Sorry everyone,but the post on this topic will be very long.
The link to the article is no longer available.This originally appeared
in Bowlers Journal in 2006.With the talk today about scores and lane
conditions being to easy.Just some more info.on this subject.Some of you my
have seen this before.


A REGULATION BALL: IS IT FEASIBLE?
By Jim Dressel
September 2006

Two years ago, the World Tenpin Bowling Association first embraced the idea of a “game ball.” Kegel’s John Davis originally sat on the sidelines. “I thought about it for a year and a half before I opened my mouth publicly,” he said. “I just knew it would cause serious controversy.”

That’s why the original “game ball” evolved into a “regulation ball”... to diffuse the arguments against the concept. So why did Davis ignore the furor and step up and offer to take a leadership role in a feasibility study of the concept with his presentation at the recent Bowl Expo?

“The WTBA committee needs help from the entire industry,” he says. “We don’t know where we’re going as a sport. It’s going wherever technology takes it. I’m not complaining because my whole business is based on this chaos. I’ve been trying to fix it and have made inroads, but I’m beating my head against the wall on the sport itself. I just don’t think birthday parties and open bowling will last forever.”
Dyno-Thane’s Phil Cardinale openly admits he prefers the chaos. It’s part of today’s game, he says.

“There are four to six pieces of the [competitive] puzzle that need to be solved in any tournament,” Cardinale says. “And the guy who solves the pieces wins. Those who are promoting this [regulation ball] concept are trying to make it one or two pieces.

“But you have to throw it good, you have to have the right ball in your hand, you have to be able to play the right part of the lane, you have to read the transition and be able to be competitive throughout the tournament as the lanes change. What they’re saying is, ‘Hey, we’re going to take away the part about the lanes changing, and the transition.’ So it’s really not a puzzle any longer.

“More than that, my concern is that what John is proposing would make the lane man the king. He can predict just by a the lane pattern what type of bowler is going to win.”

Ted Thompson, one of Kegel’s leading lane technicians, disputes the notion. Further, he suggests that Cardinale has the wrong perception of what a lane man’s job really is.

“The thought that a regulation ball would put the lane man in control is a subjective opinion,” he says. “But I do know that the lane man would like nothing more than to feel that they’re not the most determining factor in who’s winning. The lane man is the person who takes care of the lane environment, and oil is just one part of that. Yet it seems that one part is what everybody is focusing on.

“The lane man can definitely make the scores high, or make them low. A real good one could even put the right conditioner down for the right environment. But total control of who’s going to win? No way. Lenny Nicholson said it best. In his 30 years as a lane man, he said he was only able to predict a winner once or twice.”

Mo Pinel may be President of MoRich Enterprises, but he started in the business as a lane man/resurfacer, and still oversees lane maintenance and its related complexities. And he clearly disagrees with John Davis about the potential impact of a game ball, regulation ball, or whatever it would be called.

“I think John was dancing,” says Pinel. “We couldn’t hear the music playing, but there was a lot of dancing going on.

“He said we need one ball. And one ball means that if you do one ball and only one ball, then you’re not going to find out who the best bowlers in the world are. You’re going to find out who throws that ball the best on the oil pattern that the lane man dictates. I’m a lane man, I’ve done lanes for 30 years, and I’m telling you that if I know exactly what ball they’re using, and what oil pattern is being used, I can tell you who the top two to four guys are going to be at the end.

“With a regulation ball, the person creating the environment has an enormous amount of dangerous control over the entire thing, and that scares the heck out of me.”

Actually, that is a misquote. Pinel didn’t say, “heck.”

John Davis never heard of himself described as “dangerous” before... before, that is, he stepped up in proposing a study of the regulation ball issue.

“All I’m trying to do is make a stable bowling environment for competitive bowling at the world amateur level. It’s just that if you take care of lanes, you’re responsible. That means we are on the front lines, especially when a bowler can shoot 250 one game and 130 the next.

“Yes, there should be some predictability about what the ball’s going to do. When was the last time you saw someone run out a shot? They’re not really sure what the ball’s going to do next because the environment changes too fast.

“Some say I want control. I do, in the sense that I want to guarantee a fair environment. And for most of the tournaments we take care of, people feel it has been OK. But now, a fair condition is not possible to guarantee, especially with the circuses we have to deal with.”

