This is an archive copy of a document originally located at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/sportsf/stories/s635097.htm
With Amanda Smith
2/8/2002
Bowling - The New Glamour Sport?
Summary:
Let’s go bowling! It’s the new hip and happening sport. Lumbered with
the Fred Flintstone image for years, tenpin bowling has recently found a
retro-cool status among the young and the fashionable.
And there are now three times as many bowling centres in Australia as there were
in the heyday of the 1960s. We visit one of the newest, at a smart inner-city
address where cocktails, tapas and tenpin bowling are the order of the day.
Details or Transcript:
Amanda Smith: We’re going bowling on The Sports Factor this morning. But if
tenpin bowling makes you think of Fred Flintstone and Homer Simpson, think
again. It’s been reinvented as the groovy new sport.
THEME
Amanda Smith: Now we’re actually going to look at three very different kinds
of bowling this week. We’ll visit one of the newest style, hip boutique
bowling centres, a few of which have just opened up in Australia. We’ll also
drop in on a bunch of blokes who are keeping alive a much older, ninepin version
of bowling. And we’ll meet Australia’s top tenpin bowler, Cara Honeychurch,
who’s now competing on the professional circuit in the United States.
SONG ‘Tenpin Bowling’
Amanda Smith: Well that was tenpin bowling back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and
that’s the ginchy kind of song that probably evokes the image of bowling that
a lot of us have. But this is the new sound of tenpin bowling.
DISCO/BOWLING
Amanda Smith: Yes, it’s back, but with a style makeover. There are actually
three times as many bowling centres in Australia now as there were in the 1960s,
and given that in the intervening years many of them closed down, that’s quite
a renaissance. Notice also that they’re now called bowling ‘centres’, not
bowling ‘alleys’. The word ‘alley’ presumably conjures up too grungy an
image. The new places are like night-clubs. You can have cocktails and tapas
brought to you while you bowl, and along with the music there’s lights, video
screens, and a retro-cool look.
BOWLING ATMOS
Amanda Smith: Now are you an old hand at bowling?
Woman: I’m hopeless, absolutely hopeless. I bowl about once a year, so
that’s how much experience I’ve had. And I always used to cry when I was
little because I’d never get any balls, I’d always be in the gutter.
Amanda Smith: OK, so in years gone by, what image did tenpin bowling have for
you?
Woman: It was always like hot dogs and pies, and I don’t know, it was always
sort of really junky when I was young; it was more a young image. Whereas now
it’s sort of more a disco image. It’s sort of like the ‘60s and ‘70s,
it’s a chance to sort of relive a game, and everybody’s sort of actually
getting back into that.
Man: My image of tenpin bowling? Fifties rockers.
Woman: Something very conservative.
Amanda Smith: And now?
Woman: Oh, it’s fun.
Woman: Yes, I love bowling, I think it’s a shame it hasn’t come back sooner.
I think it’s fabulous.
Amanda Smith: One of these new places to go bowling is called ‘Strike’. It
opened four weeks ago in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Prahran, in fashionable
Chapel Street. It’s run by Michael Schreiber, who says that as a sport and as
an entertainment, tenpin bowling was crying out for a revitalisation.
Michael Schreiber: Bowling conceptually is great, because it’s a time-tested
entertainment, people have enjoyed bowling in various forms for thousands of
years, and in its current form for the last 100 years. And although it has gone
in cycles in terms of popularity, it’s ultimately a great game that people
have a lot of fun playing. The problem, as far as I was concerned, was the
presentation of the game in the environments that it has been presented in for
the last 50 years, and they really haven’t changed for the last 50 years. And
people’s tastes have moved on.
Amanda Smith: Well over the past couple of decades, suburban tenpin bowling
alleys that might have once been popular in the 1960s have been closing down
around the country. Bowling’s been considered a bit of a dag act. So what made
you think that the time was right now for bowling to get an image makeover, and
that there’d be people around who’d think Hey, bowling, that’s a cool
thing to do?
