Steve Brownlee

Without high school bowling, U.S. Bowling Congress honor scores or information about the Marquette County Bowling Hall of Fame, I thought about offering some insight on technical information about the game today.

Then I realized I haven’t been keeping up with all the new balls coming out, which you’d have to probably take the equivalent of a three- or four-credit class at Northern Michigan University to keep up with.

On a casual search, I found Bowling This Month magazine started 20 reviews of balls on its website, and that may very well be the number of new balls that have come out already this year — or maybe in just the past month, as the title of its periodical suggests.

So instead, I thought I’d reminisce about some of the changes that stick out most to me as I approach my 45th anniversary in this sport.

I started when I was 11 years old in early 1973, then joined my first league that fall, so actually I’ve got a full year before I hit 45 years.

Way at the start, wooden balls were the only choice. That’s way, way before my time, however.

Not too long before I started, though, just about all bowling balls were made of rubber and in one way were a lot like the Model T’s produced by Ford Motor Co. — Henry Ford told people that you can have any color you want as long as it was black.

In the early ’70s, what we called plastic balls came in vogue, really they were polyester. Balls like the Columbia White Dot and Yellow Dot were considered the latest and greatest, displacing the Johnny Petraglia LT-48 rubber ball as the one to have.

Nobody was playing around with design of the cores of balls, at least not in the way they do today with odd-shaped centers that naturally keep the ball off-balance and allow it to hook more.

There were other ways people tried to get balls to hook more. Some guys would leave a ball in a pail of water for days or weeks at a time to get it to soften, prompting the American Bowling Congress to pass rules on minimum hardness. I saw a few “soakers” and the outer surface would actually give under the pressure of your finger.

Others drilled a hole all the way through the ball and put a tube with a liquid like mercury to get it to slosh around and make the ball hook more at the end — patently illegal, and it sounds pretty dangerous too.

Then urethane came along in the early ’80s, right around the time of “short oil” — having the oil machine only travel 24 feet down the lane, or after the first year, 26 feet — and the first big explosion of award scores occurred.

There was a curious ball on the market — the Ultra Angle — with a dynamic core like balls have today, and I heard all kinds of horror stories about hardly anyone knowing how to drill it to take advantage of its properties.

I think the ball manufacturers kept working on these cores, and around the time they perfected how to drill them was around the advent of reactive resin in the early ’90s.

It’s a specialized type of urethane that doesn’t react to the oil on the lane, making a ball go straighter through the heads — the beginning part of a lane — and saving its reacting, or hooking, to the part of the lane with less oil, the back end near the pins. That’s just what everyone wanted their balls to do.

“Particle” resin was another specialization a few years later, which just heightened the resin features to hook more and later. The problem was the balls had to be carefully taken care of in order for the “particles” on the ball surface to react correctly.

You can still buy polyester balls, which are basically sold as balls for straight-throwing spares, for kids and for entry-level bowlers, since they’re cheaper.

Urethane balls are now rather limited in availability, and I know a few guys in Marquette and Ishpeming that have tried them out as a way to cut down on the radical hook on their balls to what I understand is mixed success.

Each evolution was meant to sell more balls to the vast masses of bowlers as a way to shoot higher scores.

While scores overall and certainly 300 games and 800 series have skyrocketed, in some ways it seems the latest generation of balls has leveled the playing field for those who can’t throw hard and rip the cover off the ball with the “spin,” or revolutions they can impart on the ball.

The downside is it takes lots of knowledge and almost certainly a fair amount of money to invest in balls to really take advantage if you want to be elite.

Information compiled by Journal Sports Editor Steve Brownlee. His email address is sbrownlee@miningjournal.net.