him. Stocky and sixtyish, you wouldn’t take Laskowski for an athlete. But he knows what to do with a bowling ball, how to release it, where to put it on the lane. Even in professional bowling, the styles of delivery vary wildly; some bowlers are graceful and fluid, others are herky-jerky. The canny bowlers know how their ball will react to the oil on the lane, and they know what combination of velocity and spin will get it to hit the pins just right. But the lane conditions are always changing. What worked last week may not work next week. Even as a tournament is in progress, the oil gets streaky or dries up in spots. What worked for a game or two might not keep working. Experienced bowlers know how to adjust.
To be a bowler is to be at war with change. You feel it in the moment as you are bowling. But you also feel it whenever industry leaders talk about the need to “evolve.” You worry about looming transitions, as the bowling business struggles to adapt to the times. In my brief conversation with Laskowski, it became clear that this tournament, at this mostly unchanged place, is an annual ritual, a refuge. He told me something that impressed me as much as his ability to hit 247 while hobbled: this was his forty-fourth year bowling in the Green Mountain Open.
Pin City
Bowling is an old sport—ancient, really—but it’s not easy to maintain traditions like Laskowski’s long-running Vermont pilgrimage. There’s a lot of churn in the bowling world; alleys go out of business all the time. I bowled in leagues for several years at a venerable old heap just outside of Boston. Opened in 1942 and originally called the Turnpike Bowladrome (for its location on the Concord Turnpike in Cambridge), it had one level devoted to candlepin bowling, a once-popular New England variant, and an upper floor for regular tenpin. I met people in the leagues with whom I would otherwise never have rubbed shoulders: a genial postal worker with noticeably less genial political views; a retired military man who also ran the nearby Air Force base’s bowling alley; and a Thai immigrant who told me he developed his technique by watching YouTube videos—he delivered the ball with a precise, balletic style. I even got to know the mechanic who fixed the automatic pinsetters and ran the machine that oiled the lanes. But developers had been eyeing the land for years, and finally, in its seventy-fifth year, the place then called Lanes & Games fell to the wrecking ball, replaced by a “luxury” apartment complex.
Most longtime bowlers can tell a similar story. Their home lanes were sitting on land too valuable to justify its use as a bowling alley. Or their family-owned center had no one to maintain the business. Or there just weren’t as many regulars as there used to be. It’s been said that the industry overbuilt when the development of automatic pinsetters in the 1940s led to a bowling boom in the 1950s and 1960s. Bowling leagues were especially popular in the industrial Midwest, where factory workers could bowl and drink beer after a shift. Budweiser sponsored a team in 1954 that launched bowlers Dick Weber and Don Carter to fame. Four years later, the Professional Bowlers Association was founded in Akron, Ohio, giving superstars like Weber, Carter, and the dominant left-hander Earl Anthony the chance to go on tour and make a good living.
But the number of bowling centers in the United States, which peaked at about twelve thousand in the mid-1960s, has been steadily falling for four decades. The number was down to about 3,800 in 2023, according to the USBC. Political scientist Robert D. Putnam famously cited the decline of league bowling in his 2000 book Bowling Alone as one of many indicators that civic engagement was collapsing across America, noting that league bowling declined by 40 percent between 1980 and 1993. The updated figure is even more dramatic: from a high of about 9.8 million league bowlers at the end of the 1970s, the number of USBC members in leagues for the 2022–23 season was 1.09 million. That’s a decline of 89 percent.
When I started to bowl, the tired old 1976 hit “More Than a Feeling” assaulted my ears.
Despite his book’s title, Putnam’s discussion of bowling takes up about four pages in a five-hundred-page tome. It occurs in a chapter about “informal social connections.” After documenting dwindling participation in political and civic groups, as well as falling membership in unions and attendance at religious services, he notes that fewer people are playing cards, having dinner with friends, and going on picnics. In fact, he points out, bowling was one of the only sports that hadn’t seen major declines in overall participation in recent decades. But he saw the drop-off in league bowling specifically as worrisome. “By requiring regular participation with a diverse set of acquaintances,” he writes, it represents “a form of sustained social capital that is not matched by an occasional pickup game.”