Michael Schreiber: Well I think there have been some instructive examples in the
United States of makeovers of bowling centres that have repositioned for a core
market of the social bowler versus the league bowler. In the United States, the
league bowling business has been in a constant decline for the last 25 years,
and for the first time in 2001, social bowling became a bigger component of the
bowling market than league bowling. But everyone in the traditional bowling
business are still really in a lot of instances, clinging to league bowling as
their business. They have been in that business for 50 years. So as far as I’m
concerned, league bowling will always have a place, and I think it’s a
question of reinventing league bowling, versus trying to maintain the current
format. And the businesses presenting that current format are really just
shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic. It’s going to be very difficult to save
in its current form as far as I’m concerned.
Amanda Smith: So what’s the demographic you’re aiming at here, Michael, to
get bowling?
Michael Schreiber: Well we positioned ‘Strike’ towards the 18 to 35 year old
demographic. As a demographic that are going out seeking entertainment, they
have disposable income to spend, they’re either single, they’ve got a job,
at least they’ve got money. That is the biggest core entertainment market. One
of the things we’ve found is that a lot of people coming in due to our
positioning has been that they either haven’t bowled their whole life, and/or
haven’t bowled for the last 15 or 20 years, and they’re being reintroduced
to the leisure activity and sport of bowling. And I think ultimately the sports
side of it will be something that people will get more interested in if we
change the formula it’s presented in.
Amanda Smith: But are those people I guess you’re aiming at, as you say this
young, fashionable crowd, what’s their view of bowling, what’s the view of
bowling that they bring and what’s the view of bowling that they get?
Michael Schreiber: Well the view of bowling that they bring is the preconception
of the ‘50s bowling alleys. So before they walk down the stairs their
perception is, Oh boy, this is going to be another daggy bowling alley. As they
get down the stairs, typically I like watching the expressions on their faces
because they go Wow! And their eyes get all big and they go Wow! And straight
away seeing the way it’s presented breaks their perceptions entirely, and
it’s probably diametrically opposed to what they were expecting. And then on
top of that the actual game is a lot of fun. The game hasn’t changed. I’m
still presenting the same game that you can play at 70 out of the 120 other
bowling alleys in Australia. And people like that game, and they have for a long
time. And it’s really what happened and what drove them out of alleys, and the
perception that’s really caused the main problem for the bowling business.
Amanda Smith: And did you deliberately choose a smart, inner-city address for
this centre, in a street that’s full of designer shops and nightclubs?
Michael Schreiber: I think it was a very conscious decision to come here,
because of that market. And it is in a way an inner-urban concept. I think it
will certainly still appeal in the outer suburbs, but fundamentally today,
‘Strike’ is targeted in an urban market, and that’s why this location is a
very good location.
Amanda Smith: Now I’ve heard that for bowling centres there has been a
downside to this renaissance of interest; while their numbers are up, they’re
losing shoes, people are stealing them, because authentic bowling shoes, that
once you wouldn’t have been seen dead in anywhere else, are now also ultra
hip. Do you have to keep a close watch on the shoes?
Michael Schreiber: Well we do, and unfortunately that’s an unintended
consequence of the fashionability of bowling. Everyone from Prada to Gucci have
made bowling bags, bowling shoes, you just need to walk down Chapel Street and
you’ll find 50 stores selling the bowling aesthetic, versus a real bowling
shoe. They’ve just copied the aesthetic which has become extremely
fashionable. So as a result we tend to lose a lot of shoes, but nothing we can
do about it.
Amanda Smith: Well one thing that does occur to me is that if you’re promoting
bowling as a hip, sophisticated thing to do now, is it going to be a short-lived
fad, you know, will the Bright Young Things you’re wanting to attract to
bowling now, get into it for a while but then move on to whatever they see as
the next thing, as the next place to be seen?
Michael Schreiber: Well I think to a certain extent pop will eat itself, but
what I’m hoping is that I’ll be able to extend the natural longevity of a
pop experience by capturing people who will want to do it on a more formal
basis. Hence the reinvention of league bowling again. So there will be a cycle,
and certainly the more superficial crowd will come in, and as soon as it
doesn’t become absolutely hip any more, they’ll move on, and that crowd
always does move on, but I think there’ll still be a core part of the
population that have been reintroduced the bowling experience and want to
continue doing that on a more formal basis, only because it’s social, it’s
interactive and it’s competitive. And I think that kind of encapsulates human
beings.
