Ten-pin bowling


Ten-pin bowling is a type of bowling in which a bowler rolls a bowling ball down a wood or synthetic lane toward ten pins positioned in an equilateral triangle at the far end of the lane. The objective is to knock down all ten pins on the first roll of the ball, or failing that, on the second roll.
An approximately long approach area used by the bowler to impart speed and apply rotation to the ball ends in a foul line. The, lane is bordered along its length by gutters that collect errant balls. The lane's long and narrow shape limits straight-line ball paths to angles that are smaller than optimum angles for achieving strikes; accordingly, many advanced bowlers impart side rotation to hook the ball into the pins.
Oil is applied in different patterns to approximately the first two-thirds of the lane's length to add complexity and regulate challenge in the sport. Especially when coupled with technological developments in ball design since the early 1990s, easier oil patterns, commonly called house shots or typical house patterns, enable many league bowlers to achieve scores rivaling those of professional bowlers who must bowl on more difficult patterns—a development that has caused substantial controversy.
People approach bowling as either a demanding precision sport or as a simple recreational pastime. Following substantial declines since the 1980s in both professional tournament television ratings and amateur league participation, bowling centers have increasingly expanded to become diverse entertainment centers.
In most parts of the world, the game is commonly referred to simply as "bowling". In Canada and the New England region of the United States, the game is specifically called "ten-pin bowling" or "big-ball bowling" to distinguish it from sports with smaller balls such as candlepin bowling, duckpin bowling, and five-pin bowling. In the United Kingdom, it is formally referred to as "ten-pin bowling", as "bowling" can also refer to bowls.

Facilities and equipment

Lanes

Ten-pin bowling lanes are from the foul line to the center of the head pin, with guide arrows about from the foul line. The lane is wide and has 39 wooden boards, or is made of a synthetic material. The approach has two sets of dots, respectively and behind the foul line, to help with foot placement.
Modern bowling lanes have oil patterns designed not only to shield the lanes from damage from bowling ball impacts, but to provide bowlers with different levels of challenge in achieving strikes. As illustrated, a typical house pattern has drier outside portions that give bowling balls more friction to hook into the pocket, but heavier oil concentrations surrounding the centerline so that balls slide directly toward the pocket with less hooking. In the more challenging sport patterns used in tournaments and professional-level matches, a "flat" oil pattern—one with oil distributed more evenly from side to side—provides little assistance in guiding the ball toward the pocket. The ratio of centerline oil concentration to side oil concentration can exceed 10-to-1 for THSs but is restricted to 3-to-1 or less for sport shots.
Lane oils, also called lane conditioners, are composed of about 98% mineral oil that, with numerous additives, are designed to minimize breakdown and carry-down that would change ball reaction after repeated ball rolls. Lane oils are characterized by different levels of viscosity, with oils of higher viscosity being more durable but causing balls to slow and hook earlier than lower-viscosity oils.

Balls

Rubber balls were eventually supplanted by polyester balls and polyurethane balls. Coverstocks of bowling balls then evolved to increase the hook-enhancing friction between ball and lane: reactive resin balls arrived in the early 1990s, and particle-enhanced resin balls in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, the increasingly sophisticated technology of internal cores has increased balls' dynamic imbalance, which, in conjunction with the coverstocks' increased friction, enhances hook potential to achieve the higher entry angles that have enabled dramatic increases in strike percentage and game scores.
Hook potential has increased so much that dry lane conditions or spare shooting scenarios sometimes compel use of plastic or urethane balls, to purposely avoid the larger hook provided by reactive technology.
The USBC regulates ball parameters including maximum diameter, maximum circumference, and maximum weight.