Meaning?

“Meaning the way people choose to play the lanes as a group, lanes can go high-scoring or low-scoring like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. “Even if you’re playing the lanes the right way, someone crosses your track with a high-friction ball, and they’re going to mess you up sooner or later. I object to one bowler affecting the environment for another.”

Davis believes a regulation ball is the easiest fix. “We know that because we’re doing constant research on the oil and we get closer and closer as time goes on. But as the equipment gets more aggressive, it forces the proprietor to put down more oil, which makes the environment more unstable.”

It’s a vicious circle. So how, specifically, would the regulation ball address some of these problems? Davis claims some of his detractors misunderstand the concept.

“Some think I say ‘one ball’ in a literal sense,” he says. “Well, I want every manufacturer to be able to make a ball within certain specifications, and we won’t know how wide that spectrum needs to be without testing. The idea would be so it would be less confusing to choose bowling balls. As it is now, unless players have a lot of money, they can’t learn which ball does what readily enough on the variety of lane conditions they see in the world, and it produces chaos.”

We just heard Cardinale say, in essence, “Chaos is good.”

“True, some enjoy that,” Davis confirms. “But it’s not drawing more people to the sport. Bowling is a lifelong pursuit, but the chaos I referred to as ‘a circus’ is actually reducing the number of people who go on to play the sport. That can’t be what the industry wants.”

Why does Cardinale disagree?

“I perceive ‘chaos,’ if you will, as a positive,” says Phil. “It makes you more creative as a bowler. In the old days, bowling didn’t have as much creativity. John seems to want to make the game more predictable, but if that was what [bowling became], then you’d know the move you had to make.

“The best bowlers are the most creative today. You have to know hand position, ball surface, the part of the lane you’re playing, the shape of the ball reaction, and anticipating. These are all good things they’re trying to take out of the game. I mean, understanding equipment is a huge part of the game today.”

Does Cardinale find anything admirable at all about their position? “The fact that they’re looking at it is good,” he says. “I mean, they’re saying they need to come up with a better way to make a level playing field. I don’t disagree with that. But the playing field is always the problem.

“They can fix that whole international one-ball thing by simply dictating a pattern.”

It’s no surprise to find Thompson disagreeing: “The regulation ball has been perceived as one ball, as a tighter spec ball. In that sense, we have a regulation ball now. But some, like the WTBA, just feel its regulation spectrum is way too wide, too varied. That has caused a lot of confusion with the participants, and therefore, the perception of the winner of a particular event. The impetus is not wholly on who won, it’s on who made the right guess about choosing their equipment.”

So is the game broken? Surprise: Pinel believes so.

“It needs to be fixed,” says Mo. “But it’s broken mainly at the league level where the unrealistic lane conditions people are bowling on lead to this terribly inflated scoring. Yes, bowling balls can take advantage of something that’s there, but if it’s not, they can’t take advantage of it, no matter how good the ball dynamics are.

“Now, if John is saying that he’s afraid that he’s losing control of the lane conditions he provides for the WTBA tournament, that’s one thing. He’s very passionate about his interest in the game and he’s always defended his position, both monetarily and by how interested he is in the game.

“But what he’s talking about is going to take a few years. It’s not something that’s going to be hatched overnight. I’m not opposed to doing something to aid him.”

Pinel also has another sticking point; namely, that what Davis said in his official presentation at Bowl Expo is not something he’s saying today.

“He said we need tighter, dynamic ball specifications. But that’s not what he said in his published statement and in the video he showed in Orlando. I mean, just what are we looking for — more predictability, or less?”

Asked if he was opposed to predictability in the tenpin sport, Pinel responded, “Not at all. Predictability, consistency, yes, but using your mental skills to develop strategy and tactics is key, too. Solving problems and analyzing what’s in front of you and watching ball reaction is an extremely important part of the game. And yes, physical execution is still the basis of it because if you can’t repeat shots, it doesn’t matter what ball you’ve got in your hand; you’re not going to win.

“What we really need to do is investigate accurately and scientifically the challenge that he’s facing. And I’m telling you that in ball dynamics, it’s not a linear relationship. He wants to limit ball flare and other ball dynamics. But what scares me historically is that the last time we had low-flaring bowling balls, the rev-dominant players destroyed the game.”

