THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 6, 1995 TAG: 9504060568
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 238 lines
TO A SOUNDTRACK of toppling pins, Oneil Wynne lopes into Norfolk's Bowlarama, smiles hellos to familiar faces and pulls three polished balls from his bag.
Each is the size of a cantaloupe. Each weighs a little less than 4 pounds. Each has swirling, sparkling skin unblemished by holes.
Oneil Wynne rolls one into his palm. Sixty feet away, at the end of a mirror-finished hard-maple lane, a wedge of 10 squat duckpins glows confidently under a bank of fluorescent lights. They are shorter and thinner than traditional bowling pins but still span the width of the lane. The spaces between them seem chasms.
Most Americans have never seen a duckpin bowling ball. Most probably don't know this variation on better-known tenpins exists. But not long ago, a quarter-million people from New England to the Carolinas packed duckpin alleys to admire its pros and play the game themselves. They joined teams, organized leagues, watched it on television. They passed it on to their children.
They bowled ``ducks'' at a dozen different venues in Hampton Roads and at scores of others scattered through eastern Virginia, some in settlements too small for proper town halls. Old-timers recall waiting hours for an open lane.
Not so on this weekday afternoon. Oneil Wynne stands motionless four steps behind the foul line, sizes up the pins. Many of the lanes around him are empty, their backstops in shadow.
Most afternoons it's the same, because after decades of dominating the Eastern Seaboard's idle hours, duckpins has fallen from favor. Only two Hampton Roads alleys survive. Of the hundreds that once dotted the coast, 87 remain.
Now, Wynne steps forward, eyes locked on his target. And a veteran of duckpin bowling's glory days swings the ball forward and lets it fly.
Years ago, duckpin bowlers in Hampton Roads outnumbered fans of the more familiar tenpins game, with its larger, heavier ball and pins, nearly 4-to-1. No public bowling alley devoted itself exclusively to tenpins; its players had to content themselves with the few lanes the duckpin houses set aside for their sport, and with a handful on local military bases.
``At first, the only place in town that had tenpins was Ninth and Granby,'' says Allen Hooper, chewing a cigar behind Bowlarama's counter. ``Everything else was duckpins. Right in Norfolk there was Boush Street, Ninth and Granby, Maple Lanes. There was Colonial Spillway and Pin Path. Besides that, there was a bowling alley at Norview, another one in West Ocean View.''
Duckpin players offer a host of explanations for their game's decline, but one possibility, apparent to any newcomer, is that it makes tenpins look simple.
Its challenge can be explained by a single statistic from 1960-61, when Oneil Wynne had the highest average in the nation - the highest, for that matter, in the world.
His average was 133.
That's 133 out of a possible 300, just as it would be in tenpins. ``It wasn't a high average,'' Wynne says, ``but that year it was good enough to be the best.''
Players get three shots in each frame, not two, but the ball's light weight makes for gentler play among the pins - and fewer strikes. The absence of finger and thumb holes makes the ball much tougher to control, and picking up an ``easy'' spare maddening.
The pins' wide spacing, plus the ball's small girth, equals putting a shot only half a hair from the pocket and dropping a measly two pins. All too often, the second ball rolls to the same place, threading the hole left by the first and missing the remaining eight pins altogether.
``Tenpins players come in and say, `God, if I threw a little ball like that, I could bowl a 300 every time,' '' says Tiger Baker of Norfolk, arguably Hampton Roads' top duckpin ace. ``OK. Go up there and try it. Hit the headpin and knock down only two pins, and tell me it's easy.''
Rameses II may never have donned a silk shirt with ``Tiny'' embroidered across its breast, but archeologists have unearthed pieces of a game similar to bowling buried with Egyptians of 7,000 years ago. Prehistoric men and boys may have bowled, too, rolling rocks at pointed stones or sheep bones.
But the game as we know it developed in Europe, and by 1530 had so captured the popular fancy that England's King Henry VIII ordered bowling lanes installed at his Whitehall residence. Immigrants brought it to America in the 19th century, and by 1865, tenpins was spreading fast.
In most places, anyway. ``There were a lot more regional games floating around at that point,'' says John Dalzell, curator of collections at the Bowling Hall of Fame in St. Louis. ``It wasn't popular everywhere.''
In southeastern Texas, a large German population clung to nine-pins, in which the targets were arranged in a diamond pattern. New Englanders tried to knock down arrays of tall, narrow cylinders called candlepins.
Around St. Louis, the 19th century rage was cocked-hat bowling, in which players heaved a 5-inch ball at three tenpins placed at the points of the tenpin triangle - in bowling lingo, at the 1, 7 and 10.
But tenpins' greatest challenge arose at the century's turn in Baltimore. A couple of Orioles players who owned a tenpins alley sought a new use for their banged-up wooden tenpins and commissioned a local woodworker to come up with ideas. His name was John Dittmar Jr., and what he came up with was the duckpin.
