Bowling Quote of the Day--Chicago Bowling Lounge and Kingda Ka

"Moving the action from a theme park with Bugs Bunny and Batman in attendance to a Chicago bowling lounge was tantamount to the difference between Kingda Ka and the Wiggles World (see below)...and it turned out to make all the difference in the world in transforming the event from a "silly season" exhibition into a real competition."

--Jason Thomas

PBA Xtra Frame's Mike J. Laneside Interviews Mike Fagan at Bowl Expo

Bowling Quote of the Day--Old School Doesn't Cut It Today

"If your position is that any iota of anything other than blind devotion to the gentlemen's chess match of professional bowling is anathema, then please direct me to the bowling center or other professional bowling tour using this model to generate massive fans and profits."

--Mike Jakubowski, PBA announcer and publicist, commenting in the PBA Forum

Is This the Future of PBA Telecasts?

I posted an entry the other day about PBA publicist and Xtra Frame announcer Mike Jakubowski's recent column on pba.com. In that column, Mr. Jakuboswki argued that bowling "purists" who want PBA telecasts on ESPN to faithfully mimic the staid ABC telecasts of yesteryear should come to their senses and realize that the PBA needs to keep up with the times and its younger demographic if it's going to survive much less flourish in an age of "computers, video games, cell phones, texting, 500 television channels and the Internet."

He cited contemporary examples of bleating vuvuzelas at NHL playoffs, pounded thundersticks behind the backboards at NBA playoffs, "racing sausages" and females sporting foam fingers and rally hats at MLB games, "thumping music" in many sports venues, and the slick promotional silliness of professional wrestling as laudable examples of ways to draw and keep more fans and suggested that the PBA needs to follow in their footsteps if it's to survive.

Well, maybe he's right, and the collegiate bowling program videos below, referred to me by frequent commenter Kerry, may be a foretaste of where PBA telecasts are headed. While you're watching, be sure to check out that Michael Fagan guy.

What do you think? Is this the direction in which the PBA should take its telecasts?

Mike J. Laneside Thinks PBA Telecasts Need to Change With the Times

"Many other professional sports combine entertainment elements within the sporting event, why can’t professional bowling?"

--Mike J. Laneside

PBA Xtra Frame's outstanding bowling announcer Mike Jakubowski (aka Mike J. Laneside) posted an article yesterday on the pba.com website that should provoke a lot of thought among bowling fans. It certainly has in me.

In his article, Is a Little Fun Really the End of the World?, Mr. Jakubowski argues that professional bowling needs to change with the times and do what's necessary to appeal to today's audience. Thus, bowling "purists" need to quit living in the somber Chris Schenkel style 60's and 70's of PBA telecasts and lighten up and embrace the vuvuzulas, blaring music, cheerleaders, and smack-talking, in-your-face competition of the season-ending Dick Weber PBA Playoffs of the modern era.

Here are some key passages from his article:

"Only a very small percentage of the audience in each sport sits in their seats the entire game or watches the entire telecast at home, watching every nuance, digesting every statistic, interpreting every announcer utterance. A very small percentage, the rest are there to have fun...The world of sports entertainment has changed by leaps and bounds over the last generation, while some professional bowling fans cling to the notion that presenting professional bowling the exact same way it was presented 30 or 40 years ago can engage a new generation of fans brought up on computers, video games, cell phones, texting, 500 television channels and the Internet – and most importantly, sponsors to support the sport. What other sport is presented the exact same way it was presented 30 or 40 years ago?...Pro bowling is starting to resemble professional wrestling? Good, it’s about time. I will take their television ratings, their merchandising outlets, their live audiences, their pay-per-view revenue and their sponsorship opportunities...Professional bowling never was, and never will be professional tennis or professional golf; no matter how desperately some bowlers or fans want it to be. Selling those models to a public that doesn’t buy it will never, ever work. Ever. No matter how often ‘purists’ post to Facebook or opine on message boards...This is the new world of instant social networking, smart phones and reality television. Instead of pining for something we can never be, how about we lean into what we really are?"