Davis just shakes his head, but does welcome the notion that at least the two ball manufacturers who participated in this forum aren’t opposed to looking into the problem he describes.

“I don’t know if I can relate bowling’s situation to anything in the world,” he says. “When I went to the Olympic Training Center one year, I was there with representatives from all the sports — the ones in the Olympics and the ones trying to get in. And guess what? From boxing to table tennis, etc., they were all facing the same problem: advanced technology. OK? All of them. I just think bowling got hit with it first and has been coping with it the longest.”

As far as the money aspect is concerned, yeah, golf may have 14 clubs in a bag but you do that with bowling balls and all of the sudden you’re talking about something close to $3.000.

Let me give you a small example. We had 280 bowlers in Germany. We checked in at right at 1600 bowling balls, OK. One team that went there paid over $10,000 in overweight baggage just to get the bowling balls to the tournament. If you figure the cost of balls at $250 apiece to such a far away place, they had already $28,000 or so invested in just the equipment. They hadn’t bought a plane ticket, they hadn’t got a hotel room, hadn’t paid for food yet. Just so happens this particular country has a government supported deal. Other countries got it by, they snuck the balls in, uncharged, You gotta think it was at least an average of $2,000 per country, With 46 or 47 countries, the cost of the bowling balls, I was just doing some rough calculations one day and just the equipment, meaning the equipment there for this particular tournament, was over $400,000.

PHIL CARDINALE

Could be the winning ugly ball?

That’s exactly what that is. The one that does nothing and keeps it in play and that’s the ball you end up, in a long format tournament, going to. So that’s a cheaper ball, it’s a less expensive ball, its got lot a performance built into it, so its not a 10 ball arsenal, its 3 - 4 - 5 ball arsenal. But to be a competitor at that level, that’s what you have to have.

IMPORTANT
Right. Do you find anything admirable about what they’re trying to do in relation to this regulation ball business, because I’m sure you’ve heard it all and I’m sure you’ve heard that the WPBA is basically embracing this but they have certain things that they want to accomplish with it .,……….

OK - in your favor and I’ve been playing devil’s advocate in some positions but obviously, even USBC to a certain extent seems to side with you guys because they are now re-investigating the entire system of bowling. Bowling balls are one element of that.

And the last meeting we’ve had, they’ve come up with, really been adamant about saying that, that you know, you’re right. There was only a certain amount of performance you’re going to get out of a bowling ball but most of that is dictated by the lane condition. You don’t throw a ball that doesn’t work on that lane condition. I mean period. Its like hitting the golf clubs, you know how they say, why do you hit a driver from 50 yards out? You know, that’s why you have other clubs and other balls. You have to have the ability to play on what condition is put out there. You just don’t walk into a bowling center with one ball and say, this is going to work. If the lane man is dictating where you’re going to play and what you’re going to throw - its pretty logical. He puts a lot of oil down and makes a pattern, use an aggressive ball. If he puts no oil down, makes the pattern shot, use a non-aggressive ball. And then the ball is available now, I mean, it ranges any where from a polyester ball through a 3-piece ball that’s moderately reactive. So its not that the balls aren’t out there - they just put the pattern out that allows the guy to use the other balls.

Ted THOMPSON

That’s a good point. OK, I’ll start it this way, essentially, why the regulation ball in that particular case?

Well there’s no question that today’s a better environment, if you want to be a competitive bowler, you need a myriad?? of equipment to compete on all these varying conditions. There’s also no question that the bowling balls don’t last as long as they used to, for whatever reason, whether it’s the plasticizers in the ball that make it reactive, and keep on curing, and ……. different rates, whether it’s the porosity? of the bowling balls, the friction of the cover stock characteristics change over time, whether a fresh ball is significantly better than a ball with 100 games on it, Whether a ball just tends to crack out around the finger holes a lot faster than it used to, it all adds up to the bowler needing to be having fresh equipment all the time. Therefore, ball staff people that have access to free equipment all the time or have a perceptual advantage among the masses of the bowlers, I think the WTBA would also like to minimize that.

