Since the notice of his death, I've been reading up on him, AND his theories on bowling/scoring.

 It would seem that, even as early as the 1950's, that he was already talking about technological advancements in bowling allowing higher and higher scoring while requiring less and less from the participants in order to reach those scores.

  He was called a nut, a crackpot, and a fool full of useless, baseless theories with no proof. The A.B.C. looked at him more as a nuisance than a benefactor, and continually downplayed the role "modernization" was playing in artificially inflating the scores.  From pins, to lane surfaces, to ball technology, he warned them to limit these factors frm the very beginning.

  Now we have lighter, double voided pins with higher centers of gravity and more resilient coatings, making them livlier and easier to knock over than ever before. We have lanes designed to have a "perfect" surface, and oils designed to maximize that surface, along with "legal" oiling patterns that make it easier to hit the pocket. And, when you do hit the pocket these days, it is usually with a reactive resin BOMB, which hits the pins MUCH harder than any RUBBER or PLASTIC ball EVER did.

 As an example, I use myself. Back in March, I had a job change which precludes me bowling on a league. I finished my last league up in early May and haven't touched a ball in almost two SOLID MONTHS.

 I went bowling today, shooting 6 games in a recreational, open play setting, using 14lb equipment. With NO PRACTICE, and WITHOUT BOWLING IN TWO MONTHS, I proceeded to shoot 700 for the first three games, them 646 fr the last three.

 There is NO WAY I should've been able to do that. I'm pretty decent, but I'm pretty rusty as well. Bad shots that had NO BUSINESS carrying, struck with almost predictability. Wall shots, messengers, pins bouncing off walls, rolling around the deck and taking out everything. Yet, I could tell I wasn't throwing it all that good and that my timing is off.

 I love to score well, but this was ridiculous and far too easy. All I had to do was just get it close and watch the BOMBS explode, BOMBS that thirty years ago wouldn't have even been firecrackers, much less BOMBS.

 Perhaps, just perhaps, we should've listened a little more closely.
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Good transactions list in my profile

"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

We could have done nothing about it, nor should we have.

Technology is inevitable. There is no sport on the planet today untouched by it -- at least not any popular sport. I'm sure shuffleboard is pretty much the same as it's ever been but it's also an irrelevant sport.

You give me any sport in the top 15-20 sports in the world and I can probably name three or more technological advancements.

The sports that don't change tend to die off. People like progress, change, new elements they didn't have before. It keeps things interesting for them and without it, they get bored.

The operative question is whether high scoring affected participation in the sport. Most people are starting to come around to the fact that scoring has had little effect in overall participation, that participation numbers have dropped due to socioeconomic factors, time factors and the changing face of American life.

The real hardcore purists say large numbers of people have quit because it's too easy, and no study done on the sport has ever backed that up.

Bill Taylor was ahead of his time, but where either Bill, his fans (or maybe both) get off-track is when they try to tie the scoring environment into league membership numbers. There is no correlation.

And if that's not a concern, the question reverts back to what kind of game are you trying to promote. If you're trying to promote a game where people have to practice 2x a week and bowl another 2x a week to be "good" at it, they're not going to do it. Attention spans aren't what they were even 20 years ago, much less 30-50 years ago. If you turned bowling right now into a sport where 300s were as rare as four-leaf clovers again, where bowlers had to grind to shoot 170 at best and a 450 series was average for most leagues, you would see league bowling die off completely in no time. That ship has sailed.

If the objective is to bring more people into the game, that is done through things like recruiting, pricing, shortening the league season, etc., but mostly face-to-face recruiting -- which the USBC and its local associations, in most places, are too lazy to do. People want to stand around and point fingers at each other and the bowling center rather than getting out and going door-to-door in their neighborhoods. I've always said you have to treat league recruitment like it's church: You don't get people to come to church by building a church, you get them to come by going to their homes and asking them.