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know that I've been pretty critical of the PBA's attempts to make its bowling telecasts more "entertaining." I was especially displeased with its coverage of the "Bottlegate" incident and with the vuvuzelas and the Dick's antics in the Dick Weber PBA Playoffs, and I expressed the hope that the PBA wouldn't try to turn its telecasts into the "bowling equivalent of Wrestlemania."

Yet, judging by Mike J's column, that's exactly where the PBA may be headed because that's where it thinks today's fans and professional bowling's future appears to be if it's to have any future at all.

How do you feel about this? Does Mike J have a point? Do you think the PBA can stay alive and perhaps even become more prosperous by making itself more appealing to a broader demographic less interested in bowling per se than in being entertained, and how far in this direction do you think it can and should go before it goes too far to hold your interest?

I'm going to give the matter more thought and read what others have to say about it. Then I'll post more on the topic in an upcoming entry.

Bowling Quote--Hooray for Mike J

"I absolutely love Mike Jakubowski doing the announcing with Randy Pederson. Jakubowski, who handles the PBA Xtra Frame Webcasts, meshes fantastically with Pedersen and is, in my opinion, far superior to Rob Stone, Pedersen's regular ESPN partner who is busy covering the World Cup. I'm not a Stone hater and I think he's better than predecessor Dave Ryan, but Jakubowski clearly knows bowling a lot better than Stone and he and Pedersen just sounded far better together than Stone and Pedersen ever have."

--Jeff Richgels

Kelly Kulick's Historic Victory

Kelly had a great week, defeating several of the top-ranked men bowlers in the world, and hopefully she can truly enjoy the moment and appreciate how it is not only a big deal in bowling, but a major moment in her life and potentially the lives of others.
--Billie Jean King

This may be the greatest performance I've ever seen given the circumstances.
--Randy Pedersen

You talk about a dream come true...you can't explain it...I'm speechless.
--Kelly Kulick

I’ve been bowling and watching professional bowling for closer to fifty years than forty. I’ve seen just about every great moment in televised PBA history from Billy Hardwick's inaugural TOC title to the first 300 game to Don Johnson’s heartbreaking solid 10-pin in the twelfth frame to Mark Roth’s 7-10 split conversion to Liz Johnson’s second place finish to Jason Belmonte's two-handed triumph last year to, well, you name it. But I can truthfully say, even 24 hours after it occurred and with the heat of my excitement now cooled somewhat by the sobering reality of the sports world’s relative indifference to bowling and to what transpired yesterday, that Kelly Kulick’s steely stellar performance in bowling's equivalent of the PGA Masters, after an almost equally impressive showing two nights before, rises to the top of the list. It was magnificent, it was thrilling, it was moving (I think I saw tears of joy in the legendary Carmen Salvino’s eyes after he congratulated Kelly after the final match, and, for the record, there were in mine too), and it WAS historic for the great sport of bowling. As PBA Xtra Frame's "Bowling Doctor" Jeff Mark excitedly exclaimed after the match, "Our sport will not be the same after today...There's going to be a media wave after today like you've never seen before!"

What was so impressive about Kelly Kulick's 227-223 defeat of "Major" Mike Koivuniemi in the semi-final match and 265-195 crushing of the unofficial world's greatest bowler, Chris Barnes, to win the hugely prestigious title is that she really earned her championship. She bowled all week against a formidable field of some of the greatest male professional bowlers, past and present, of all time and dominated it most of the time. And, as pba.com writer Jason Thomas explains in his column today, it wasn't necessarily a matter of the lanes unusually favoring her softer woman's game over those of the more powerful male players: "This week’s lane conditions favored no one and allowed bowlers to play just about any place on the lane that they felt comfortable," Thomas writes. He proceeds to put Kulick's performance in striking perspective with the following: "It was like Annika Sorenstam beating the men in The Masters at a fully stretched out Augusta National."