This is my first, I’m not, I don’t think anybody knows exactly where it will tell you that. It could be one ball, it could be a very tight spec ball. My personal opinion, I would like to see a very tight spec ball where the bowler could go to an event, with 4 to 6 balls or something and cover his bases with the equipment spectrum, vary those particular balls minutely, where the spectrum is a little bit narrower, and then the rest of it is really up to the bowler. ,,,,, ,,,,,, different speeds, hand releases, leverage points, stuff like that - to succeed.

Final question, if you want it to be and I told you this wouldn’t take long but any final thoughts that you wanted to make sure were incorporated into this article, that you wanted to make sure that, hey, I want to make this point or I want to make this other point?

MO PINEL .

I had a couple of points I wanted to make. No. 1 -
He’s saying the modern exotics are making his job impossible.

I don’t think it’s impossible because the statistics don’t show so. If you look at the PBA tour right now, in the top 20 bowlers you have the least amount of condition-specific players, which is a term we used to describe somebody who has a game that just takes advantage of a certain situation. The least amount of condition-specific players that you ever had in a top 20, and the best bowlers in the world are in the top 20. As far as I’m concerned, you look at the USBC championships - the best terms, the teams with the guys that have bowled together, that have all good bowlers on them and that have gotten used to playing off each other and developing a lane, by playing in the same area, they’re on top. I mean, I don’t see where we have false gods in this game any more.

Now if he’s telling me that if he could decrease Traxler, which will turn out to be, as you study, as the big enemy out here. If he says he needs a little help decreasing Traxler so he is not in danger of loosing control over pattern, then say so. But don’t rabble rouse and say the games broken and if we don’t have a regulation game, we’re all going to the devil and the world’s about to come to an end because I don’t believe that that’s the case.

but the case is, if he wants the scientific community to help him with that, the bowling knowledgeable community, the USBC putting in specification division, which has turned 180 degrees in the last year, or the ball manufacturers, who have the specific knowledge on how to make a bowling ball, he wants us, enlist us and we can help him. But when he goes to his tournament he just ran, he goes to a manufacturer outside the normal ball production, and they used some goofed up ball like using different densities of swirling cover stock that settles at a different rate and is a not reproducible ball, I mean that’s just getting people excited about something that just isn’t going to work because that ball alone would be ridiculously expensive coz it was all made out of the most expensive material that goes into the construction of a ball.

Well, you sound like you know a lot about it but John actually just wants to launch an investigation into the subject, and he doesn’t know any of the answers yet but he wants to look into it and see if they can come out with a ball.

He didn’t launch an investigation, he went and got somebody to make some stuff and have everybody throw the ball in the tournament and say, Jeez, I can use 7 or 8 mills of oil and the oil pattern didn’t break down and this, that, and the other thing - its not a scientific investigation. That’s P.W. Barnum policy.
:

Of course, there are some who say you have an inordinate amount of control but it takes a lot more equipment to exercise that control. In other words, the bowler can say I want this ball to handle this condition, I want this other ball to handle the other condition, etc. You know what I’m talking about.

It’s exactly, but the modern game of bowling, and a classic example of how successful Tommy Baker has been on the summer tour. Tommy has finally realized that the modern game of bowling, there are so many different environments: for the first time in the history of bowling, we have some wood lanes, we have 3 or 4 different types of synthetic lanes, we have topography issues, we have hardnesses on all the different synthetic lanes. We have all these lane machines that can put out any volume of oil from the last amount of oil to enough oil that you could fry enough French fries for the U.S.Army for a week. OK, so you’ve got this, the game of bowling today, the environment of the game of bowling is the most wide a spectrum that’s ever been available to bowling. Now, bowling balls are like golf clubs. A guy goes out to play around the golf course, the idea is to look at the shot, recognize the shot, and pick the best piece of equipment in your arsenal that will allow you to complete your task. That’s the way the game is played today. But this sent a lot of random to it because depending on where the players play, how much and what type of ball they use, the oil pattern breaks down totally different from lane to lane or from day to day. So you have a randomness here saying, gentleman, your job is to solve the problem out in front of you. Your job is to go out and figure how to overcome the obstacles in that oil pattern. Coz that oil pattern is not dictated by somebody’s will.

