Bowling is older than its rulebook and odder than its rental shoes. These stories run from a Roman-era lane in Egypt to pins on strings, by way of a Manhattan park rented for a peppercorn, a woman who beat her idol in 1927, hand-set pins in Antarctica and a perfect series the sport still will not count.
Every tile in a Bowling game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
History
nine stories
1A bowling lane from Roman-era Egypt
On the tile: Egyptian Lane2nd-3rd century AD
In 2007, Egyptologist Edda Bresciani of the University of Pisa described a find at Narmoutheos, in Egypt's Fayoum region: a room with a well-built limestone floor, a lane about 4 meters long, and two stone balls. The building dated from the second or third century AD. A square hole sat in the middle of the lane, with a sand-filled vase beneath it. Two players stood at opposite ends and threw at the same time, one aiming a small ball at the hole while the other most likely rolled a bigger ball to keep it out.
The story goes that Martin Luther decided how many pins bowlers should aim at. The United States Bowling Congress's history says bowling at pins probably began in ancient Germany as a religious ceremony rather than a sport, and that Luther is credited with settling on nine as the ideal number. The International Bowling Museum adds that German historian William Pehle dated bowling in his country to about AD 300. Neither account cites anything Luther wrote, so his nine is best treated as tradition. English, Dutch and German settlers later brought their own versions of the game to America.
New York City's oldest park began as a bargain. In 1733 the Common Council leased the ground where Broadway begins to three neighbors, John Chambers, Peter Bayard and Peter Jay, for one peppercorn a year, to be used as a bowling green. The lessees had to add grass, trees and a fence. In 1770 a gilded lead statue of King George III went up there. On July 9, 1776, after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence, angry citizens toppled it, and it was melted down for ammunition. The park's iron fence, installed in 1771, still stands.
When Henry Bowen built Roseland Cottage in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1846, his written specifications included a bowling alley of yellow pine planks set edgeways, leveled with a spirit level and planed smooth, with gutters and a channel to send the ball back. The lane is just over 53 feet long, about ten feet shorter than today's standard, and it went in five years after Connecticut outlawed ninepin lanes. The museum that runs the house says the alley is certainly not the first in the country, but it is the oldest one that remains.
In the 1800s even ball weights and pin sizes varied by region. A first try at order came in 1875, when nine New York and Brooklyn clubs met at Germania Hall in the Bowery, but New York bowlers kept feuding with everyone farther west. Restaurateur Joe Thum pulled the regional clubs together, and on September 9, 1895, at Beethoven Hall in New York City, they organized the American Bowling Congress. The smartest move came next: nearly 1,000 copies of the new rules went out by mail, and within months members joined from Boston to Kansas City and Quebec.
Photos show American women bowling as early as the 1880s. In 1915 Ellen Kelly formed the St. Louis Women's Bowling Association and started writing to proprietors, then to women across the country, urging them to organize. In the fall of 1916, with help from proprietor Dennis Sweeney, she staged a first national tournament in St. Louis: eight teams and a $225 prize fund. Afterward, 40 women from 11 cities met at Sweeney's Washington Recreation Parlor and formed the group that became the Women's International Bowling Congress. Its first president, Catherine Menne, had been bowling for at least 25 years.
When the National Negro Bowling Association was organized in Detroit in August 1939, Black bowlers could not join the American Bowling Congress or the Women's International Bowling Congress, because both had restrictive clauses in their constitutions. The new group set out to help Black bowlers develop their skills, and it held its first annual tournament in Cleveland that year. As Asian, Hispanic and Native American bowlers joined, it became The National Bowling Association in 1944. It fought for equality until the racial restrictions came out of both constitutions in 1950. It still exists, running tournaments of its own.
8The tournament that bowled on without prize money
On the tile: Bank Holiday1933
The American Bowling Congress's annual tournament was always a spectacle, and in some years of the 1920s and 1930s it was held on temporary lanes under a tent-like roof. In 1933 it was days from opening in Columbus, Ohio, when banks across the country began failing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's bank holiday then tied up all the prize money. The entrants came anyway and put on a competitive show for no cash at all. Seven years later, the 1940 tournament in Detroit drew 6,073 team entries and 100,000 spectators over 62 days.