Kulick's effort yesterday was a monumental performance under unimaginable pressure. What's more, Kulick showed tremendous class and poise in her interviews after she won the title. Aside from being a great bowler, Kelly Kulick is one intelligent, earnestly articulate, gracious, and seriously focused young lady who is a remarkable credit to bowling and to professional sports in general with her exemplary character and demeanor.

I really hope that the predictions of people like Jeff Mark come true and that Kulick's victory brings to bowling the attention and appreciation it deserves. Jason Thomas reports in his column that "as of Monday morning she was the #1 most searched item on Google and Yahoo!’s home pages." I hope this lasts long enough to help rekindle an interest in women's and men's professional bowling that securely removes them from the brink of extinction. And, in any case, the proverbial sky is now the limit for bowling's new superstar, Kelly Kulick.

Odds and Ends

* Kulick's ball rep reported in an interview with Jeff Mark on PBA Xtra Frame after the tournament that Kulick used an Ebonite Mission with the pin down to win the title and, as I understood him, that she used the same ball with various layouts and, perhaps, surface adjustments throughout the week.

* When Xtra Frame's Jeff Mark asked Kulick about her match with Barnes, she said, "The lanes broke down to the advantage of me. My hand just was able to clear the ball through the front part of the lane really well, and the ball just pounded the pocket." And when Mark commented that she "had such a good look all week" and asked if she "did anything different than before," she replied, "Somebody told me instead of trying to change my hand, change balls. So I really just tried to keep the same hand position all week long and go from ball to ball to give me the better reaction."

* In her interview with Xtra Frame announcer Mike Jakubowski, Kulick commented that she was so nervous she couldn't feel her legs most of the day but that winning that first match with Mika built her confidence and enabled her to "groove into the lane" and throw all those strikes by focusing not on beating Chris but on executing and knocking down the pins.

* Randy Pedersen commented during the televised action that Kulick had the crowd behind her all week and that this surely helped her. When ESPN announcer Rob Stone asked him to quantify how much this helps a bowler, Peterson replied that it was probably worth about 12 pins a game. And Kulick herself acknowledged during her interview with Jakubowski the importance of the crowd's support when she said, "By far the secret to my success this week was the crowd. I mean they were behind me from the get go from match play on, and here today it was the energy from you guys out there that really carried me over."

First Round Match Play in Dublin

I've spent a couple of hours this morning watching live match play at the Earl Anthony Memorial Open in Dublin, California on Xtra Frame on the PBA website. As I type this, the video coverage has concluded until 2 PM PST, but game seven of a best-of-seven game match between Eugene McCune and PJ Haggerty is still unfolding, and I'm following the frame by frame scoring of it on the PBA website.

I know PJ's mom, Debbie. In fact, we just won the doubles championship of a small fall league a few weeks ago, and this is actually the second time we've done this since I moved to Sacramento and started bowling league where I do now. Debbie has been voted by Bowlers Journal as one of the top 100 bowling coaches in the USA, and she was also voted by the USBC as the top junior bowling coach in the country last year. She runs a marvelous junior program at Fireside Lanes, and she's a good person.

Her son PJ was two time collegiate bowler of the year at Fresno State and is now an exempt player and Columbia 300 staff member on the PBA tour. He hasn't been on the national tour long and hasn't made it to the TV finals yet, but maybe this week will be his week as I see that he's just defeated Eugene McCune in the round of 28 and will next face Steve Weber in a best-of-seven match in the round of 16 to be bowled later today.

One of the things I enjoyed about this morning's Xtra Frame coverage was a guy named Rob Allen who sat in with Xtra Frame commentators Mike Jakubowski and Jeff Mark and displayed his unbelievably encyclopedic knowledge of PBA tournament results over the past forty-five years. He could list every Tournament of Champions winner from the beginning in 1965, and he seemed to know who won just about every PBA tournament, where it was held, whom he beat, and what score he shot to win since that time. People watching Xtra Frame could write in and challenge Allen with trivia questions, and he was up to the challenge an overwhelming majority of the time. It was a nice trip down bowling memory lane and an amazing display of a prodigious memory.