There's still time to reverse the trend, but we're going to reverse it with shoe-leather effort, not on dialing back technology.

Jess

I feel the problems lies more in our organization body, the USBC.  Why are people quitting???  Some people think its the conditions being too easy.  I think Jess is right on alot of the factors.  What is the official word though.  Well I find a very simple idea in finding this answer.  USBC has everyone's address on file when they sanctioned, so every bowler who hasn't sanctioned with USBC in the last 3 years, they need to send a survey and ask the following questions.
1. What is the reason that you have not bowled in a sanction league??  
2. If the bowling  enter was a mitigating factor, please list which center and explanation on why you do not wish to return?
3. What options/benefits would entice you to bowl in a league again?
 

Offer something to go with to have ex-bowlers be more inclined to respond.  The reason for the 2nd question, is if USBC receives too many complaints on one house, then they should issue a warning and investigate into possibility of pulling its sanction.  With economic times and the many competing other activities bowling is up against, if a house is pissing alot of members away, then  they are not helping the sport.  How to hurt them, pull the sanctioning where no leagues can bowl there.  I have said this a million times, you can never fill a center of with enough open play on Mon-Thurs, at 6pm, to make more money then leagues would at these prime times.  Especially when school is in.  Quite a few of the local entertainment centers (Combines Video Games, bowling, and other activities like laser tag etc) in the area are really hurting now with the economy being down because the open play numbers are there, and the never really made a true effort in recruiting leagues.  

I am doing some research for my local association and the decline is staggering.  In the 07-08 season, 8,074 bowlers booked a sanctioned average, with 550 of them recording less then 42 games.  In 97-98, the same association had 14,343 bowlers booking a sanctioned average, with 900 recording less then 42 games.  IN 10 years, this is a decrease of around 40%.  Keep in mind, the area we are talking about is metro Atlanta, where the population of the area has increased almost 16% in that same 10 year span.  So somehow we have lost 6,000 bowlers despite the fact that the same area population has increase almost 1,000,000 people.  

The above point is why I think USBC doesn't realize the depth of the problem.  Yes membership is declining 5 percent, but the country population has increase somewhere around 2-3%.  We have a bigger pool of possible participants, but the numbers keeps dropping  Not a good trend..

I have been a fan of Bill Taylor for many years. Although I have never been fanatical about the problem of technology making the game easy.
 I was a delegate to the ABC convention in Louisville either 1977 or 78. Prior to the start of the convention a rep from the BPAA gave a presentation. He told the convention "Higher pin fall equals higher participation equals higher profits".
The idea behind his message was for the ABC to lighten up on lane conditions and denial of award scores, the BPAA got what they wanted !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 In order for many houses to make a profit they need to sell a lot of beer on league night. In order to sell the beer the scoring has to be easy. This is not myth, in my area this is a fact of life !
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All I ever wanted to do get to the line on time & throw the ball well!

Going off the "beer" angle...if a bowler was scoring REALLY well, wouldn't the bowler theoretically get more serious and not drink (or at least stop drinking)?  Perhaps that all-elusive award score is in their sober future?

At the same time, don't people tend to drink to forget their problems?  If a bowler was bowling REALLY poorly, wouldn't they tend to drink more to lessen the pain of an awful night?

Personally, I'n not a big drinker.  But the likelihood of me having a drink is better if I bowled badly.  On the other hand, if I bowled well enough to win jackpot money, then perhaps a round is on me.  But only a few bowlers can win money...while everyone else could bowl bad.  Which truly leads to a bigger bar bill?

Back to the subject...history has proven that Bill Taylor has been right about an awful lot.  I think USBC's lack of a news story regarding his death is proof of how right he was and how USBC looks badly because of it.  Hey...why trumpet the fact that someone who's predictions about the organization's failures have proven true has died?