It’s true that bowling with a diverse group of acquaintances—as I do in my current league—can widen one’s horizons. But the distinction Putnam makes between league bowlers and those he sees as “bowling alone” is one he conjured from statistics rather than from immersion in actual bowling culture. There’s not always a clear line: for several years, I met for regular Sunday morning bowling with a couple of close friends, and a wider circle of their friends. We named our informal league and kept stats. That variety of “recreational league,” which doesn’t register with the USBC, exists in bowling centers around the country. Often based on strong bonds rather than weak ones, it would also be an important form of social capital, though harder to quantify. Even the aspersions cast on the solitary bowler make no sense to a regular bowler if taken literally. The people we see bowling solo are inevitably there for practice because they are in a league.
Putnam’s contention, though, was that something vast had shifted in the culture. He noticed that while participation in most sports had dropped in recent decades, people were spending more time and money watching athletic events. Television and other electronic media were keeping people in their homes, he argued. His conclusion is even harder to refute today, when so many people are living virtual lives. And he’s not wrong that bowling leagues don’t fit into people’s lives the way they did at the middle of the last century.
Yet the decline in league bowling wasn’t just because people turned into couch potatoes. The disappearance of factory jobs, which gave working life regular and reliable rhythms, was bad for a lot of urban bowling alleys. Historian Andrew Hurley has noted that before World War II many industrial firms sponsored bowling teams for their workers, with some of the largest plants supporting as many as two hundred teams. “In heavily industrialized cities where many factories operated around the clock,” Hurley wrote, “it was not uncommon to find alleys hosting leagues on three separate shifts during weekdays.” The gradual deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s took away these core customers and created a vicious cycle. The consolidation of the bowling business made it harder for bowlers to stay in a league: when a neighborhood bowling center closes, league bowlers are left high and dry. Many of the people I bowled with at our now-demolished center haven’t quit occasional bowling, but the loss of the local lanes ended their league participation.
More so than with most other sports, bowlers exist in a relentlessly commercial arena. If you want to practice tennis or basketball, you can go out to a public court. Stay all day if you want; no charge. If you want to get better at throwing a baseball or football, all you need is an open space and someone to practice with. But outside of competitive collegiate bowling and the active practice of the sport on military bases, bowlers depend on proprietors, who need to sustain a capital-intensive business. When factory-sponsored leagues declined, the bowling industry embarked on a ceaseless campaign to find new customers, often alienating the older ones in the process. Do proprietors want to run a center for serious bowlers? Or do they want a recreation center with rock-climbing walls and minigolf, blacklight bowling, and “family fun”?
I asked Tom Smyrski at the Rutland Bowlerama, who is now in his twenty-eighth year running the Green Mountain tournament, whether participation has fallen off. He looked at a bunch of sheets posted on his office wall. Entries peaked most recently in 2016, but when the pandemic hit in 2020, the tournament had to shut down early—and was cancelled for 2021. Now the numbers are slowly recovering; when we met, Smyrski expected about 1,200 people to bowl in the GMO this year. But youth participation at the Bowlerama is not what it used to be. “We used to fill this place up with kids,” Smyrski told me. Not so much anymore. “I think bowling is going downhill,” he said.
Bowling has been going downhill for a long time. Still, the outlook isn’t uniformly grim. On the very day I was bowling in Rutland, the USBC’s annual nationwide Open Championship for league bowlers kicked off in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (It runs through July.) The USBC claims that the Open Championship is “the world’s largest annual participatory sporting event, attracting 45,000 to 75,000 participants.”
More than fifty million Americans bowl at least once during the year, according to the most recent survey of American sports participation by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA). Bowling outranks golf, tennis, basketball, yoga—just about all fitness activities, other than hiking, running, and walking. It’s even ahead of pickleball, the fastest-growing sport, now at nearly twenty million players. It’s true that the majority of occasional bowlers are just out to chuck a ball down a lane. But with more than a million league bowlers around the nation—and over eight million people considered by SFIA to be “core participants,” defined as bowling at least thirteen times a year—the trade in high-end bowling balls, shoes, and other equipment is strong. And as long as alleys find ways to draw new customers, there will always be those who start trying to figure out how to get good. (One way is to buy a better bowling ball.) Some will get sucked in, start competing regularly, and end up hooked on the most popular declining sport in America.
