November 11-17, 2004

naked city

Gutter Punk'd

by Cory Frolik

On day two of a three-day East Coast Bowling Centers Convention, the exhibit hall of Bally's Casino in Atlantic City was swarming with business people working to transform the "sport" of bowling. The new sensibility they're striving for diverges from the Joe Sixpack image of the game. While the Al Bundys of the world will always be drawn to the lanes, companies looking to invite everyone to the party—and milk every last shilling out of America's most popular participation sport—risk turning the game into a perverse kind of circus.

At one booth we find The Flashy Foot Wear Co., an outfit that makes "shoe slips." The slips, essentially bright, decorative shoe protection, come in styles from American flags to flames. Larry Magidoff, owner and founder, explains that because "a shoe slides [more] on synthetic lanes," you just might need a glow-in-the-dark bootie to improve your game. Random, yes, but at a convention brimming with Quick Change Thumb Inserts, balls filled with ectoplasm and bowling-themed Christmas ornaments, no one seemed to find it odd.

A booth for the Karaoke Center—a company that outfits lanes with karaoke capabilities—blasted bubblegum pop, part of it's shock-and-awe attack on the senses. This booth sold enough strobe bulbs to fill Hunter Thompson with fear and loathing twice over. Just how anyone could concentrate on picking up a spare with such visual and auditory chaos is not for me to answer.

John LaSpina, the convention chairman, commented on bowling's transformation: "It's a different business."

It certainly seems so.

"The industry is consolidating (youth, women, all bureaucracies) into one," LaSpina said. Which would be all nice and tidy if not for corporations upping the ante. Pam Hosp of Strike Ten Select (a marketing firm that works as a mediator between alley owners and large corporations) says, "70 million people across the country bowl at least once a year. Corporate America wants to get to the customer."

Bowling alleys, like chrome diners, were once charming in their notable resistance to progress (George Parker, William H. Macy's character in Pleasantville, sought refuge from a world that was colorfully changing around him in an alley). But, as the trade show demonstrated, these anachronisms are slowly fading.

And yet, in the belly of this beast, there was beauty. Giro Chierchio carves sculptures—from Star Trek's Enterprise to an abstraction of the phantom from Phantom of the Opera—out of bowling balls. After throwing a 300 game, Chierchio said he was "curious to see the insides of the ball [that gave him] 23 strikes in the row."