Bowling comes downtown
From the National Post (September 23, 2000)
with files from Robert Elliott

Why does the centre of the universe lack a centrally located bowling alley?

Edmonton, Vancouver and even Winnipeg and Halifax have bowling alleys in their downtown core, while Toronto does not. Our so-called Entertainment District is filled with dance clubs and singles bars but lacks lanes and balls -- and the last thing anyone's picking up is a spare.

Yet various cultural barometers indicate bowling will soon be red hot. Nouveau bowlers will be pleased to know that downtown Toronto is slated for at least one, and perhaps two such facilities.

The first will reside in the entertainment complex to be known as Metropolis, now under construction at Yonge and Dundas streets.

"Automatic scorekeeping and state-of-the-art bowling lanes, good aesthetics, lighting, music in the background and a waitress to bring me a Coke and chicken wings," says an enthusiastic Keith Travis, spokesman for developer PenEquity, as he describes the ebonite utopia that will open in the fall of 2002.

The other alley will be housed in the redeveloped Maple Leaf Gardens. Trivia sticklers would be accurate in noting that the Gardens had a bowling alley when it opened in 1931. Sadly, few realize that Toronto's glorious bowling past has been buried and nearly forgotten -- pushed toward the suburbs by rising real estate values and changing tastes.

During bowling's golden age, from the '40s through the '60s, nearly 120 different alleys dotted the downtown, says 71-year-old Sid Morris, a former pin boy and lifelong aficionado. There were lanes everywhere -- in the basement of the Gladstone Hotel, in the Dufferin Mall, in the Annex (The Apollo Bowling Club, now The Poor Alex Theatre), at the University of Toronto (Victoria Bowling Alleys, 277 Huron St.), and even in the financial district (21-23 King St. E., formerly the National Trust Building).

Some old-timers reminisce about how the intersection of Queen and Yonge streets once sported an alley on each corner, and every patriotic Canadian knows that five-pin bowling was born just a few streets south. In 1909, Thomas F. Ryan, owner of the Temperance Street Bowling Club, whittled five pins down to size, assigned them each a scoring value and put the traditional 16-pound ball on a crash diet.

According to lore, five-pin started out snooty -- a lighter ball for Timothy Eaton and his Osgoode lawyer friends ensured they wouldn't get too sweaty during lunch hour. Still, the game was approached with great vigour, and apparently balls and pins used to pop out the window onto Yonge Street. Bowling lite came to exemplify that quality long associated with dour old Toronto: thrift. You only needed one pin boy for every two alleys.

While fiduciary prudence helped popularize bowling the first time around, extravagance is the dominant motif of the recent revival. After all, it was no less an authority than Prada which, earlier this year, made the bowling ball bag the must-have accessory -- a patina of kitsch that fashion acolytes find appealing, as it avoids the ugly connotations of the unhygienic reality. Trendy shoulder bags, yes. Mysteriously damp bowling shoes, no.

That proletarian aspect of bowling has until now impeded a comeback. Bowling was the opiate of the working class, and the battle between high and low culture appeared to have been settled unequivocally in 1980 when the Olympia Edward, located at 20 Edward St. (the largest alley at the time, with 64 lanes on four floors) was sold and converted into the World's Biggest Bookstore.

But look again. In January, no less a cultural warrior than software mogul Chris Peters -- a former Microsoft executive -- purchased the Professional Bowlers Association of America, with plans to innovate and modernize the sport. Forget Silicon Valley, the next craze among the dot-com crowd could be Silicon Alley. Certainly, if bowling is to thrive, it must adapt to the work habits of year 2000.

"There was no such thing as open bowling in the old days," says Murray Thompson, president of the Metro Toronto Five-Pin Bowlers' Association. "Every centre that opened up had leagues." Many -- especially the ones downtown -- started playing right after work. "Because of the scattered hours today, this just doesn't happen."

This is not a sign of bowling's decline, however, but of its rebirth.

"League play has fallen off, but the popularity of bowling is on the upswing again," says Walter Valentan, executive director of the Youth Bowling Council. Figures shows that league membership has decreased 5 to 7% during the 1990s, but the number of games played remains constant.

In other words, more people are bowling ý la carte, in smaller groups and according to their schedules.

In his recent book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, author Robert Putnam uses this phenomenon as a metaphor for the loss of "social capital", as if league play represented communal good. Well, even if that's how he chooses to see it, the illustration on his book jacket, with its retro feel and angst-ridden air, is just further proof that bowling has acquired style.

The bowling brand has been changing lately, offering such variants as laser bowl, disco bowl or rock 'n' bowl, all of which essentially marry the production values of Spinal Tap to the ambience of a Grade 9 sockhop.

Among young people, bowling is still popular (there were more than 17,000 members of the Youth Bowling Council of Ontario in 1999) and the sport still commands television coverage on TSN and CBC.

While bowling has traditionally been associated with a certain lack of athletic rigor, Al Hong, executive director of the Ontario five-pin bowlers association insists that, "You'll probably find there are more athletic-type people who bowl in the higher levels, then there are the big-belly, cigar-smoking, beer-drinking types. Unfortunately, we're still stuck with that stigma."

Encouraging signs of its universal cachet are everywhere. A bowling ball like the one wielded by Janeane Garofalo in Mystery Men -- the one with her father's skull inside it -- is available for purchase through www.blockbusterbowling.com for $110US.

Indie-rockers have long cherished the bowling shirt as a de rigeur uniform of the slack soldier; a recent Pizza Pizza print ad features a bald guy named Ronnie wearing a bowling shirt.

And once you get into a bowling frame of mind, you realize how often it has been weaved into our cultural quilt, be it cinema (Kingpin, The Big Lebowski) television (The Simpsons) and music (alt.rock pioneers Camper Van Beethoven were best known for their infectious ditty: Take the Skinheads Bowling.)

Until the downtown alleys bloom, all that remains for those on the vanguard of bowling is to acquire a taste for the exotic and otherness that the suburbs possess.

Overcoming the ironic and geographical remove of bowling requires converting an annual ritual into a weekly or monthly one; the beauty and power of an original Lustre King Custom Ball Conditioner by Brunswick (like the one at Bathurst Bowlerama) might help in this regard. With practice comes more accuracy and consistency, and the ironic distance melts, leaving you with a newfound love of the game. Al Hong notes that "Bowling is the Rodney Dangerfield of sports -- it gets no respect." But if Janeane Garofalo's skull ball can defeat evil and save the day, then surely the sport itself has the strength to overcome any lingering issues of confidence or coolness.