The Discovery of Bowling

“A Stupid History of a Stupid Sport.”

I have nothing against bowling. Not really. I mean, I’m not particularly good at it, but I did beat all my friends the last time I played against anybody, so there’s that. It was one of the better minigames in Wii Sports, in my opinion. Hell, even Kinect Bowling was alright. But I wouldn’t say I like bowling. If I want to go out and do something with people, I’m never gonna be one to stand up and say “Hey cousin, let’s go bowling!” but I’m also never gonna really argue against it, either, if everyone else wants to go throw a ball at some pins. I can be convinced to go with, and I enjoy it when I’m there, but I don’t really get the draw of it, if you know what I mean? I just… I don’t get it. It’s just kind of a thing.

And yet, somehow, bowling is one of the most ludicrously historied games in all of existence. Just like card games, which are perhaps the purest form of gaming entertainment, bowling has a bajillion different variations, regional changes, historical alterations, and a winding past stretching back throughout time like an immense bowling lane of the cosmos. Just look at the glossary for Skittles, a traditional European version of bowling, for fuck’s sake. It’s insane. Somehow, bowling is one of the most nuanced, ancient games still in common practice today. And I fucking hate it.

How well do you know the history of other sports in America? According to some asshole at Sports Brief, whatever that is (some kind of sports underwear, maybe?), the five most popular sports in America are football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey, and soccer. I mean, you can probably switch around the order a little bit and still get the right idea. I figure basketball probably beats out baseball, but whatever. Sports Browser, which I can only assume is google but just for sports, lists the next five most popular as being tennis, golf, wrestling, motor sports (i.e. NASCAR and the Midcoast Maine 4th of July Amateur Demolition Derby), and badminton. Fucking Badminton. Bowling doesn’t even crack the top ten. It got beat out by Owen Wilson’s Lightning McQueen-lookin’ ass. And yet bowling as a sport is older than every other sport on this list, except maybe soccer or wrestling (though I’d hardly count being forced to wrestle your neighbor Cronk to get back the sheep he stole in 20,000 BCE a “sport”).

Sure, lots of these sports have ties to historical antiquity or around the beginning of the industrial era, but our post-modern variations usually have more recent progenitors. American football comes from rugby which comes from the Greeks, but you can tie what we think of as American Football most directly to Walter Camp in the late 19th century. Baseball has ties to colonists in New England and, later, the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club in 1845. Ice Hockey’s got backing in Canada and the northern US for a couple hundred years. Basketball was straight-up invented by some dude at a YMCA in 1891, but at least soccer dates back to a handful of variations both in the ancient old world and new world (see: versions of Aztec death ball). But bowling? Don’t get me started.

Bowling predates the foundation of the United States. Well, sure, so do lots of other things. This country isn’t that old. But bowling also predates Columbian contact in 1492. Bowling predates the country we now know as “England,” with its Doomsday book and William the Conqueror or whoever’s musty norman ass waltzed into the island. But it keeps going. Bowling is not just older than the Roman Empire, bowling is older than Jesus, and I mean that as literally as possible. Actually, let me clarify that a little bit. By going bowling, you are engaging in an activity that predates the religion someone you know probably practices. Simon-Peter could have relaxed from a hard day of building the Catholic Church by going bowling down at Methuselah Lanes.

In the immortal words of Billy Mays, But Wait, There’s More! Bowling still predates the Greeks, too! The original Olympics, from almost 3,000 years ago, could have featured bowling as a competitive sport. Presumably, it wasn’t included so they wouldn’t get laughed at. Famous Greek historian Herodotus, known for his extensive volumes on the ancient world, wrote about bowling. I can only take this to mean that he, too, hit the lanes once in a while. Hm, maybe I should go bowling more often, apparently I’d be in pretty good company.

See that picture up there? With the obscenely-shaped figures at the end? That’s a sketch of an archeology dig from 1895, which uncovered what is believed to be the oldest known record of bowling. Wanna know where he found it? In an Egyptian tomb over seven thousand years old. Some accounts pin it at five thousand years, but there’s evidence older than that. But either way, bowling is older than most, if not all, of the pyramids at Giza. And the wild thing about it is that it’s mostly unchanged for all that time! The tomb had stone balls with holes in them for rolling, it had nine pins to be knocked down, and it had a little gate to pass the ball through, but other than that, it’s bowling! Bowling as we know it is so old that its invention is closer to the end of the ice age than it is to today. This is buck wild to me.

