Hello everybody...
This thread reminds me why I first started caring about the sport I participate in, and why I went out in the world and sought my own voice so I could speak on such interesting subjects. It reminds me of the first thread that I decided to post in and of the more recent thread that was nearly my last one to post in.
I start this post in a personal manner because bowling is personal to me. It is personal to a lot of us here, and watching the direction in which it has slipped over the years has been heartbreaking at best. Bowling became important for two reasons only for the vast majority of us, and it has become unimportant to a lot of people recently for the same two reasons...and I fear the day that it becomes unimportant to me.
Bowling is like quicksand to one extent--the longer you are in it, the harder it is to get out. For the true bowler (that's us), bowling is a community and in fact a family. No matter how much we might grow to dislike the art of bowling and what it has become, we still love the family. We still cannot bring ourselves to quit because the family is more important than the art. Having kids and getting married only means our family is growing bigger and should be growing stronger.
For many people who have recently quit or for those will quit in the near future, two different reasons can truly explain their decision.
A) The sense of family and community no longer exists for them. The people they bowl with, the employees at the bowling center, and everybody else involved seems as strange to them as an enemy in war. People are different today than they were yesterday--less respectful, less thoughtful, and generally less personal than they used to be. Looking at the 3-4 generatoins that exist in the world today, you can see a decline in morals and ethics that looks a lot like the decline of our sport. People change teams, employees change jobs, and new people replace them at a declining rate (however you prefer to define that which is declining).
B) The importance of the art of bowling has become more important than the family. This truly arbitrary act of tossing a sphere down an alley has somehow consumed the person doing it, and failure at some level for some reason is grounds enough to quit. Either the game isn't fair anymore, or there are no good leagues to bowl in, or there isn't enough money to win, or maybe the scores are just too high. All of these mini-reasons add up to one thing--the art of bowling isn't fun anymore. Many people cannot see beyond that one thing, so they simply say they don't have fun bowling anymore, and they leave it at that.
The real problem is, bowling isn't an art anymore, and it certainly isn't as much of a science as people make it out to be. Or is the real problem the lost sense of community? Which came first...the chicken or the egg? In other words, which happened first--the decline of the community or the growing unimportance of a bowler's skill in regards to the outcome of a tournament, a league, a game, or a single shot? Is it even important to know which came first?
I say ignore all the fluff and all the distraction, and let's focus on those two aspects of bowling. Let's look at where our community has dissappeared to and why, and let's look at why our sport no longer measures true ability anymore. Both are very important, and both have happened over the years at seemingly the same starting point, and have acclerated at seemingly the same pace.
I honestly do not think it matters which came first. I think what matters most is that we learn to reverse both trends as quickly as possible. Finding a real community to belong to is getting harder these days. To me it's more than just saving a sport, it's saving a community and even a way of life.
--------------------
Brian
MichiganBowling.com
http://www.MichiganBowling.comFamous Last Words of a Pot Bowler--"Ok, but this is my last game!"
Edited on 11/9/2004 3:14 PM