BOWLING/CHEERS
Amanda Smith: And I was speaking there with Michael Schreiber, who’s the
Managing Director of ‘Strike’, one of the new-style bowling centres that
have just started to open up in Australia.
Now you might remember that when the Commonwealth Games were on in Kuala Lumpur,
this time four years ago, one of the sports Australia did awfully well at was
tenpin bowling. And one of those Australian bowlers was Cara Honeychurch who won
three Gold Medals there. Cara now competes on the professional tenpin bowling
circuit in the United States. Right now, she’s in Kentucky, where the
Louisville Open is under way. Now I have to say that I was a bit surprised to
find out that there was this professional tenpin bowling circuit, but then
there’s a pro league for just about any sport you can imagine, in the USA. So
when and why did Cara Honeychurch decide to make bowling a profession?
Cara Honeychurch: Yes it was actually only fairly recently. I’m currently on
my third full-time year on the professional women’s bowling tour. I decided to
turn professional late in 1999 and it was basically after the Commonwealth Games
was over, and I’d really achieved all of the goals that I’d set for myself a
number of years ago. And I really got to a point where I had to reassess what I
wanted to do in the sport, and really the only thing that I hadn’t done was
play the sport at a professional level. So I decided that I would go over there
for three months, see what it was like, and then I made the decision that I
think I could do well enough to make a living out of it. And here I am, three
years later.
Amanda Smith: Now I think you trained as an accountant, but do you actually make
a better living out of tenpin bowling now than accountancy?
Cara Honeychurch: Well I do currently. I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve
had two really good years on the tour, and I finished in prizemoney in the top
five each of those two years. And also with the fact that I’m earning US
dollars, you know, when you convert that back into Australian dollars, yes, I am
making a better living on the bowling tour than I was working as an accountant.
But it is a hard way to make a living, and really unless I’m performing to the
best of my ability, it’s actually quite hard to make a profit at all.
Amanda Smith: Now you of course got a lot of public recognition around this time
four years ago, at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur when you won those
three Gold Medals for the tenpin bowling events there. Now those Games were the
first and so far, only time that tenpin bowling’s been a Commonwealth Games
event; are you sorry that it’s not on the program for Manchester, and that
you’re not there having another crack at three Gold Medals?
Cara Honeychurch: Oh absolutely. It’s very disappointing for myself, and also
for the sport as a whole to not be included, especially after the great
successes, not only the team, but how well the sport was recognised by the
Commonwealth Games. But we knew, going into KL that the program had already been
set for Manchester, and in fact Melbourne, so we knew that it was really only
going to be on the program that one particular occasion unless something drastic
happened in upcoming years. But yes, given the fact of how successful the event
was in Kuala Lumpur, I’m sure that perhaps going forward in future
Commonwealth Games that it may be included again on the program.
Amanda Smith: Well tell me about the image of tenpin bowling in America
nowadays, Cara, because just recently in Australia a number of smart new bowling
centres have opened in fashionable inner-city locations. Is there a similar sort
of thing happening in the United States?
Cara Honeychurch: Yes, it’s probably not quite. Bowling’s certainly become
I’ve noticed, very trendy in Australia, with all these handbags and things
that look like bowling bags that are being sold as fashion accessories, and
there’s a number of bowling centres that have – just about all of them now
have the disco bowling, the lights and music blaring, and glow-in-the-dark
lanes. That’s been in America for a number of years. It is very popular over
here, and the image is probably very similar in the US as what it is in
Australia, but at the moment one of the major differences is obviously I meet a
lot of people over here, I’m travelling all the time, and people often ask me
where I’m from and what I do for a living, and when I’m in the US I say
I’m a professional bowler, most people will say, ‘Oh, that’s great, I’ve
occasionally watched it on the SPN or SPN-2’. Whereas when I say that in
Australia there’s usually more of a ‘Oh gee, I didn’t realise that you
could do bowling as a profession’. So I think we’re a little bit further
advanced in the US in terms of it being recognised as a professional sport.