In 1958 Eddie Elias, a lawyer from Akron, Ohio, founded the Professional Bowlers Association with 33 founding members. Its tour began in 1959 with three tournaments worth $49,500, and television came along at once with a show called Jackpot Bowling. In 1962 the Winter Tour finals went on ABC for the first time, and by 1963 the tour offered 38 tournaments worth $1,000,000. Elias kept dealing. In 1965 he landed the $100,000 Firestone Tournament of Champions in Akron, which the PBA called the biggest tournament in the history of the game.
Floretta McCutcheon did not learn to bowl until she was 35, and she modeled her game on the star Jimmy Smith. In 1927 she faced Smith himself. She won the first game 246 to 224, lost the second 256 to 234, and took the third 224 to 217 for a 704 to 697 victory, a win later recognized by Ripley's. She went on to tour the country giving exhibitions and clinics, rolled ten perfect games in ten years of exhibition play, and is estimated to have taught more than 250,000 people to bowl.
Andy Varipapa made bowling look like magic. He developed trick-shot bowling to its peak, starred in the first bowling film short, Strikes and Spares, in 1934, and made more such films than any other bowler. He was also one of the first bowlers to tour the nation giving exhibitions and lessons. His showmanship sometimes hid how well he could simply win. At 55 he won the All-Star tournament, and the following year he became the first bowler to repeat as All-Star champion. He also won two BPAA doubles titles with fellow Hall of Famer Lou Campi.
In the early 1940s, Marion Ladewig of Grand Rapids, Michigan, trained under instructor Joe Wilman. She recalled that he told her to cut down her backswing and shorten her approach. It worked. She won the first women's All-Star tournament in 1949, and the Bowling Writers Association of America named her Bowler of the Year nine times between 1950 and 1963. She won eight U.S. Women's Open titles, then called the All-Star, five of them in a row. In 1965 she retired after winning the World Invitational for a record fifth time.
In 1964 Don Carter signed a $1 million deal to promote Ebonite bowling balls. The International Bowling Museum calls it the largest sports endorsement deal of its time. Carter had the record to back it up. He was the first star to win the grand slam of bowling's match-game titles: the All-Star, the World's Invitational, the PBA National and the Masters. He also bowled for the Budweiser team of St. Louis that rolled a record 3,858 series in 1958. In a 1970 Bowling Magazine poll, he was voted the greatest bowler in history.
In 1975 Earl Anthony, rolling an orange Ebonite ball, became the first bowler to win more than $100,000 in a single season. Seven years later, at the 1982 PBA National Championship in Toledo, Ohio, he became the first professional bowler to pass $1 million in career earnings. He clinched the title with a strike on the second roll of his final frame, with 14 million viewers watching on television. Anthony won 43 PBA titles and six Bowler of the Year awards, and in 2008 he was voted the greatest player in PBA history.
Dick Weber's career was a lesson in staying power. At the 1955 National Championship, the Indianapolis native's right thumb swelled so much it would not fit in his ball, and he used thumb protectors afterward. In 1983 he won the PBA Senior Championship in St. Louis, his 27th career title and his fourth straight decade of titles. He said, "I think more than anything else, it means I'm an old man." The USBC Hall of Fame credits him with pro tournament wins in six decades. His son Pete also made both halls of fame.
On July 1, 1982, at La Habra Bowl in California, Glenn Allison rolled three straight perfect games for a 900 series. Approved, it would have been the first perfect series in history. But the American Bowling Congress inspected the lanes, found that their condition broke its rules, and refused to approve the score, and a federal court upheld that decision. The first sanctioned 900 came in 1997, from 20-year-old Nebraska student Jeremy Sonnenfeld. In 2014 the U.S. Bowling Congress reviewed Allison's case once more and declined to change the ruling, saying it could not rewrite history for one score.
In her fifth-grade yearbook, Kelly Kulick of Union, New Jersey, declared that she wanted to be a professional bowler. She had started at 6 in a Saturday morning league. In 2006 she became the first woman to earn a PBA Tour exemption. Then, in January 2010 in Las Vegas, she beat Chris Barnes 265 to 195 in the final of the Tournament of Champions and became the first woman to win a Professional Bowlers Association Tour title. It came in a major, which she said she had never imagined. The USBC Hall of Fame inducted her in 2019.
George Branham III grew up in Southern California watching Mark Roth bowl on television. In November 1986, making his own first TV appearance, he met Roth in the final of the Brunswick Memorial World Open in Glendale Heights, Illinois. He won 195 to 191 and became the first Black bowler to win a PBA Tour title. He had just turned 24. His father, an amateur league bowler, had started him in the game at 6 in Detroit. In 1993 he won the Tournament of Champions, the first Black bowler to take a major.