I started bowling seriously at the end of the black rubber ear and saw the advent of the plastic white dot. I saw first hand the increase is scored even at my tender age of 17 at the time. Then came the Urethane and again I saw the scoring pacing increase. I left the game in the 1990 having returned in 2000 to see yet another advent with core dynamics and increased profeciency in shells.

I was not there to see the impact of double voided pins but have seen plastic and other coating that produse pins that fly around easier.

I have seen the benefits of synthetic surfaces.

Having been a head meachanic from the late 70's until 90 in several centers I know the tricks we used, flat gutter depths, kick panels made of different materials, moving the 10 pin to the legal limit of the rack, using multipul oil on the lane (one that dry out faster outside 10 and one that stays around all night in the center), rounding the bottom of pins.... I seen and done many things.

If you add up all these cheating, artificial score enhancer items and compare them to the advances of bowling ball is is no comparaison... the ball makes the most difference by far!!! Period. No question.

Now in comparaison, there has never been allowed in golf, in tennis in any other major sport a technology that has completely altered the sport to allow less skill. The Big Burtha, the Over Sized Racquet both were deemed too much technology and are now allowed in competition. I am sure there are other items that have been disallowed,,, I am not involved in many other sports.
 
With all respect to Bill Taylor he clearly forcasted this. I have known of him for 40 years and have known him for over 20. He was not a crack pot as many describe him. Anyone who claims doom and gloom are quickly to be labeled crazy like Einstien, DaVinci and others. It is only over time that proof builds enough to overcome the lable.

In my humble opinion bowlers todays that average 230-250 are not the same skill as the bowlers that averaged 210 before 1975. I averaged 220 in 77 and I average 230 now and I laugh at the strikes I get today... and in 77 they were easy. I was bowling 100 games a week, ever week in 77 and now I shoe up 2 times a week 3 games and 6 games.

To those that say technology will come are right. But there is a difference, bowling has allowed technology that completely changed the game to allow LESS, MUCH LESS skill to succeed. No other sport has done that. Each sport has been protective of scoring except bowling. 99% of all scoring records have been set in the past 5 years or so in a sport that is over 100 years old and which is in deep decline with 1/5th the number of bowlers than the hay day.

Scoring is not the problem as to why membership is down. If people keep thinking that way the problem will never be solved.

Jess is on the right direction. I started bowling in the late 60's and stopped around 90 and started up again 3 years ago. And the scoring or balls or lanes had nothing to do with it. If you don't believe that your hiding your head in the sand. The world has changed and for a young person today there is no incentive to be in a league when you can do it on your Wii and even be in a on-line league at the same time.

The problem is people changed but the sport didn't, yes the equipment did the lanes did, but the concept didn't. Young people don't identify with bowling just like they don't identify with baseball. If you don't attractive  them to the sport they will not come and that's the bottom line. Young people have ten times no 20 times the things to do then I did in the 70's and their attention spans are 20 times shorter, so if you don't attract them they won't come, that's the bottom line.

Talk all you want about the other things, bowling needs to attract bowlers and young bowlers and your not going to do that with the I'm sorry to say with this old time thinking.

Nothing is how it was 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago and to keep thinking it will be is blind thinking.

I normally don't post but the thinking has to change if this sport is to continue. And I'm sorry if you get mad or pissed at my comments.

Edited on 7/7/2009 8:52 PM

The death of the bowling banquet also did something else -- it cut a lot of the sense of community out of the leagues.

I bowled on an 8-team league my first year as a league bowler. To this day I remember at least one person from each team. I also remember the banquet we held at the Southwind Restaurant at the end of the year. Seafood buffet. How's that for a memory?

Last year, I bowled on a 24-team league. I remember about half of those teams fairly well, another 6-10 of them I might could pick one person out of a lineup and that leaves two teams, at least, that I couldn't tell you anything about.

Granted, it's easier to remember eight teams than 24, but we're talking about a span of two decades here.

But it's not just bowling. America is becoming more insular, less communal. It's why you've got people more interested in Wii Bowling than real bowling these days.

Jess