Grab Your Balls
The first thing Tom Smyrski told me in Rutland was that the Bowlerama was “a family-owned operation.” The center was opened in 1956 by Guido and Clementine Forte. Their sons Guido and Clement kept it going, and it is run today by three of their sons, the third generation of Fortes. That’s the business model that is now in jeopardy. What’s taking over, naturally, is big corporate chain ownership. Take Bowlero Corp., which has been buying up independent bowling alleys, often those that haven’t seen any new investment since the 1980s, and renovating them with the signature Bowlero look: vaguely retro but full of neon lights and thumping music for a more clubbish atmosphere. The company has bought out family businesses and small to mid-sized chains such as Lucky Strike, AMF, and Brunswick Zone. With more than three hundred locations, and plans to grow to about seven hundred, Bowlero is now the largest bowling chain in the world. By the end of 2024, the company had rebranded as Lucky Strike Entertainment, signaling their plans to expand beyond bowling into the operation of family entertainment centers and water parks.
In a widely discussed investigation last year for The Lever, journalist Amos Barshad found that Bowlero’s boom was enabled by private equity groups like Apollo Global Management and Atairos. “As the company has expanded,” he wrote, “it has amassed massive debts, all while successfully enriching its founder and CEO.” Barshad included comments made by that CEO, Tom Shannon, that have not endeared him to the community of hardcore bowlers: “‘I don’t think anyone takes bowling seriously,’ he once said. ‘Why would you?’” Shannon had entered the business in the late 1990s with the purchase of the Bowlmor center in Manhattan’s Union Square. As he expanded under the Bowlmor and later the Bowlero and Lucky Strike brands, he pursued a vision to make bowling a more “upscale” part of the urban nightlife scene. He made his famous comment about the unserious and “ironic” side of bowling in a 2011 interview with Bloomberg Enterprise. He later clarified that the statement “was made in the context of ‘our’ bowlers, and Bowlmor customers don’t take the game seriously.”
Where were the bowling proprietors forging their own way, looking for a promising path for traditional bowling outside the Bowlero juggernaut?
By 2013, Bowlmor had absorbed AMF, and Shannon’s new company ran 264 U.S. bowling centers and eight in Mexico. His strategy all along has been to downplay league bowling. In an interview with Bowlers Journal International in 2014, he reasoned, “More people go out on a Saturday than on a Tuesday.” You didn’t have to read between the lines to see that he considered weeknight league bowling a relic of the past. Bowlero’s purchase of the Professional Bowlers Association in 2019 caused even greater alarm. Shannon likes to go on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money to talk up his company’s share prices; he once again alienated bowlers when he suggested his interest in the PBA was mainly “as an infomercial” for the Bowlero brand. Earlier this spring, bowling fans worried that Bowlero would bring an end to the moderate success the PBA has found in broadcasting its events on Fox in recent years: the contract with Fox was set to expire in June, and according to PBA commissioner Tom Clark, negotiations for renewal were ongoing.
Meanwhile, purists lament a new trend dovetailing with the consolidation of the bowling industry. Several equipment companies are pushing a labor-saving innovation for proprietors called stringpins. Their sales pitch is that the automatic pinsetters of yesteryear, heavy equipment with thousands of parts, are too cumbersome and expensive; they require constant maintenance, which means having skilled mechanics on staff. The solution is a new simplified pinsetter, in which the ten pins have black nylon cords attached. The pins fall and are pulled up by the cords and reset. One of the selling points is that you can lay off the mechanics; another is that stringpin setters use much less electricity.
