Yes with the Excalibur being the first reactive ball that would make bradl being born about 1973-74 time frame!

The first reactive resin bowling ball was the Columbia bleeder circa '75....the second was the original Faball blue hammer

I believe the Columbia yellow dot bleeder was a soft plastic ball and the blue Hammer was a pure urethane.  The best yellow dots were the early ones with a serial number that started with 5T.

I'm just a genx'r but anything after 2005 has been disastrous. If your wondering why that particular year, do an internet search on what happened to sanctioned bowling that year.

As a younger bowler 29 ( not that young) i gotta say i love reading the info you guys are giving from back in the day. I love the sport and wish sometimes i could go back in time and test my skills

bradl,

So if you were 18 when reactives got going (1992), that puts your birth around 1974.  You started bowling when you were 4 and know about the game from the 70's?

And the best "era" for bowling was 73-93, which covers plastic, all of urethane, and the beginning of reactive?

Am I the only one confused?

Yes with the Excalibur being the first reactive ball that would make bradl being born about 1973-74 time frame!

Yep.. that's right. Born in 1974. My uncle got my mother into bowing in the late 1960s. By the time shortly after I was born she was bowling 2 nights a week, so I was literally running around a bowling alley by the time I was 3 to 4. After league was over, she'd pay .75 or $1 or whatever it was, help me with an 8lb ball, and either run and drop it or granny it on the lane. Comfort me when I cried because every ball fell in the gutter, or watch me jump up and down when I took a corner pin off the rack.

But every Saturday when my dad wanted to watch football, I begged him to stop on the PBA Tour when he flipped through the channels.. and back then, you had to turn the channel knob, so you had to go through it, especially if you only had 3 stations on the main knob in Omaha (the UHF knob is where PBS and all snow was). So I got to see a lot of Anthony, Roth, Berardi, Dickinson, Durbin, Weber, Salvino, Bluth, Myers, Schlegel, Troup, and all of golden era guys when they were on the tour, and before there was a Senior or Women's tour.

IIRC, YABA rules back then even said that you had to be 5 to start bowling, so my first league wasn't until 1979. Since that league, I traded Smurfs, Spiderman & His Amazing Friends, Dungeons and Dragons, Mighty Orbots, Blackstar, and CBS StoryTime on Saturday mornings for an 8lb. Powder Blue White Dot and clown shoes. And still made it home in time to catch the Tour.

So I got to see a lot of bowling. I almost gave up the sport after the season ended in 1987 because the coaches bailed on the league and it was as if the alley didn't care. But we moved that year, went to a different house, and saw kids my age using fingertip drills and grips, while I was still in a conventional grip. That's when I knew I wasn't taking the game as seriously as I thought I was, so I gave it one more try, and haven't looked back. The rest... is history.

Anywho, if it weren't for my mother letting me bowl after her league ended, I wouldn't have had any interest in the sport, especially from back then. Seeing old matches from then reminds me of my youth.. literally speaking!

BL.

As per Justrico stated about the bleeder yellow dot! Columbia 300 did a lot a experimenting with coverstock a lot because of the Sur D! When it was outlawed for the hardness rule they had the bleeder and the red dot had an additive that gave the cover a different texture as did the orange dot! Brunswick tried to do something different with the cover of the Mark X that made the cover ripple on most of them and didn't work out to well. It probably all started when guys back in the day would soak their bowling balls in solvents to make the cover softer, before the hardness rules in the early 70's! Just my $.02, Bruce

Always makes me jealous when I hear about those that had youth programs around or whose parents got them into bowling. We had diddly around here til about 10 years ago when they added high school programs. Of course by then I was long since out of high school.

I don't know if it has to do more with location than exposure, but I know how you mean.

Back to my mother. where she grew up at in southeastern Oklahoma, there was only 1 bowling alley, and it was a 35 mile drive to it. But to my knowledge, they had a youth program there, at least when I went to it every time we visited my grandparents. I want to say it was the only bowling alley in a 50 mile radius of that town (Paris, TX). Again, this is small town/rural country, so that made a difference. It could be that most other places wouldn't care, because the sport didn't get any sort of traction there. If Paris didn't already have that traction, every boy would have been lost to football in either Oklahoma or Texas.

Jealousy.. I know how you feel, because when I was in high school, I was invited to join the elite youth bowling league in our city: Junior Traveling Classic. Minimum requirement was a 150 average sustained over 2 years. That was our leap pad to being scouted by collegiate teams (Nebraska, Kansas, Kansas State, Wichita State, Mankato State, and at least 5 others all in 3 hours drive). A lot of us made it to collegiates...

But we missed out on everything that Junior Olympic Gold now offers.. and to make it worse/better, performance in the JTC is now a ticket to the JoG tournaments, as well as collegiate scouting. If we had that back then, who knows what the potential for our crop would have been.

BL.

Its kind of odd here, pretty much every town has its own bowling center,  but it hasn't ever seemed like anyone ever did anything to try and generate new bowlers.

I always had to go to the one Murfreesboro when I got older because my local one in Shelbyville was more like a honky tonk than a bowling alley. Too many rednecks and too many fights. Not to mention the owner didn't take care of his customers or the center either.

Luckily there was about 5 places I could go within 30 to 45 minutes of my house so I just chose somewhere else.