Bowling-Lane Oiler Mounts a Campaign Against Perfection

Bowling-Lane Oiler Mounts a Campaign Against Perfection

In Top Amateur Tournament, Eric Pierson Has a Goal: Just Enough 300 Games

By STEVE LEVINE May 31, 2006;PageA1

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- Eric Pierson thinks there are too many perfect games in bowling, and he knows what to do about that.

The 41-year-old Mr. Pierson is the lane manager for amateur bowling's premier event, the U.S. Open Championship, a five-month competition involving about 63,000 players now under way in this port city on the Gulf of Mexico.

It isn't that Mr. Pierson hates to see players reach the pinnacle of bowling, achieved when they knock down all 10 pins, 12 times in a row, for a perfect score of 300. But, in Mr. Pierson's opinion, there's such a thing as too much flawlessness.

His management tool is oil, which all bowling alleys spread on their lanes. Oil protects the lane surface, but oil artists like Mr. Pierson can use it to make the game harder or easier depending on how they apply it.

The first official perfect U.S. bowling game was rolled in 1907. It was the only one that year. Two more players managed the feat in 1908. Last year, members of the U.S. Bowling Congress, the sport's amateur association, tallied a record 51,192 perfect games in league and tournament play.

Are today's bowlers so much better than their forebears of a century ago? Mr. Pierson doesn't think so, and most bowling experts agree. They say that bowlers, like golfers and tennis players, are taking advantage of technology to improve their games.

That bothers traditionalists, who say the integrity of some of the world's most nuanced precision games is at risk. Golf officials have tried to fight back by lengthening championship courses and limiting the size of titanium club heads. Former tennis star John McEnroe has called for a return to the wooden racket.

But while golfers are driving farther and tennis players are hitting more aces, they have nothing on bowlers. To score a strike, bowlers are generally aiming to hook the ball into what they call "the pocket," the space between the front pin and the next pin on either side. If the pins are walloped just right, they knock or bounce into one another, and all 10 pins will fall. It used to be an extraordinary feat to knock down all the pins at once a dozen times in succession. Few players had the consistency to do that. But in the late 1980s, the sport began to shift away from polyester balls to super-engineered polyurethane balls with special resins and particles that grip the lanes better and strategically weighted cores that make aiming easier.

The maple pins were covered with a new plastic called Surlyn that not only protected them better but made them bouncier and easier to topple.

As a result, the bowling congress has seen an explosion of perfect scores, with more perfect games rolled last year than the combined total racked up in the 87 years after official record-keeping began in 1895.

Declining interest in organized bowling has made the problem worse. In the sport's U.S. heyday, the 1960s to the early 1980s, bowling alleys served as magnets for teenagers and as social venues for adults gathering to drink beer and compete in local leagues. But league participation has fallen to under 3 million players from more than 4 million at the zenith, the bowling congress says. So many bowling-alley owners, according to officials of the sport, have tried to make it easier for players to roll high scores. "There are fewer bowlers, so they want the ones still bowling to feel good," says Matt Cannizzaro, the spokesman for this year's championship here.

Many bowling alleys have opted for oil patterns that raise scores, which, along with the improved balls, help account for the climb in perfect games, experts say. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bowling Congress, trying to slow the pace of perfect scores, is encouraging the growth of "sport bowling," a version of the game in which the oil is strictly limited so as to increase the challenge.

The bowling congress has watched as perfect games have soared in its prestigious annual tournament. After the first tournament in 1895, it took 13 years before a player, using a wooden ball, delivered the first 300 score. By the 1990s, the tournament was regularly seeing 25 to 50 perfect games.

When players scored 64 perfect games in the 2002 tournament, it was too much for Mr. Pierson, the lane manager. "I think that's outrageous," he says.

Mr. Pierson, who has been bowling seriously since he was 11 and has bowled in the national tournament for 23 straight years, began working as a lane official in 1998. He was promoted to lane manager for the 2004 championship, giving him authority to decide on an oil pattern and to make sure it's applied consistently for each competitor.

When Mr. Pierson, who lives in Waukesha, Wis., began in January to prepare for the tournament, one of his goals was to avoid another flood of perfect scores like that of 2002. But he didn't want to go as far as last year, when the oil pattern helped to limit the players' average score to about 169, and the number of perfect games was a relatively low 13.

Mr. Pierson and tournament officials thought a more reasonable average score was a bit higher -- about 171 or 172, he says. As for perfect games, Mr. Pierson decided "30 is a great number."

All bowling alleys use a lubricant composed mostly of mineral oil to protect the lanes from the battering of dropped, heaved and sometimes bounced balls. But, after bowling just two or three balls, skilled players can detect the pattern in which the oil was applied -- where it's thick, where it's thin -- and try to aim in a way that after a while grooves out an effective guide straight to the pocket.

He says he relies mostly on his own experience to know which oil pattern will produce the desired result. He began his calculations this year by using a pattern suggested by the manufacturer of the oil and the automated oil applicator, Florida-based Kegel Co. Inc.

He applies 19 milliliters of oil -- about four teaspoons -- to each 60-foot lane, starting near the foul line at the front of the lane and running another 39 feet toward the pins. As is typically done on bowling lanes everywhere, he leaves the last 20 feet oil-free so the ball can get a good grip on its final hook into the pocket.

A few days before the tournament began in February, Mr. Pierson invited local Corpus Christi bowlers to try out the lanes. After watching three players, Mr. Pierson noticed that they were finding it too easy to hook the ball into the pocket by rolling it along a trajectory near the center of the lane. There evidently was too little oil down the center, Mr. Pierson concluded. He widened the track of thick oil there.

Mr. Pierson and his assistants run the red, rectangular applicators over the lanes three times a day. After carefully cleaning the trunk-size machines, he fills them with oil and lines them up in front of the lanes, one at a time. The battery-powered machines then move automatically up the lane and back, removing the previous oil and then applying a new coat. The idea is to provide all players, whenever they happen to bowl, precisely the same pattern.

It's probably just as well that the subtleties are lost on some bowlers. Ron Crocraft, a 62-year-old resident of San Leandro, Calif., bowling in his tenth consecutive national tournament, said he hasn't noticed any special challenge this year with the oil pattern. "I have no trouble with the lanes any year. It's the bowler" who makes the difference.

So far, the lanes seem to be just about right this year. Three-fourths of the way through the tournament, players have rolled 25 scores of 300, and accumulated averages of about 174. "I think we're on target," Mr. Pierson says.

Write to Steve LeVine at