I recall reading about stringpins back in 2012. A Kansas City firm called White Hutchinson, which advises companies in “location-based leisure & entertainment,” produced a report called It’s time to reinvent the game of bowling. Their idea was to move away from the heavy bowling balls some customers found “intimidating” and to revive duckpin bowling, which uses short, squat pins and a smaller ball. The problem was that no company was manufacturing pinsetters for the declining game of duckpins. White Hutchinson noted that stringpin setters have been around since 1963 and are in use around the world. So, combine the game of duckpins with stringpin setters, and you have the future of bowling! It sounded ludicrous. I had never been to a duckpins alley; though there are a few in New England, they’re mostly concentrated in Maryland. And I assumed no real bowling alleys would want to fiddle around with cords. I was wrong. The Los Angeles Times reported two years ago that alleys nationwide, including six of Bowlero’s two dozen centers in Southern California, were ditching traditional pinsetters. Both of the Boston-area centers I resorted to after the 2017 demise of Lanes & Games have recently converted.
It’s likely that the industry’s “innovations” won’t make any difference to the families who take the kids to the lanes for a birthday party or to the Saturday night crowd. But they cause many active bowlers to worry about the end of the sport as they know it. I used to bowl with a transplanted Midwesterner who refused to recognize candlepin bowling or duckpins as real bowling. A while ago, he drove to one of our occasional back-up centers called Boston Bowl, known for staying open late and offering both candlepin and tenpin. After a few frames at the tenpin end, he realized to his horror that he was rolling the ball at pins on strings. He left quickly, never to return. Nor has he patronized Town Line Ten Pin, in nearby Malden. Town Line became Town Line Luxury Lanes a few years ago, adding leather seats and going for a more upscale vibe. Now it’s also a stringpin center.
In the interest of journalistic inquiry, I decided I would make a February road trip to take in some of the latest developments. I dropped in on a Bowlero in the old mill town of Lowell and then drove to Town Line. It was a Sunday afternoon, the worst time to go. The Bowlero was noisy and crowded, with the lights dim and the music loud. When I started to bowl, the tired old 1976 hit “More Than a Feeling” assaulted my ears. I was bowling next to an elderly man—yes, bowling alone—who competes in two senior leagues during the week. He assured me that during the weekdays, the lights are up, and the music is off. To its credit, the center hasn’t given up on leagues. The attendant told me that local league bowlers who come to practice get a discount, plus eight free games a week. For the rest of us, it’s pricey. I paid $42.45 for five games. That’s the Bowlero model: raise prices and cut costs.
It’s the same formula at Town Line in Malden. I bowled three games ($28), trying to discern what felt different when the pins are on cords. There were a few times a corner pin fell over when I’m pretty sure it hadn’t been grazed by another pin. But for the most part, the companies have worked diligently to make the change unnoticeable to the recreational bowler, designing the system so that the cords are almost invisible. After the ball hits, a dark partition drops down to hide the puppetry.
Still, I wouldn’t return, even if I lived in Malden. Someone had mentioned that the owner of Town Line has had many business interests, including a trailer park and a nightclub. When I got home, I looked him up. A banner on his Facebook page depicts the president with his fist raised (fight, fight, fight) and a billboard that says pray for trump. He also turned up in the Boston Herald in a story from 2018: his sixty-eight-year-old father, described as “the wealthy patriarch of a North Shore business dynasty,” had tried to run him down with an SUV in the Town Line parking lot. The son was reported to have suffered chest and arm injuries. Turns out the elder had accused his scion of stealing $2 million, and the son was suing his father for breach of contract and “fraudulent misrepresentation.” Family fun at the luxury lanes!
Bowling League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Hijinks like the parking lot assault at Town Line are a reminder of bowling’s ambiguous place in American life. In the early decades of the last century, bowling alleys were seedy places, often in underground establishments devoted to tobacco and gambling. Boris Karloff is shot in a bowling alley in the 1932 movie Scarface, not the last time bowling would figure in film noir. But then, in the post-World War II era, bowling centers opened up in suburban areas and marketed themselves as family friendly. It’s these contradictory registers that 1998’s The Big Lebowski revels in. As literature and film professor Bradley D. Clissold of Memorial University in Newfoundland wrote several years ago, Lebowski’s Hollywood Star Lanes is “decidedly no PG-13 bowling alley. Patrons liberally curse, smoke, and drink alcohol”—not to mention that “one of the regular league bowlers is a known convicted pedophile.” (The vintage Hollywood Star Lanes, where Lebowski was filmed, opened in 1960 but hasn’t survived: it was demolished in 2002.)