Ball motion

Because pin spacing is much larger than ball size, it is impossible for the ball to contact all pins. Therefore, a tactical shot is required, which would result in a chain reaction of pins hitting other pins. In what is considered an ideal strike shot, the ball contacts only the 1, 3, 5 and 9 pins.
Most new players roll the ball straight, while more experienced bowlers may roll a hook that involves making the ball start out straight but then curve toward a target, to increase likelihood of striking: USBC research has shown that shots most likely to strike enter the pocket at an angle of entry that is achievable only with a hook.
A complex interaction of a variety of factors influences ball motion and its effect on scoring results. Such factors may be categorized as:
Bowling pins are "spotted" in four rows, forming an equilateral triangle with four pins on a side to form a tetractys. Neighboring pins are centered apart, leaving a space of between pins that can be bridged by a bowling ball of regulation diameter.
Pin carry—essentially, the probability of achieving a strike assuming the ball impacts in or near the pocket—varies with several factors. Even before a 2008 USBC pin carry study, it was known that entry angle and ball weight increase strike percentages. The 2008 study concluded that an impact with the ball centered at "board 17.5" causes pin scatter that maximizes likelihood of striking. The material of the pin deck and "kickback" plates was also found to materially affect pin carry.

Ball delivery

Delivery style categories

Three widely recognized categories are stroker, cranker and tweener.
A conventional grip, used on non-customized house balls and some custom-drilled balls, involves insertion of fingers to the second knuckle. A fingertip grip, involving insertion of fingers only to the first knuckle, enables greater revolution rates and resultant hook potential. A thumbless grip, often used by so-called "two-handed" bowlers, maximizes ball rotational speed.

Scoring

Traditional scoring

In traditional scoring, one point is scored for each pin that is knocked over, and when less than all ten pins are knocked down in two rolls in a frame, the frame is scored with the total number of pins knocked down. However, when all ten pins are knocked down with either the first or second rolls of a frame, bonus pins are awarded as follows.
The World Bowling scoring system—described as "current frame scoring"—awards pins as follows:
The maximum score is 300, achieved with ten, not twelve, consecutive strikes but with no bonus pins received in the tenth frame.
World Bowling scoring is thought to make bowling easier to follow than with traditional scoring, increase television viewership, and help bowling to become an Olympic sport.

Variant of World Bowling scoring

Another variant of scoring, a 12-frame system introduced at the November 2014 World Bowling Tour finals, resembles golf's match play scoring in counting the greater number of frames won rather than measuring accumulated pinfall score. A frame may be won immediately by a higher pincount on the first roll of the frame, and a match may be won when one player is ahead by more frames than remain of the possible 12 frames. This variant reduces match length and scoring complexity for two-player matches.

History

Early history

Modern American ten-pin bowling derives mainly from the German Kegelspiel, or kegeling, which used nine pins set in a diamond formation. Some sources refer to an 1841 Connecticut law that banned ninepin bowling because of its perceived association with gambling and crime, and people were said to circumvent the prohibition by adding a tenth pin; other sources call this story a mere fable while earlier sources explicitly confirm the strategy. Even earlier, an 1834 Washington, D.C. ordinance had limited the time and place of "nine pin and ten pins" or "any game in the likeness or imitation thereof... played with any number of pins whatsoever". In any event, newspapers referred to "ten pin alleys" at least as early as 1820
.
A painting thought to date from around 1810 shows British bowlers playing outdoors with a triangular formation of ten pins, which would predate the sport's asserted appearance in the United States. In any event, the enjoyment of kegeling by German peasants contrasted with the lawn bowling that was reserved for the upper classes, thus beginning bowling's enduring reputation as a common man's sport.
In the mid 1800s, various alternatives to free-standing pins received U.S. patents to solve perceived problems in pinsetting and ball return, aiming to avoid the need for human pinsetters to perform these functions. One scheme involved pins with spherical bases that when hit by a ball merely fell over, in place, to be rotated back to a vertical position. A second arrangement involved resetting the pins via cords descending from respective pin bottoms to weights beneath the pin deck. Another design involved suspending the pins with overhead cords.
In 1884, the Brunswick Corporation became the first American bowling ball manufacturer, and by 1909 introduced the Mineralite ball that was considered so revolutionary that it was displayed at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1934. In 1886, Joe Thum—who would become known as the "father of bowling"—began opening bowling alleys and over decades strove to elevate the sport's image to compete with upper-class diversions such as theaters and opera houses.
In 1875, delegates from New York City and Brooklyn bowling clubs formed the National Bowling Association to standardize rules, but disagreements prevailed. In 1887 Albert G. Spalding wrote Standard Rules for Bowling in the United States, and in the mid-1890s the United Bowling Clubs was organized with 120 members. The American Bowling Congress was established in 1895, followed by the Women's International Bowling Congress in the 1910s, such organizations promoting standardized rules and striving to improve the sport's image.
From 1920 to 1929, the number of ABC-sanctioned alleys grew from 450 to about 2,000, with Prohibition leading to the growth of family-appropriate "dry" alleys. The 1933 repeal of Prohibition allowed breweries to sponsor teams and bowlers, adding to bowling's reputation as a working class sport. Though at the turn of the twentieth century most bowling alleys were small establishments, post-Prohibition bowling lanes shifted from side entertainment at fancy Victorian venues or seedier saloons to independent establishments that embraced the Art Deco style and fit the era's perceived "need for speed".

