In the first display at the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame in downtown St. Louis, a caveman mannequin with an oversized cranium and pronounced underbite grasps a huge stone. Underneath, a card explains: “THE BEGINNING OF BOWLING. Is this how bowling began, with a stone-age hunter tossing a rock at a formation of bones? No one is sure.”
That uncertainty has never stopped bowling historians from concocting imaginative theories for the apparently hardwired human need to bowl. In Bowling, author Carol Schunk offers one such unique hypothesis: “The Romans did much of their fighting in hilly areas, so one of their tactical maneuvers was to roll rocks down a pass to attract or bowl over their oncoming enemy. The soldiers practiced to develop skill in this tactic and before long began to ‘play’ this game for fun.”
Mark Vesley, who holds a Ph.D. in Roman life from the University of Minnesota, disagrees with this theory. “The story about bowling coming from Romans dropping rocks on Christians for sport is an antique urban legend,” Vesley says. “Sure, they’d roll or drop boulders on enemies during wartime … but similarity doesn’t prove derivation.”
Joe Falcaro counters the Hall of Fame’s version of the sport’s Fred Flintstone-style evolution with a bit of creationist theory (bowling as gift from God) in Bowling for All: “Some historians even ponder on the possibility that the boys in the Garden of Eden used to throw giant pebbles at a lineup of pointed stones.”
A stroll through the museum reveals additional evidence of bowling as a bounty of divine benevolence. A British holy man named Winfrid, it is claimed, exported the game to Germany while converting the Saxon tribes to Christianity around 700 A.D. Winfrid sanctified bowling by proclaiming that the kegel, or pin, was actually the heide, or devil. With each pin knocked over, a blow was said to be delivered against evil and another victory chalked up for Christ. The pagans struck back, however, by bludgeoning the poor priest as he confirmed a new batch of converts, which resulted in Winfrid’s canonization (as Saint Boniface) and his position as the de facto Patron Saint of Bowling.
The Grimm Brothers took time off from writing their fairytales to challenge Winfred’s status as the man who introduced bowling to the Germans. The Grimms claimed that early Teutonic tribes bowled in Deutschland long before the Brits. German keglers, or bowlers, in fact, would stake their livestock on the outcome of a single game. In an attempt to eradicate this sort of gambling the government in Frankfurt banned bowling in the 1440s. When, in 1468, angry keglers took to the streets in the world’s first populist bowling strike, the politicians relented and reopened the lanes.
The early obsession with bowling eventually gave the sport a bad reputation. Soon even Satan was being depicted as a bowler. While Christians believed they were knocking over the devil with each roll, medieval drawings showed Lucifer striking back by bowling a human skull to shatter Christ’s cross. The eye sockets and single nose hole provided a nice three-holed ball similar to modern designs.
In medieval times, a myth was circulated that if an innocent man was condemned to death, the sentencing judge was doomed to spend his afterlife bowling with the victims’ severed heads. Thus, a man of the cloth who did not follow Christ’s example would spend eternity bowling.
Just as Martin Luther attempted to address what he saw as the failings of the Christian church by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, so did he preside over bowling’s reformation in the sixteenth century. Luther established the rules for the sport and declared that exactly nine pins should be used in a proper game. He also indulged himself with a private alley.
Sir Francis Drake, another early proponent of the game, was said to become hugely irritated when interrupted while bowling. In the summer of 1588, after sailing around the world, Drake was confronted by a frantic messenger announcing the impending arrival of Spain’s “Invincible Armada” intent on avenging Drake’s plundering of Spanish settlements in the New World. As the story goes, Drake calmed the anxious messenger with classic British sangfroid before continuing—and winning—his final frames. This undoubtedly inspired him to rout the conquistadors at the Battle of Gravelines.
In 1626, a Dutch governor named Peter Minuit bought a lush island at the mouth of the Hudson River from the local Indians for approximately twenty-four dollars’ worth of beads and cloth, and shortly thereafter set up a bowling green on the southern tip of the island, which at the time was known as New Amsterdam.
Envious of this Dutch paradise, King Charles II of England gave his brother James, the Duke of York, all of New Netherland, including America’s first bowling green. Faced with British warships, the Dutch colonists capitulated and surrendered their beloved bowling lawn. The victors promptly rewrote bowling history to give earlier explorer—and Englishman—Henry Hudson credit for introducing nine-pin skittle bowling to New York.
A large area of the Hall of Fame is dedicated to modern bowling media, but noticeably missing are any references to the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL), Camper Van Beethoven’s classic hit “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” the annual Punk Rock Bowling Tournament in Las Vegas, Bowling for Columbine, or the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. Curator Jim Baltz steered me to the museum’s library—a storage locker with hundreds of bowling magazines—where visitors can research bowling history for forty dollars an hour (a rate that inexplicably doubles to eighty dollars if you spend more than eight hours). Instead, I opted for a photo of the bowling pin car in the basement and the opportunity to roll a few lines on either the renovated classic lanes, which still require human pin setters, or the museum’s ultramodern lanes, featuring the latest pin-setting technology.
The International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame may seem to overstate the importance of this humble game, but signs remind visitors that bowling is the largest participatory sport in the world. According to the American Bowling Congress, more Americans bowl than vote; an estimated ninety-one million Americans bowled in 1998 compared to the paltry seventy-three million who voted in congressional elections that year.—Eric Dregni
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