The crazier thing, though, is that it wasn’t like something that was done in ancient Egypt and then forgotten about. See, I first started to plan this post in the winter of 2018, when I went bowling at the Illini Union with my friends Kenny and Eva. I distinctly remember doing a quick google search about the history of bowling, expecting some sort of story like basketball’s YMCA origins, but I just got sucked into this sprawling vortex of madness instead. But I didn’t peer too deeply into the abyss at that point, because what I had “learned” about bowling then was largely wrong. I was under the impression that, for some reason, bowling had disappeared from the world and was “rediscovered” in the 1930’s by an archeologist, who then popularized it as an alternative to some sort of American vice, like billiards or some shit. Like bowling was some sort of entity that has existed since time immemorial, waiting to be revived. But I can’t find any evidence of anything even close to that happening, but what I found instead is maybe even better. Are you ready for this?

Bowling used to be a religious ritual.

Listen, I don’t want to make fun of anyone’s religions, even if they are no longer practiced by anyone, but come on. There is something fucking innately hilarious to me about the idea that, according to Wikipedia, bowling in Germany was “a religious ritual to cleanse oneself from sin by rolling a rock into a club (kegel) representing the heathen.” Even Martin Luther, otherwise known as Protestant Prime, wrote about bowling in a religious context. This feels like some sort of Big Lebowski bullshit. This isn’t ‘Nam, damn it, there are rules! Sure, I can laugh now because of my privilege of existing two thousand years in the future, and I can qualify my laughter with a wave of my hands and some choked-out mumblings about “cultural relativity,” but I can’t help but picture a full-on Viking going bowling for Thor while his brethren blow into horns from the side of the lane or something, and Odin the One-Eyed slaughters a lamb in the background. (Yes, I know it’s the wrong region. What are you gonna do about it?) Forget Bowling for Soup, I’ll take this version, please.

There are little tidbits like this just left lying around all over the place in the history of bowling. Not to jump around too much in time, but another personal favorite of mine is a quote from the United States Bowling Congress, which describes a time in the formation of their bowling league as such; “Disagreement raged between East and West, principally the alignment of New York State bowlers against everyone else.” If that isn’t the most New York thing I’ve ever heard, I’ll eat my bowling shoes. Oh, and in the medieval ages, bowling was so popular with King Henry the 8th (A.K.A the guy who kept trying to kill his wives) that he banned the general populace from going bowling (except, of course, on Christmas). Historic accounts mention that some versions of this legislation were met with such anger that people burned the laws as they were distributed. There’s some sort of ironic meme here, I swear, something about “the government banning books” versus “the government banning bowling” but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

There’s more history to it, I’m sure. The rabbit hole goes deeper. The rabbit hole always goes deeper, if you know what you’re looking for. But bowling always felt to me like one of those things that people kind of do because it’s expected of us, you know? Like, “oh, we’ll go bowling because we can. Because it’s there.” But apparently, I ought to rethink a few things because there is an insane level of depth to this. Like darts, card games, and the Honda Ridgeline, there’s a stupid amount of history and nuance here. Maybe I should be giving bowling a deeper level of appreciation, due to its long, winding history, from ancient Egyptian past-time to common European sport to modern American entertainment powerhouse. I mean, supposedly, 67 million Americans go bowling every year, or 95 million worldwide, depending on who you ask. That’s a lot of people! Surely they wouldn’t just do something because it was “there,” right?

Except, you know what? I still can’t take bowling seriously. Fuck that! Between all the weird strike animations, the kind of grimy subculture that exists around bowling alleys, the bizarre kind of cultural periphery, this outer-orbit that bowling seems to possess in this country where it’s somewhere between a joke and a legitimate sport, bowling is just so weird. To me, bowling will forever be that thing that is a Wii Sports game first, a bizarre amusement second, and a cultural artifact third. I don’t get it, and you can quote me on that!

But ah well, what the hell, let’s go bowling, anyway.