1940s to early 1960s

Gottfried Schmidt invented the first mechanical pinsetter in his garage in 1936, one implementation of which was publicly exhibited in 1946 before AMF placed a production model into service in 1952.
The 1940s through the 1970s became known as the "golden age of bowling", with ABC membership growing from 700,000, to 1.1 million, to 2.3 million, to 4.5 million, Women's International Bowling Congress membership growing from 82,000 to 866,000, American Junior Bowling Congress membership growing from 8,000 to 175,000, and sanctioned individual lanes growing from 44,500 to 159,000.
Bowling's growth was fueled by deployment of automatic mechanical pinsetters by AMF and Brunswick, television broadcasts, modernization and stylization of establishments with amenities to attract broader clientele, and formation of bowling leagues. Though President Truman had installed a bowling alley in the White House in 1947, a report of the American Society of Planning Officials in 1958 characterized bowling alleys as the "poor man's country club".
ABC bylaws had included a "white-males-only" clause since its inception in the 1890s, but numerous lobbying efforts and legal actions after World War II by civil rights and labor organizations led to a reversal of this policy in 1950.
Eddie Elias founded the Professional Bowlers Association in 1958 with 33 members. The Pro Bowlers Tour TV program aired from 1962 through 1997.
In the 1930s and 1940s, professional bowling was dominated by “beer leagues” with many of the best bowlers sponsored by beer companies, but by 1965 the PBA tour was televised nationally on ABC Sports with sponsors such as Coca-Cola and Ford.
In parallel with professional bowling was "action bowling" or "pot bowling"—bowling matches based on monetary bets—historically associated with the New York underworld from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Late 1960s to 1980

The first tenpin lanes in Europe had been installed in Sweden in 1909, but attempts to popularize the sport in Europe were unsuccessful over the next several decades, though hundreds of lanes were installed on U.S. military bases in the U.K. during World War II. Various countries developed the sport to some extent, and the Fédération Internationale des Quilleurs was formed in 1952 to coordinate international amateur competition.
A firmer establishment of the sport began in the U.K. in 1960 in London in January 1960, and the British Tenpin Bowling Association was formed the following year. Various other countries, including Australia, Mexico and Japan, adopted the trend over the ensuing decade. After initial faddish growth in the U.K., however, the sport did not thrive as it did in the U.S., and by the 1970s many British bowling alleys were converted to serve competing pastimes, such as bingo.
The "Lane Master" automatic lane cleaning and conditioning machine was first deployed in the 1960s.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, top bowling professionals made twice as much money as NFL football stars, received million-dollar endorsement contracts, and were treated as international celebrities. The $100,000 Firestone Tournament of Champions launched in 1965, in a decade that saw ABC membership peak at almost 4.6 million male bowlers. The number of sanctioned bowling alleys peaked at about 12,000 in the mid-1960s, mostly in blue-collar urban areas, and Women’s International Bowling Congress membership peaked at 4.2 million members in 1979.
In the late 1960s, the participation sport of bowling found itself competing with spectator sports and outdoor recreational activities. The number of certified bowling centers was to eventually decline from its 1960s high of 12,000 to 6,542 in 1998 and 3,976 in 2013. The decline was noted acutely in waning league participation over the intervening decades.

