The Lonely Game of Bowling

The shuttered Bowl-O-Mat in Beverly, MA

A special-needs teenage boy that I mentor recently took a liking to the sport of bowling after playing a few strings with his grandmother.  When he found out I was once a pretty good bowler, he invited me to tag along.

When people in New England mention bowling, there's a good chance they're talking about candlepin bowling.  This regional favorite features small balls and tall, thin pins which makes getting a strike far more challenging than ten pin bowling.  In fact, there has never been a perfect game in candlepin bowling.

In my teens, I was part of a bowling club and thanks to some lessons from my dad, had a fairly high average.  After a while, I stopped bowling on a regular basis because no one else wanted to go with me and the leagues in my town were made up of mostly old people.  Every once in a great while, I returned to the local bowling alley when a friend visiting from out of state was feeling nostalgic but the lanes were usually empty.  It was quite a departure from how popular the sport used to be at one time.

Candlepin bowling tournaments were a big deal here back in the day and some Boston television stations even had their own weekend bowling shows.  The current champion laments this loss of interest in the sport and says tournaments aren't even worth the effort now since the prize money is so low.  In the few bowling alleys that exist today, you can usually find yellowed newspaper clippings of bowling's heyday hanging on the walls.  The owners of these establishments have tried whatever they can to bring the crowds back like cosmic bowling, pool tables, arcades and kid's birthday parties but the results have been mixed.  During the spring of this year, the only bowling alley in my hometown closed its doors for good.

In many ways, the current state of candlepin bowling reminds me of the Catholic faith.  We fondly recall those glory days when parishes were packed on Sundays but over the years, the number of worshipers have significantly declined because religion no longer plays a central role in many people's lives.  Occasionally, gimmicks are trotted out to bring lapsed Catholics back to Mass but these efforts often fall short.  As churches and bowling alleys continue to close, some hope against hope that the pendulum will swing the other way while sharing their theories as to why such downturns happened in the first place.

After a couple of games with his grandmother, the teen I mentor wanted more practice to improve his score so he called me up to go bowling.  In the back of my mind, I wondered if there would be any eligible women there for me to strike up a conversation with.  The alley was surprisingly busy and I did catch a glimpse of some cute females in a few of the lanes.  Unfortunately, the owner assigned us to a lane located in the smaller private room that was mostly used for birthday parties.  To the left of us was a group of elderly men and to the right of us were a few mentally retarded people with their caregivers.  Just like that, my chance to meet a woman was cut short even before we started bowling.  Every now and then, I'd see a cute girl at the soda machine but then she'd quickly disappear behind the wall that separated the private lanes from the rest of the alley.  It was yet another reminder of the bad luck I've had over the years just meeting women.

Our next few visits to the alley were like my experiences at Mass: many old people and families with a sprinkling of young couples but no single women around my age to speak of.  Often times the only females in the alley were there just because their boyfriends wanted to go.  With the leagues on hiatus for the summer, it was not uncommon for us to be the only customers in the place.  The eerie silence intensified the noise coming from the automatic pin setters.  When the owner of the bowling alley closed the place early just as we entered the parking lot, we decided to try another alley in the next town over.  Their prices were much more reasonable so we decided to make it our new home for candlepin bowling.  While the crowds there were somewhat larger, my earlier observations about the type of people who go bowling still held true.  In the autumn, the leagues returned and we were struck by how many grossly overweight “red neck” types filled their ranks.  Of course, this is a sport where you can sit down to enjoy fried food, pizza and beer during game play.

Lately, the teen that I mentor has been busy on the weekends so sometimes I go bowling alone and one of two things happen.  Either a loud and obnoxious group of people will be assigned to the lanes next to me or no one will.  There never seems to be a happy medium and candlepin bowling continues to be one more enjoyable thing in life that also brings with it a certain amount of isolation.