Amanda Smith: Well did you start bowling like the rest of us, in a daggy old
suburban bowling alley in Australia?
Cara Honeychurch: I don’t know about daggy, but I started bowling in 1983 and
I joined a junior league over at Keon??? Park in Melbourne and yes, I started
like everyone else; I went bowling one day with my Mum and my Dad, and I played
a lot of different sports as a child, but there was something really unique and
different about bowling, and I loved it, and I also improved fairly rapidly. And
I think when you’re a child and you see sort of rapid improvement in something
in a short amount of time, you tend to stick with it and maintain your
enthusiasm.
Amanda Smith: OK, so as a top player now on the US professional circuit, what
sort of score do you average at tournaments? You know, when most of us
occasional players are lucky to make 100 or so.
Cara Honeychurch: Yes. I’m averaging 215 on the tour so far this year.
Amanda Smith: Well the highest possible score in tenpin bowling is 300 and
that’s when you get 12 strikes in a row; how often at your level do you play
that perfect game?
Cara Honeychurch: Not often enough, unfortunately. I’ve had nine perfect games
in my career, which doesn’t really sound like a lot considering there are
thousands and thousands of games that I’ve bowled, but achieving a perfect
score is very hard to do. I’ve bowled two perfect games so far this year, and
in fact it took me until I think it was about 1998 or 1997 it might have been,
before I actually bowled my first 300 game. So many, many bowls went down the
lane, and many games were bowled before I actually achieved the perfect score.
It’s very hard to do.
Amanda Smith: Very hard to do, even at the top end of professional bowling. And
from Louisville, Kentucky, that was Australian tenpin bowler, Cara Honeychurch.
Such a mellifluous-sounding name; can’t you just see the ball sliding out of
her hand for a strike?
Now although there’s a professional career in bowling in America for people
like Cara Honeychurch, and while tenpin bowling might be finding new appeal with
the young and the groovy in Australia, in the United Kingdom, a small number of
people are keeping alive an ancient form of this sport, strictly in the amateur
sense, and without much regard for fashion. As you probably know, bowling once
had nine pins, not ten. The ninepin game was banned in the United States in the
19th century because it attracted gambling and match-fixing. But for centuries
before this, all sorts of versions of ninepin skittles were played in Europe.
One of them is still being played regularly by just a handful of chaps in
London. I spoke with them some time ago for The Sports Factor, and we’re going
to revisit them today.
PUB ATMOS/SINGER
Amanda Smith: This is the Freemason’s Arms, a pub in the North London suburb
of Hampstead. It’s a pleasant, ordinary sort of English pub, and on a Tuesday
night just a few people are in for a quiet ale. You’d never guess that hidden
away downstairs, in the cellar of this pub, there’s some pretty weird sport
going on.
FOOTSTEPS ON STAIRS & SKITTLES SOUNDS
Peter Green: Oh bollocks! That’s quite an easy shot, they should have got that
one.
CRASH OF SKITTLES
Peter Green: Oh, another bad throw. That’s half a tadpole.
Amanda Smith: Why half a tadpole?
Peter Green: Because one part of its head’s missing. (laughs)
Amanda Smith: This is London Skittles, also known as Old English Skittles, a pub
sport which as you’ll find out, has a very rich and colourful terminology
attached to it. It’s played with nine pins, which are made of hornbeam, and
set in a diamond formation.
Skittles probably originated in the Middle Ages, and this version that’s
played at the Freemason’s Arms is thought to be Dutch in origin. The Club
Secretary and archivist is Guy Tunnicliffe, and he says that while there used to
be dozens of versions of skittles played throughout England, London skittles is
now one of the few remaining.
Guy Tunnicliffe: There’s three sorts of skittles in this country: Western
Skittles, which is played in the West Country; there’s Long Alley Skittles,
which is played in the Midlands; and this game, which is the most robust of the
three, and the most difficult, is London Skittles, and uses bigger pins, bigger
cheeses, heavy lignum-vitae cheeses which is proscribed tropical hardwood.
Amanda Smith: Now I should just interrupt for a minute and say that when you
talk about ‘cheeses’, we’re not actually talking cheese here, are we?