1980 to 2000

Tournament prize funds in the 1980s included the PBA National Championship and the Firestone Tournament of Champions, and PBA membership approached 2,500. Ten-pin bowling became an exhibition sport at the 1988 Summer Olympics, was a medal sport at the 1991 Pan American Games, and was included in the 1998 Commonwealth Games.
Outside elite and professional bowling, participation in leagues—traditionally the more profitable end of the business—declined from a 1980 peak, compelling alleys to further diversify into entertainment amenities. While league bowling decreased by 40 percent between 1980 and 1993, the total number of bowlers actually increased by 10 percent during that period, with nearly 80 million Americans going bowling at least once during 1993. In 1995, the National Bowling Stadium was constructed at a cost of $47.5 million, but the PBA Pro Bowlers Tour TV program was canceled in 1997 after a 35-year run.
In 1991, equipment manufacturer DBA Products released "The Lane Walker"—the first computer-driven lane cleaning and oiling machine, programmable to clean up to 50 lanes.
The early 1990s brought development of reactive resin balls with chemically "tacky" surfaces that enhance traction to dramatically enhance hook and substantially increase the likelihood of striking, raising average scores even for less experienced bowlers.
The Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association reported 1997 bowling product sales of $215 million, the SGMA president attributed an increase in popularity to bowling alley remodeling, technological innovations in balls and lanes, computerized scoring, and promotion by bowling organizations.

2000 to present

From 1998 to 2013, the number of American bowling centers fell by one quarter. Similarly, in the two decades following 1997, the number of USBC-certified lanes—also indicative of business viability—declined by one-third. This business decline is often attributed to waning league participation: USBC membership—indicative of league participation that was the main source of revenue—declined by two-thirds in those two decades, and the portion of alley revenue attributable to leagues is estimated to have dropped from 70% to 40%. Political scientist Robert D. Putnam's book Bowling Alone asserts, with some controversy, that the retreat from league bowling epitomizes a broader societal decline in social, civic and community engagement in the U.S.
As an indication of the decline, AMF Bowling, the largest operator of bowling centers in the world at the time, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001, and again in 2012. By 2013, AMF Bowling had merged with New York-based Bowlmor, the company becoming known as Bowlmor AMF.
In 2000, three former tech industry executives bought a debt-laden PBA—which saw its 36-year television contract with ABC Sports end in 1997—and turned it from a non-profit league into a for-profit organization, and invested heavily in marketing. The January 2005 merger of four U.S. bowling organizations to form the USBC formed a "central brand" aiming to grow the sport. Beginning late in the decade of the 2000s, the two-handed approach became popularized, first by Australian Jason Belmonte, with some hoping that the controversial delivery style would boost popularity of the sport. In January 2013, the eight-team PBA League began competition, the strategy being that basing teams in specific geographic localities would generate viewer enthusiasm and corporate sponsorship in the same manner as teams in other professional sports. Still, continuing the reversal of bowling's peak popularity in the 1960s, in the 2012-2013 season the average yearly winnings of the ten highest-earning PBA competitors was less than US$155,000, and the average for the remaining 250 competitors was $6,500—all much less than a rookie NFL football player’s minimum base salary of $375,000.
Estimates of the number of total bowlers in the U.S. have varied, from 82 million to 51.6 million to 71 million, the USBC stating in 2019 that bowling is still the #1 participation sport in the U.S. More broadly, the International Bowling Museum stated in 2016 that bowling is played by 95 million people in more than 90 countries. In an era of continual decline in league participation, bowling centers promoted "party bowling" and black-light-and-disco-ball "cosmic bowling" and experienced a shift from blue-collar participants to open-play family-oriented clientele in combined bowling and entertainment centers.
In contrast to the U.S., the 2000s and 2010s brought a bowling renaissance in the U.K., achieved by accommodating sophisticated modern tastes by providing retro style bowling alleys outfitted with 1950s Americana, "boutique bowling", "VIP lanes", and cameras for instant replays, and by rejuvenating bowling "alleys" into diverse-entertainment bowling "centres". The population of ten-pin bowling centres grew from a low of barely 50 to over 200, with almost a third of Britons going bowling in 2016 and league participation growing over 20% over two years.
Though ten-pin bowling was a demonstration sport in the 1988 Summer Olympics and has been included in the Pan American Games since 1991, after making the short list for inclusion in the 2020 Summer Olympics, it was cut. One commentator noted that the sport's limited geographic popularity, and aging demographic of those who follow the sport, make it difficult to convince an Olympic Committee that wants to appeal to youth.