It remained a heavy drinking crowd, Mitchell admits, recounting that the first time they brought PBA bowlers in, things got so wild that some pros ended up bowling barefoot or shirtless.
Perfidy, however, was not what I was looking for on my February excursions. What I had in mind was someone who ran a bowling alley as if they liked traditional bowling. Where were the bowling proprietors forging their own way, looking for a promising path for traditional bowling outside the Bowlero juggernaut? Who see a future that doesn’t envision duckpins on strings or otherwise turning bowling into a carnival game? For that, I traveled to Bayside Bowl in Portland, Maine, having heard the center was drawing league bowlers from far and wide. Something of a phenomenon in the bowling world, Bayside opened in 2010 with twelve lanes in an old warehouse in a neglected part of the city. It expanded to twenty lanes in 2016. Along the way, it attracted the interest of the PBA, which brought televised events to the center, where an avid fan base created a new kind of “electric” atmosphere that at first unsettled pro bowlers used to a more sedate environment.
Bayside is unlike any other alley I know. The aesthetic is industrial but modern. It is airy, with natural light and better food and music than in the old-style centers. Nor does it create the overstimulating, neon-lit pandemonium of the modern chains. I wanted to know how this place became so popular while bucking the industry trends that are ruining the experience for so many of us. I set up an appointment with the owner, Charlie Mitchell. Mitchell, a Maine native, had previously lived in New Orleans, where he bowled at the legendary Rock’n’Bowl, known for its live music. Later, he worked as a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., before moving back to Maine in 2007. Wanting to recreate the camaraderie he found down South and then in a softball league he joined while in Washington, Mitchell and some friends formed a bowling league at a local Portland center. It grew fast and attracted a beer-drinking, fun-loving crowd—and a waiting list for those who wanted to join. But he sensed the old-timers looking askance at the new blood.
One member of the league was Justin Alfond, whose family had owned the Dexter Shoe Company, specializing in, among other things, bowling shoes. Mitchell and Alfond had both served in the Maine legislature, where Alfond eventually became the Senate president. The two of them decided to open their own place, where they were free to create a newer, less staid style. That meant better music and better beer, but also bowling leagues that could become central to the business. The original twelve-lane center opened to a strong clientele; the active league that had formed across town took up at Bayside. It remained a heavy drinking crowd, Mitchell admits, recounting that the first time they brought PBA bowlers in—a non-televised event—things got so wild that some pros ended up bowling barefoot or shirtless.
In 2020, Mitchell became the sole owner. “Everything here is designed around treating bowling like a sport,” he said. Somehow, he has managed to appeal to recreational bowlers, casual league bowlers, and serious bowlers at the top of their game. It wasn’t by accident, Mitchell said. He traveled the country looking at successful bowling centers. He revisited New Orleans, went to Garage Billiards and Bowl in Seattle—now also absorbed by Big Bowlero—and Brooklyn Bowl in New York. His instinct was that a youngish affluent crowd in Portland would respond to something that featured live music, good food and drink, and that could even host weddings. But their success was also built on the networks from Mitchell’s days with an active league. They drew on what Putnam would identify as social capital.
Mitchell’s latest initiative was to replicate the Bayside model in a second location. A rival bowling alley made a go of it in South Portland but was hit hard by the pandemic. The pinsetting machines were not well maintained, resulting in a lot of breakdowns. The ownership didn’t seem to care about bowling, Mitchell said. So he bought the place and refurbished it in the style of Bayside. It’s now an appealing ten-lane center called Broadway Bowl that looks out over the Fore River. Yet, he conceded, “we’ve had a little bit more of a challenge than we thought, developing a bowling culture over there.” South Portland, he said, is more working class than the central city, and there was no built-in league base to bolster Broadway Bowl. As I rolled a few games, then ordered a sandwich and tater tots for lunch, I saw another obvious factor: though slightly cheaper than Bayside, it’s not an inexpensive outing.