Guy Tunnicliffe: No, that’s right. ‘Cheese’ is a term probably once again
back to its derivation in Holland maybe; it’s a cheese-shaped object, it’s
more like a discus, a very hard, round discus, weighing about 10 to 12 pounds in
weight. And like I say lignum-vitae is the wood used, Tree of Life, it’s
called. It’s now no longer possible to buy that wood in this country because
it comes from the tropical rainforest. So most of the cheeses we still use are
50, 60 years old, which I don’t know, makes us worry a bit about whether we
can continue if the cheeses break, which they occasionally do. But we’re
fortunate, we’ve got enough to last us.
Amanda Smith: And I understand that this is the only club here with an alley in
the UK, here at The Freemason’s Arms?
Guy Tunnicliffe: Yes, that’s right. It’s the last one left. When I say the
last one, it’s the last public alley. I need to draw a distinction between the
two. There’s a private club, the National Westminster Bank has an alley in
Norbury in South London, and they still play there, but as it’s a private club
it’s very difficult for the public to see it. We still go down there and play
them in competitions, but they’re our last competitors, if you like, we’re
the last sort of Dodo left. And sometimes we worry a bit about that, but we’ve
managed to keep it within the club and play, like I say, against the Bank. In
the ‘30s was the high point of the game, when there were hundreds of clubs all
over London. It was pubs, working men’s clubs, all sorts of places it was
played, and was very, very popular.
Amanda Smith: It interests me that not only skittles but also other pub games
like bar billiards seem to have had their rise and their heyday in the 1930s. Is
that in any way linked to that being a period of economic depression? I’m
struggling for reasons why they might have grown at that time.
Guy Tunnicliffe: The thing about the pub games is I think, they were probably
played a lot even before the ‘30s, but under the Gaming Acts that were in
force in the country at this time, there were only five games that could be
played in pubs for small stakes, and something to do with the popularity of
these games I think had to do with the fact you could actually legally bet on
them, rather than games you couldn’t. So you could play them in public houses,
skittles is one, dominoes, shove ha’penny, bar billiards and cribbage were the
five games. And even today, if you look behind a bar in England, you might see a
little notice which says those five games are allowed, you’re allowed to bet
on them.
SKITTLES
Peter Green: Oh, hit from behind.
Amanda Smith: Unlike tenpin bowling, where you roll the ball down the alley to
strike the pins, in London Skittles, the cheese is flung through the air to hit
the pins at a full toss, and it looks amazing.
Nevertheless, this game of skittles is a forerunner to tenpin bowling. The
transformation of ninepins to the tenpin game happened in North America, where
the original game had also been introduced by the Dutch.
Guy Tunnicliffe: And they would have taken the game of ninepin to America, and
it was played extensively over the east coast of America, involving quite a lot
of gambling, low-lifes, criminal elements etc. A lot of the States began to be
concerned and criminalised the game of ninepin, which was then deftly
sidestepped by adding the tenth pin, changing the shape of the pins; instead of
having a diamond formation like we have in ninepin, they changed it to a
triangular formation like you get in tenpin. They sanitised the game as well.
Over the years the game became sanitised, so you have now tenpin bowling, and
tenpin bowling alleys, the family game etc. We get a lot of tenpin bowlers
coming down here, coming looking at our game because of its origins, and because
of what it led to, and we always try and explain to them that as far as we’re
concerned, our game is far more difficult; it’s three-dimensional in that the
cheese flies through the air, whereas tenpin bowling, the game is
two-dimensional, you’ve just length and width to worry about, not height.
SKITTLES ATMOS
Amanda Smith: Now apart from the archaic charm of Old English Skittles, this
sport also has a strange and wonderful lexicon attached to it.
Guy Tunnicliffe: Well the pins that are left lying on the frame are not removed,
they’re left lying there. You can use those to knock other pins down, throw
the cheese at those, and deflect off them; those are known as ‘deads’. The
people putting the pins up at the other end by the frame are known as the
‘stickers’.
Amanda Smith: Right, because of course you haven’t got automatic pin removal
and replacement, as in tenpin bowling alleys.