I do have one question though and I’m not sure if, in fact, this is the ideal situation but isn’t bowling in an ideal state something where you need some consistency and some predictability rather than trying to guess, which sounds very capricious, but rather than guess the oil pattern, rather than guess which kind of ball to use, etc.,

We’ve got the “cranker,” the new “cranker” - the kid with the rubber wrist, the guy with the YoYo release that can just tip the cover off the ball, we can put the two handers in there. And then we’ve got the “tweener” and then we’ve got the traditional stroke, the player that just dead rolls the ball and relies on accuracy and smoothness of delivery. And each one of those players should have a valid chance to win, and each one of those players needs a different piece of equipment to maximize their skills and minimize the things that they have the hardest time with, so that they are a part of the game. And that is so very, very true.

Now I’m going to lob one over the net for you: just opposite of a real tough question here, which none of these have been, really. But even the USBC is basically saying how important is the ball any way because they’re reinvestigating based on the system of bowling, as far as what kind of problem we have here and the scope of it. So the bowling balls are only one element of that.

Right, because the environment will dictate the technique. That’s why the successful coaching technique today are not, do not fly in the face of traditional coaching value: they are adaptations of good scientific, bio-mechanical principles, OK? And repetition to the new environment. So the environment will also dictate the techniques and will always dictate the successful equipment So yeah, we have to make sure that it’s a pure environment in terms of it takes the repetition and the physical skills, it takes the conditioning, it takes the strategy and it takes the tactics to be a successful player. And we need that, so now, if you want to tighten up dynamics, so that you raise the skill level, OK, I don’t think there’s a manufacturer opposed to that. Work through the manufacturers and we’re the guys who have the specific knowledge. We can create that bowling ball, as a very less expensive ball to make, to fit their needs. But certain things have to be true: they can’t be arbitrarily decided by a technical committee who has no specific knowledge of how to make a bowling ball. Certain things are going to have to be true, so that it’s manufacturing-friendly and so that we can produce this ball and first of all, its not going to be a commercial success. So we produce the ball that allows the high level and you’re going to have a certain number of balls go because they’re going to be restricted to these ??free? tournaments in each region, each year, something like that, and we can do this as an economic benefit, or at least to the point where it isn’t cost ineffective to do this but you better work through the specific knowledge it takes to make a bowling ball. I’m telling you, since I’ve had balls made by 4 different manufacturers now, my company, OK, there are specific things that have to be true so that it becomes manufacturing-friendly and still meets the need, so we need the people that know this specific knowledge to get together with him and we don’t need this public forum where we’re getting everybody excited and really we aren’t anywhere closer to the answer now than we were 4 weeks, 2 months ago, except we’re more excited about it.

Yeah, sounds like you would not be unwilling to work with the guy in terms of a general vague direction as to what he’s trying to accomplish.

Yeah, we can do certain specifics - I’ll tell you exactly what they are We set a minimum RG, we can set a maximum flare, we can set a volume specification, a density specification in the ball and we can develop a specific cover stock or 2 or 3 choices of, coz each manufacturer wants a chance for XXXX, and make this restricted call?, is it going to be a commercial success? Obviously not. Are we interested in that? No. Is it in the best interest of the game? I personally say that all manufacturers have the best interest in the game at heart.

FINAL QUESTION: and I told you it’s not going to be long for anyone individual, but final question: and that, what do you think is the most important for you to say and bring up in this second chance, if you will, to make sure that we don’t lose sight of what we’re really all about. Maybe you’ve already said it but I’ll give you this other chance, any final thoughts?