Early bowling balls were made of lignum vitae, a durable hardwood from trees native to the Caribbean and South America. Instead of a rubber core, they were nearly solid wood, with the two halves held together by wooden pegs. Rubber ended that. The first rubber ball, the Evertrue, arrived in 1905, and Brunswick soon promoted its Mineralite, selling bowlers on a mysterious rubber compound. Today's rules cap a tenpin ball at 16 pounds and, oddly, set no minimum weight at all.
For decades, pins were reset by hand by workers called pin boys. The 1930 American Bowling Congress tournament in Cleveland was the first to use pin-setting machines, and it still ran on hundreds of pin boys, foul men and scorers. Full automation came from American Machine and Foundry, which had bought the patents to Gottfried Schmidt's automatic pinspotter. After nearly a decade of experiments, AMF demonstrated its machine at the 1946 ABC tournament in Buffalo, New York, and production models reached bowling centers in 1952.
On November 8, 1967, Brunswick unveiled its Automatic Scorer at Village Lanes in Chicago, and a company vice president hailed it as a new era in bowling. It was billed as the sport's first major innovation since the automatic pinsetter. A computer tracked the score ball by ball and frame by frame and projected it on a screen above the lane. At the end of each game it printed a score sheet, either a souvenir of a good game or a reminder to practice. The American Bowling Congress approved it after a 2,000-game test.
Free-fall pinsetters leave the pins standing loose, knocked down with nothing attached. String pinsetters tie a cord to each pin and use it to haul the rack back up. Strings change how pins fly, so the U.S. Bowling Congress studied them for years and, starting August 1, 2023, certified string pin bowling as its own category of competition, with strings at least 54 inches long. In 2024 test events, the Professional Bowlers Association found players struck on 48.5 percent of shots, against 57.6 percent on its free-fall national tour.
The U.S. Bowling Congress tells a surprising origin story for bowling's most basic measurement. Its history describes ula maika, an ancient Polynesian game played with stone pins and balls, in which stones were rolled at targets 60 feet away, a distance it says is still one of the basic regulations of tenpins. The history offers no evidence tying the two games together, so treat the link as tradition. The measurement itself is exact: USBC specifications require 60 feet, plus or minus half an inch, from the foul line to the center of the headpin spot.
A regulation tenpin stands 15 inches tall and must weigh between 3 pounds 6 ounces and 3 pounds 10 ounces, and it takes a terrible pounding. In 1962 the American Bowling Congress approved the Magna-Pin for tournament use, the first synthetic pin it ever approved. It had a magnesium shell and a foam filling, all coated in plastic, and it was built to survive constant pummeling. That turned out to be the problem. The pins were expensive to make and bowling centers rarely needed replacements, so Magna Pin Corp. went out of business.
Thomas F. Ryan ran the Toronto Bowling Club, an elegant place with potted palms, ceiling fans and a string orchestra, and in 1905 he installed what Canada's five-pin association calls the country's first regulation tenpin lanes. His customers complained that the balls were too heavy and the game too strenuous. So Ryan had five tenpins whittled down on a lathe to about three-quarters of their size and rolled a hand-sized hard rubber ball at them. Five-pin bowling was born in 1909. A perfect game is 450, first rolled in Toronto in 1921 by Bill Bromfield.
Candlepin bowling was first played in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1880. Justin White, who bought a billiards and bowling hall there, is widely credited with its early days, and John J. Monsey helped standardize it. The skinny pins look like a row of candles from the end of the lane, and the ball has no finger holes. Each frame allows three balls, and knocked-down pins, called wood, can stay on the lane and topple standing ones. Even so, scores stay low: the highest recorded game is 245, rolled by Ralph Semb in 1984 and matched by Chris Sargent in 2011.
For years the accepted story was that duckpin bowling began in 1900 at Diamond Alleys, a Baltimore hall owned by John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson, two of the original Baltimore Orioles who would reach the Baseball Hall of Fame. Maryland's state archives dates duckpins in Baltimore to 1899 and notes that recent histories call the game a Massachusetts invention, as early as 1893. The difficulty is not in doubt: the pins and balls are small, the balls have no finger holes, and no perfect game has ever been recorded. Pete Signore Jr. came closest, with 279 in 1992.
In Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Rip climbs into the Catskill Mountains and hears long rolling peals like distant thunder. The noise turns out to be a company of odd-looking men in old-fashioned clothes, playing ninepins in grave silence. Rip drinks from their flagon, falls asleep and wakes 20 years later. The villagers explain that Hendrick Hudson and his crew keep watch in those mountains, and that summer thunder there is the sound of their game. The U.S. Bowling Congress calls Irving's tale, from about 1818, the earliest known reference to bowling at pins in America.
When Abraham Lincoln served in Congress, he and his family boarded at Mrs. Ann Sprigg's, across from the Capitol on land where the Library of Congress was later built. A bowling alley stood nearby, and Lincoln was very fond of bowling. Samuel C. Busey, a young medical student who took his meals at the boarding house, remembered him as "a very awkward bowler" who played with great zest and took victory and defeat with the same good humor. Whenever people knew he was at the alley, crowds gathered, expecting his jokes and stories.
In 1947 a two-lane bowling alley opened in the White House West Wing, and President Harry S. Truman made the first roll, knocking down seven pins. Truman was not much of a bowler, but that July he hosted three paraplegic World War II veterans who showed him how they bowled from their wheelchairs, and he told them to bowl as long as they liked. A White House Bowling League formed in 1950. The lanes later moved to what is now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, so Richard Nixon, an avid bowler, got a one-lane alley under the North Portico.
During the Antarctic winter of 1961, U.S. Navy Seabees installed a bowling alley at McMurdo Station. In 2000 the station newspaper described two lanes in the basement of Building 63, among the few manually set alleys left in the world, fitted with Brunswick B-10 pinsetting trays. Residents worked as pinsetters in their spare time for minimum wage and tips, bending and lifting in a cramped space, resetting as many as 400 pins an hour and dodging balls of 10 to 16 pounds. The alley was dismantled in 2009-2010 because of structural problems in the building.
Milwaukee's Holler House tavern turned 100 in 2008, and its basement still held a pair of lanes bowlers had used since before World War I. The Associated Press reported that the lanes were real wood, never replaced, and that pin boys still loaded the manual pin mechanism by hand and rolled balls back on rails between the lanes. If a customer tipped a pin boy poorly, 82-year-old owner Marcy Skowronski, all 4 feet 11 inches of her, would say so. A cleanup before the party turned up five old wooden balls with only two finger holes.
Before automatic pinsetters, pins were reset by hand by youngsters known as pin boys. They even turned up in jokes: in the late 1800s the famed stein maker Villeroy and Boch, also called Mettlach, made a bowling stein saying that even the finest throw is misdirected if it hits the pin boy. They had leverage, too: a pin boys' strike nearly derailed the 1917 American Bowling Congress tournament in Grand Rapids until two Toledo teams and other volunteers took over. By 1959 a veteran Nebraska pin boy conceded that machines had two advantages: they never got tired or temperamental.
By early 1962, bowling centers were operating in more than 50 countries, and Tokyo made a grand entrance. When Korakuen Stadium Lanes opened, its 62 fully automatic AMF lanes made it the largest bowling center outside the United States and the first fully automated commercial lanes in Japan. The opening was a show: actress Akemi Kita bowled a few frames, and Sachiko Parker, daughter of American actress Shirley MacLaine, picked up some technique. Japan soon had bowling stars of its own, including Kayoko Suda and Ritsuko Nakayama, who founded the Japan Ladies Bowling Club together.
Bowling filled hours of television, but a perfect game on the air was rare. The Professional Bowlers Association credits Jack Biondolillo with the first perfect game on live national television, at the 1967 Firestone Tournament of Champions. In 1985 True Value Hardware Stores offered $100,000 to any player who rolled a 300 during the Winter Tour. In 1987 Pete McCordic collected that award when he rolled the first 300 on national television in 13 years. A year later, Bob Benoit rolled the first perfect game in a championship match, beating Mark Roth 300 to 255.
Long before television, cartoonists used bowling to explain politics. During the 1868 presidential race, one cartoon showed Ulysses S. Grant bowling down his opponents, Horatio Seymour and Francis Blair. Around the Russian Revolution of 1905, a cartoon showed a Russian woman eyeing skittle pins drawn as ministers and politicians, some already knocked down, while she gripped a ball labeled Revolution. In 1907, with Theodore Roosevelt preparing to leave the White House after promising not to seek a third term, a cartoon showed him setting up the next strike for his protege, William Howard Taft.