After we spoke at Bayside, Mitchell took me behind the pindecks where we got the rearview of the early 1960s vintage Brunswick pinsetters. He employs one of the best mechanics in the area, he said, and is too much of a traditionalist to consider a stringpin conversion, but he understands the pressures pulling that way, especially the energy savings. Eventually, he predicted, most big commercial centers will make the transition. The Bayside style may survive in a few cities where iconoclastic proprietors can tap into an affluent base and create new enthusiasm for league bowling. Meanwhile, in bowling strongholds like Michigan and Wisconsin, the small-time centers that have kept bowling affordable by avoiding the glitz will keep getting visits from the stringpin salesmen and perhaps eventually field an offer from the Bowlero division of Lucky Strike Entertainment.
Ducky Strikes
And now, a final twist. On the way home from Portland, I was heading right toward one of only two surviving duckpin centers in Massachusetts. It’s located in North Chelmsford just across the Merrimack River from the Bowlero in Lowell. The pin gods were leading me to believe I had come to that moment in life when it was time to give duckpin bowling a try. I’d bowled candlepins before and was blasé about it. But duckpins turned out to be surprisingly fun.
The pin gods were leading me to believe it was time to give duckpin bowling a try.
Having set out to explore the future of bowling, I ended up spending a glorious hour with its past. North Chelmsford Lanes is a tiny subterranean grotto with six lanes. It’s run by Ron Hennessey and his wife, Robin. Hennessey, who is sixty-five, bought it a few years ago from John DePalma, a top-level duckpin bowler who had operated it since 1974. He told me there used to be eight duckpin centers just in the Lowell area alone. This one has been in business since 1943. The current pinsetters are the same ones that were installed in 1959; Hennessy is the sole mechanic. “I call this place a bowling alley frozen in time,” he said, and you can see why.
Hennessey put a ball in my hand. It was the size of a bocce ball, slightly larger than the one used in candlepin bowling. He showed me how to use the score sheet, going down the column vertically instead of across the page. As in candlepin, you get three shots per frame. But you press a button to sweep away the “deadwood” between shots. The pins are shapely like regular pins but short and squat. They tend to fly up and scatter like ducks hearing a shotgun, hence the name.
I rolled a game and registered seventy-six. It seemed almost impossible to get strikes, and difficult to get spares. Nobody’s ever rolled a perfect game in duckpins or in candlepins. Hennessey walked me down the old wooden lane, which has no sheen of oil. The pinsetters were straight out of the industrial age, all visible levers and gears. It was thrilling to see them up close, to imagine these same machines working as designed, week after week, now in their sixty-sixth year.
Hennessey coached me through a second game, keeping score. I started hitting a few spares and managed to break one hundred. There were four women on lanes one and two, practicing. They’re in a weeknight league. They called my attention to a letterboard on the wall that listed a couple of them in the “Women’s 300 Club.” It took a moment to register, but I realized that meant three straight games above a hundred. Hennessey pointed out a few scoresheets posted on the entryway wall, showing bowlers who’ve broken two hundred. The lines showed spares all the way down, with a few strikes mixed in.
I could imagine trying to get good at this. If I someday end up with arthritic knees or hips, this game would be less taxing on my joints. Too bad I’ve discovered duckpins just as it’s dying out. Could I have been a contender? The spell broke on the way home. I started pondering once again my difficulty in tenpin tournaments. It’s not impossible to solve; I just need more practice. If I could round up a few teammates by this time next year, I’d like to bowl again in the Green Mountain Open, this time in the team events, the doubles, and the singles. After that, we could make the trip to Reno for the 2026 USBC Open. I want the tournament experience while I’m still able to hoist a fifteen-pound ball. And while bowling is still bowling.