Bowling organizations

International

was formed in 2014 from component organizations of the Fédération Internationale des Quilleurs, which in 1952 developed from the International Bowling Association which began operations in 1926. Since 1979 the International Olympic Committee has recognized the FIQ, and later, WB, as the sport's world governing body. WB establishes rules for the uniform practice of bowling throughout the world, and promotes bowling as an Olympic sport. The World Tenpin Bowling Association "membership discipline" of WB serves the amateur sport of tenpin bowling worldwide, adopting uniform playing rules and equipment specifications.

United Kingdom

The British Tenpin Bowling Association is the official governing body of tenpin bowling in the country, is recognized by World Bowling as the official sanctioning body in England, and as such "is responsible for the protection, integrity and development of the sport". Its stated vision is "to ensure that all people, irrespective of their age, disability, ethnic origin, marital status, sexual orientation or social status have a genuine and equal opportunity to participate in the sport at all levels and in all roles".
The National Association of Youth Bowling Clubs is a BTBA subcommittee serving youth bowlers and youth bowling clubs.
The British Universities Tenpin Bowling Association organizes bowling events for present and former university and college students.
The Tenpin Bowling Proprietors Association is a trade association for the British ten-pin bowling industry.

United States

The United States Bowling Congress was formed as the governing body for the U.S. on January 1, 2005, by the merger of:
As the national governing body for bowling, its stated mission is to provide services, resources and the standards for the sport, its stated goals including growing the sport and promoting values of "credibility, dedication, excellence, heritage, inclusiveness, integrity, philanthropy and sportsmanship".

Museums

The International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame is located on the International Bowling Campus in Arlington, Texas, U.S.

Notable tournaments

oversees quadrennial World Championship tournaments, and international championships for various sectors, including for women, seniors, youth and junior bowlers.
The QubicaAMF Bowling World Cup is recognized as bowling's largest event in terms of number of countries competing, according to the USBC in 2018.
The Professional Bowlers Association Tour includes dozens of events annually, mainly at U.S. locations. The PBA Tour includes "major" championship events:
the U.S. Open,
the USBC Masters,
the PBA Tournament of Champions
the PBA World Championship, and
the PBA Players Championship.
The United States Bowling Congress has various tournaments for the PBA tour, PWBA, youth and seniors, including the USBC Masters and U.S. Open, and USBC Queens and U.S. Women's Open, plus the USBC Team USA Trials/U.S. National Amateur Bowling Championships. Additionally, the USBC has regional tournaments and certifies local tournaments.
The European Tenpin Bowling Federation owns the European Bowling Tour, including its final tournament, the European Bowling Tour Masters.
The Commonwealth Tenpin Bowling Federation, made up of World Bowling member federations within the Commonwealth of Nations, owns the Commonwealth Tenpin Bowling Championships, which has held tournaments at irregular intervals since 2002.
The Weber Cup is an annual, three-day USA vs. Europe tournament, named after Dick Weber, that began in 2000 and has been held almost exclusively in the U.K.
In the decade of the 2000s, the World Ranking Masters, owned by World Bowling, ranked standings in the Pan American Bowling Confederation, Asian Bowling Federation, and European Tenpin Bowling Federation.
Though ten-pin bowling has not progressed beyond a demonstration sport at the Olympic Games, international games modeled after the Olympics do include the sport, including the Asian Games and the Pan American Games. The Maccabiah Games host ten-pin tournaments as medal events.