What we really need to do is investigate accurately and scientifically, the challenge that he’s facing. And I’m telling you that in ball dynamics, it’s not a linear relationship. For example, he said, we’re going to have a no flare ball with a certain coverage……….. We need to study from where we are now by reducing dynamics, which would be increasing differential, raising RG and find out, with his oil pattern, there’s going to be threshold value here. We’re going to get to a certain point, its going to say, if we get below that point, that area there, that threshold value is a significant difference from what we had before. But we also want to allow to include every style of player for the most styles of player we can within the game that has already developed, so that people have some choices so that, if you were rev?? dominant player, you’re looking for one thing. If you’re an accuracy dominant player, or a swing dominate player, you’re looking for another. And the other thing that scares me historically, the other thing is, this is frightening, is that the last time we had low flaring bowling balls, with not as much friction, that was in the late 80’s, the rev dominant players destroyed the game. Everybody was a twister and those were the only guys who could play. We had a lot of guys quit in the late 80’s when we had the Blue Hammers and those balls where they didn’t have any flare but the guys that could rev it up, could take advantage of whatever track that showed up in the XXXX. That’s one thing. The other thing is, is when we start talking about hook bowling, the game that we all love and that we learned to play on that always had an area penchant??? on the lane, in the old days it was in the wood track, whether it was shellac or lacquer, there was always a high friction area of the lane where the boards to the outside of it hooked less and the boards in the center hooked less. And that’s how we developed our game. But the other is, is we get into this game and then we look at it and we find out that the helicopter game, right? meets the needs of this newly developed environment and all of the sudden, we don’t have a game like we started out with. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. If it turns out to be that, that’s fine. But we better call that another game. We could call it “level bowling” or something like that, coz you know what, its not the game that we traditionally have developed over the ages, The game we have developed over the ages takes advantage of area of the lane, on the right side of the lane, that has more friction on certain boards that are worn or that are inferiorated through wear, than the areas to either side of it have less friction than that area and we’ve learned how to play into that area, we’ve developed the skills of the release and the timing and everything so that we can take advantage of small friction differentials. Or medium friction differentials. Now, if we want to restrict it so that we don’t have large friction differentials that weren’t present as the game developed and there are now possible with the new synthetics as well as the new lane machines, yeah that means, but that’s the oil pattern. Let’s cut down on it a little bit, let’s get this under control but let’s use a scientific organized rational reasonable way of analyzing data, drawing conclusions, being able to defend our position, being able to verify our information and at that point we’ll make the adjustment necessary to make the game right.


JOHN DAVIS
And I’m having a problem doing that. The environment is just too unstable and the ball choices these people are making are not from an area of good knowledge. I see good talent players with the wrong ball, not performing well enough score-wise, as to their execution. But we know, the definition of a good bowler includes knowledge and that also includes knowledge of equipment. Where do you get the knowledge of equipment today?


Yeah, if you can’t resolve problems and have more questions than you have answers, I mean, people are going to be turned off by that.

Yeah, it is very confusing. I mean, back in the late 70’s we had yellow dot LT 48 combination, or the Karmel - White??? combination,

Right

It was a pretty simple choice. Now the choice is unlimited, you see, and people just don’t have the time or the money to vote to learn that. And fewer and fewer do.

Yeah, although right now, playing devil’s advocate,

Yeah, let me get back to this one type of style: if the lanes still guide the ball, it has to now, to some extent - all right, then the stronger hand will dominate. The less guidance you give the ball, the less in the middle as opposed to the outside

And accuracy comes to play, at what point that is with a regulation bowling ball spec, I don’t know. That’s why we want to go through several years of testing and doing tournaments here and there and everywhere and get reactions from people. No, its not written in stone by any - I’m just suggesting that if there are fewer competing players at the world level, as they move into it, and there are few competitive players at the U.S. level, …. …… ….. at some point time that’s going to be a serious financial problem for everyone.

Yeah.

Let’s take a look at other ways to do it, that’s all.

Right now the manufacturers

In my experience, going through rubber, plastique, urethane, resin, particle flare, I saw more confused as time went on. And what I had to do to take care of a lane changed every year, as more and more of my customers got balls that hook more and had to put more oil on it. When just a few had it, no problem …… ……… but as time goes on, I don’t see that this is a good thing.

Yeah. I think, basically, if you ask me, the manufacturers are looking at it from a short term position, they’re interested in protecting the, what they look as an asset rather than looking at the long term health of the game.

I wish they’d look at responsibility. I think, Jim, calling their symposium, like I had before, and get them to talk about it in an open forum, because this is not a different message than I gave in 1997, this is not a different message. I said the environment is being torn to shreds too quickly,

Yeah, exactly. That’s not good for the game.

Well its just not good for the future, that’s for sure. I can’t think of anything that’s really growing as far as the sport goes. We’re having more contestants enter nationally (internationally??) depending on the place we go to, that’s just one team. One federation, we don’t have to come up with 12 bowlers for adults or 8 bowlers for juniors. So that’s a representative, but are there more and more people in each country buying the - I think not. The development’s

You know by yourself

Helping patience for bowling, yes but the developed nations, I don’t’ think we’re getting more and more people that have their eyes on becoming international players.

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MOTIV GIRL