Guy Tunnicliffe: No, we don’t have pin setting machines or pin spotting
machines, we use manual labour. Up until about 10, 12 years ago, we used to pay
somebody to stick the pins up, and it was an interesting fact that during the
course of last century, we only had two stickers, from 1900 right through to
about 1960, there were only two stickers. One sticker, what was his name? Joe
Turner I think it was, something like that, he stuck in h is alley for about 50
years and retired in 1949, and then his successor took over and stuck in the
ally till about 1968. And after that, we ceased paying them, really.
Amanda Smith: So sticking has gone from professional to amateur?
Guy Tunnicliffe: Yes, that’s right. They were paid enough I think, it was like
a part time job to them, but there was only a single sticker. Now, if you work
out the weight of each pin, there’s nine pins and each one weighs roughly
about 8, 9 pounds, and during the course of an evening we worked it out, the
sticker, if there’s a single sticker, he’d be shifting a ton of weight in
total. Nowadays with volunteer stickers we have two stickers rather than the
one, and we get by it that way.
Amanda Smith: All right, so some other terminology: there’s things like
‘Waterloo’ and ‘Gates of Hell’ and ‘London Bridge’ and
‘Tadpole’, what are all they?
Guy Tunnicliffe: OK, well after the first throw, you’re left with different
combinations of what we call broken frames. Now the broken frame set-ups have
all got names, and depending on where they’re placed, where the pins are
placed, Waterloo is a difficult shot, was thought to have originated because it
was a match-winning shot played against the pub called The Waterloo. The Gates
of Hell is two very difficult pins to get. They’re the furthest distance away
from the throwing end of the alley and you need to hit them at a right angle to
actually get them. There’s a whole lot of shots, 6/4d shot, a brandy and soda,
the umbrella, the candlestick, all the shots have got names.
Amanda Smith: What about the Landlady’s Daughter?
Guy Tunnicliffe: Oh, I can’t tell you about the Landlady’s Daughter, but it
involves two pins lying very close together and the object is to throw the
cheese between the two pins and split the pins. The ins, I might add, are deads,
they’re lying on the frame. But there is a cruder version of that.
Amanda Smith: Is part of the pleasure of playing London Skittles for you one of
keeping alive this increasingly, I guess, obscure, English pub sport?
Guy Tunnicliffe: It is. Very quickly after I joined I wanted to sort of document
it and record it in every way I could, mainly because I knew from the old Club
Secretary, a guy called Kevin Smith, all the documents had been lost in a flood,
all the records and evidence had been lost in a flood, so I spent a lot of time
rooting around libraries, including the British Library, not just for my own
satisfaction but in order to write about it and let other people know that it
did exist, that it was dying and hopefully try and encourage people to come down
and play. We do get new members coming down.
Amanda Smith: Yes well I did want to ask you, I mean is it dying, or is it still
carrying on pretty well?
Guy Tunnicliffe: Well when I joined, I think it was about 1988, it was dying;
it’s still alive today, so we’re still here.
SKITTLES ATMOS
Peter Green: That’s an eight pin, so finish with an eight.
Amanda Smith: Beer and skittles are the Freemason’s Arms, the last remaining
Old English skittles alley in a pub in London. And I was speaking there with
Club Secretary, archivist and player, Guy Tunnicliffe, and fellow player, Peter
Green, preserving what you might call the heritage end of the bowling scene. And
a million miles from the nightclub style cocktails and bowling that we visited
earlier.
And that’s The Sport Factor for this Friday. Maria Tickle is the program
producer, Paul Penton is technical producer, and I’m Amanda Smith.
Guests on this program:
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Cara Honeychurch - Champion Tenpin Bowler
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Guy Tunnicliffe - Club Secretary and archivist, Freemason's Arms
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Peter Green - Skittles player
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Michael Schreiber - Strike bowling alley
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Musical Items:
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Ten Pin Bowling
Duration: 45"
Artist: Bryan Davies
Composer: Chet Clark, Bob Wilkie
Label/CD No: L45951/2
Copyright: ABC/Festival |
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Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Maria Tickle
©
2003 ABC
This is an archive copy of a document originally located at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/sportsf/stories/s635097.htm
All copyright remains with the creator.