Leagues

Bowling leagues vary in format, including
demographic specialization,
number of bowlers per team,
number of games per series,
day and time of scheduled sessions,
starting dates and duration of league seasons,
scoring, and
systems for bestowing awards and prizes.
Usually, each team is scheduled to oppose each of the other teams over the course of a season. Position rounds—in which the first place team opposes the second place team, third place opposes fourth place, and so on—are often inserted into the season schedule.
Customarily, team position standings are computed after each series, awarding a first number of points for each game won and a second number of points for achieving the higher team score for that series, the particular numbers being specified in each league's rules. Further, in leagues having "match point" scoring, individual bowlers on one team are matched against respective members of the opposing team, the winners receiving points that supplement their team's game and series points.
The number of league bowlers in the U.S. peaked at 8 million in 1980, declining to approximately 1.3 million in the ensuing 40 years.

Notable professional achievements

Titles and scores

Ernest Fosberg bowled the first recognized 300 in 1902, before awards were given out. In 1908, A.C. Jellison and Homer Sanders each bowled 300 games in the same season, the ABC awarding the gold medal for the highest score of the year to Jellison after a three-game tie-breaker match, without regard to the chronological order of their accomplishments.
On January 7, 2006, Elliot John Crosby became the youngest British bowler to bowl a BTBA-sanctioned 300 game at the age of 12 years, 2 months and 10 days, breaking the 1994 record of Rhys Parfitt.
On November 17, 2013, Hannah Diem became the youngest American bowler to bowl a USBC-certified 300 game at the age of 9 years, 6 months and 19 days, breaking the 2006 record of Chaz Dennis and the 2006 female record of Brandie Reamy.
Jeremy Sonnenfeld rolled the first certified 900 series in 1997. A well-publicized court-contested 900 series by Glenn Allison in 1982, considered by many to be the first-ever 900 series, was denied certification due to non-conforming lane conditions.

"Score inflation" controversy

The 905 perfect games that were rolled during the 1968–69 season increased 38-fold to 34,470 in the 1998–99 season. Likewise, the number of perfect-game league bowlers increased from about one of 3150 to about one of 27, a greater-than-hundredfold increase that many thought threatened to jeopardize the integrity of the sport. Specifically, the USBC Technical Director wrote that the "USBC is concerned that technology has overtaken player skill in determining success in the sport of bowling," announcing in 2007 the completion of a ball motion study undertaken "to strike a better balance between player skill and
technology".
Separately, a USBC pin carry study completed in about 2008 found that dramatically increased entry angles improve pin carry to result in higher scores—regardless of whether the bowlers supplied additional effort or improved their skill. Among the factors allowing higher scores were technological advances in coverstock and core design combined with improved lane surfaces and accommodative oil patterns.
Specifically, the reactive resin balls and particle balls that came out in the 1990s increased frictional engagement with the lane to provide greater hook potential that made high entry angles easier to achieve. Moreover, changes in lane surface technology, as well as the introduction of voids into pins to make them lighter and more top-heavy, helped to raise average scores as early as the 1970s. Expanded choices in oil viscosity and electronically controlled lane oiling machines permitted alley owners to customize house oil patterns to optimize the advantages of the new ball technologies. Technological progress allowed some 1990s league scores to surpass those of professionals in the 1950s.
Responding to such concerns, the USBC initiated "sport bowling" leagues and tournaments that provide "sport", "challenge" and "PBA Experience" oil patterns that are more challenging than the accommodative patterns of typical house shots. Still, the USBC has encountered enduring issues concerning how to maintain "average integrity" across leagues using oil patterns of differing difficulty.
As a result of various USBC studies, including a bowling technology study published in February 2018, the USBC Equipment and Specifications Committee established new specifications focusing mainly on balls. The overall result of the new specifications was said to slightly limit hook potential, more specifically eliminating balance holes and setting a new specification for oil absorption. The USBC stated that the new specifications will slow oil pattern transition, cause bowlers to move less, and keep the same scoring pace with lower oil volume.

Ten-pin bowling in media

Coverage of events

Beginning in 1962, ABC's Pro Bowlers Tour was broadcast on Saturday afternoons to be viewed by millions, and—with various entertainment-oriented programs including Make That Spare, Celebrity Bowling and Bowling for Dollars—confirmed the sport's popularity. However, television ratings fell substantially, from 9.1 in the mid-1970s to 2.0 in 1997, the year in which Pro Bowlers Tour was canceled.
The decline in bowling event coverage has been attributed to a variety of factors, including time demands burdening the schedules of two-income households, small purses for professional tournaments, declining participation in league bowling, the perceived demographic of bowlers, waning popularity with the public, lack of corporate sponsorship, lack of an inspiring bowling star, and an aging audience for TV bowling. A 2006 PBA article describing the PBA bowlers in the documentary A League of Ordinary Gentlemen called the professional athletes "the Rodney Dangerfields of professional sports".
The decline in coverage has also been attributed to the perception that bowling is less an athletic sport than a recreational pastime. This perception is reinforced by the easy lane conditions provided to bowling leagues that enable league bowlers to achieve scores rivaling those of professionals who must bowl under more challenging lane conditions.
Said to be "near bankruptcy" in 2000, the PBA changed ownership to one that emphasized marketing. ESPN featured bowling from 2000 to 2018 on Sunday afternoons, with CBS Sports Network also airing a smaller number of bowling tournaments.
In 2019, the PBA entered an agreement, expected to last four years, in which Fox Sports would sell advertising and sponsorships for the sport to establish the sport's presence on broadcast television, also providing cable, streaming, and social media programming.

Portrayal on television

Particular television broadcasts include:
In J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Professor Albus Dumbledore is a fan of ten-pin bowling.

Non-fiction films

Strikes and Spares was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Novelty Short.
Pin Gods presents the early challenges of three young bowlers breaking into professional bowling.
The PBS Independent Lens documentary A League of Ordinary Gentlemen chronicles the stories of four PBA Tour bowlers at different stages of their careers.

Fiction films

In the animated short cartoon The Bowling Alley-Cat, cat and mouse Tom and Jerry do battle inside a bowling center.
In Dreamer, Tim Matheson plays a man aspiring to be a professional bowler who faces a challenger played by Dick Weber.
In Greedy, Michael J. Fox plays an "honest but luckless pro bowler with a bad wrist and a good woman."
The Farrelly brothers' comedy Kingpin is a bowling comedy about which Randy Quaid said in an interview, "If we can't laugh at bowling, what can we laugh at?"
In the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski, "the Dude", a "slacker's slacker," hangs out with his buddies at a bowling alley, in which John Goodman pulls a gun out to threaten a competitor who stepped over the foul line.
In the Disney Channel's Alley Cats Strike, high school students engage in a bowling rivalry.

Games

What is believed to be the first bowling video game was released in the 1977, a built-in provided with the RCA Studio II console. A pseudo-3D game was released in 1982 for the Emerson Arcadia 2001 console, and a multi-player game was released by SNK in 1991, almost a decade before convincing 3D graphics arrived. The Wii Sports game pack, released in 2006, includes a bowling game for the 3D-motion-controlled console, and mobile-device bowling games have since become increasingly popular. Several organizations—including the PBA and entertainment franchises such as Animaniacs, The Simpsons, Monsters, Inc., and The Flintstones—have granted licenses to use their names for video games.

Publications

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