It was short-necked, squat and 9.406 inches high. Duckpin balls followed, no more than 5 inches and no less than 4 3/4 inches across. The new game wiped out tenpins in Baltimore and began expanding along the coast, achieving strongholds in Hampton Roads, Connecticut and Washington, D.C.
Between world wars, the game's popularity grew: Its reliance on finesse, rather than brute strength, suited it to pencil-limbed children and arthritic older players, while those in between chased elusive high scores.
Baker, who's bowled for all but six of his 30 years, is one of few who've come within striking distance of a perfect duckpin game. The feat is not uncommon in tenpins - about 60 are thrown in league games every night, and one player has rolled 42. But no one has bowled a 300 in ducks. Not in league, not in open play, not ever.
However, Baker bowled 11 strikes and a spare in a league game at Bowlarama, giving him a 272 - the highest score bowled anywhere up to that time. Nobody in Hampton Roads had ever come within 25 pins of his score.
The fact that Baker may never again approach that mark is, for him, part of duckpins' appeal. ``Never had an interest in tenpins. It's too easy,'' he says. ``You can open up the paper, and every single week you've got two, three 300 games shot.
``With duckpins, you can throw what you consider to be a perfect ball - perfect rotation, perfect torque - and still not know what you're going to get.''
Perhaps because most of the country was a bit less masochistic, duckpins never spread much beyond the Appalachians. A few outposts cropped up inland - at least one operated in Illinois in the '20s - but you could count them on a hand.
It didn't catch on, either, with servicemen who flooded Hampton Roads during and after World War II, servicemen who had grown up with tenpins in other parts of the country. Likewise, as postwar transplants swelled Washington, D.C., they ignored the local game.
Too tough. Too much practice required. Unimpressive scores. No thunderclap as the smaller pins toppled.
In 1951, the first bowling program was televised. ``People saw tenpins on TV,'' Wynne says. ``They didn't see duckpins. In 1960, 1961 we had a TV show on duckpins. At that time, every duckpin house in Norfolk was filled with people. But it only lasted a couple of years, and when that stopped, the numbers started to fall.''
The Hall of Fame's Dalzell says duckpins was headed for trouble long before the tube. ``I think it has to do more with the growth of the American Bowling Congress than anything else,'' he says. ``It was hard for any regional game to compete with a national game. And the ABC was around early - its first tournament was in Chicago in 1901.''
Whatever. Duckpins hit the skids in the late '60s, helped along by rising real estate values that encouraged alley owners to sell out. The game began losing players at an average rate of 7 percent a year, and in 1980, its darkest 12 months, 17 per cent of the nation's small-pin players quit, died or took up tenpins.
Washington, once a duckpin center, lost all of its alleys. Big duckpin houses like the 68-lane Greenway East in suburban Baltimore went under all along the coast.
Many others, like Fair Lanes Military in Norfolk, switched to the big-pin game. ``Nobody was interested in learning how to bowl duckpins,'' Betty Scearce, a manager there, says of the decision to convert 16 lanes last year. ``We weren't using them. We had some seniors and some children. The middle-bracket age kind of petered out.''
Baltimore's game was stung by another slap in 1992, when the Maryland Legislature refused to name duckpins the state sport. It opted instead to stick with jousting.
If things can get much worse than that, it seems a safe bet they will. ``Most of the duckpin bowlers are longtime bowlers,'' Wynne says. ``There are a few newcomers, but most are longtimers. That's the problem: We don't have enough young people coming up in duckpins. They see tenpins on TV, and that's what they want to do.''
Still, duckpins has fared better than other regional variants. Only two cocked-hat lanes survive - two lanes, not alleys - in the basement of a bar in the St. Louis suburbs.
It's 6:30 p.m., and a packed house at Bowlarama is loosening up for the 96 games ahead in the Tuesday leagues.
Bowlarama, with 32 lanes, is Virginia's largest remaining duckpin alley, and it retains much of the atmosphere of its March 1959 opening. No high-tech computer score boards clutter the cinderblock walls. Balls returning to the stack after each shot take their time doing it, and do it in uncovered chutes. The automatic pinsetters require the touch of a button or pedal before they lurch to life. The snack bar isn't long on low-fat foods.
Standing in this time capsule on a league night, when the air throbs with concussions and laughter and most lanes are taken, it's easy to picture duckpins in its heyday.
It doesn't hurt that Wynne is up, practicing: He's bowled since 1938, and after his stint as national champ, he was named Bowler of the Year on the duckpin pro tour and, in 1968, elected to the Duckpin Hall of Fame. There isn't an actual hall, per se.
On a pillar near the snack bar, a plaque honors winners of the Oneil Wynne Classic tournament, which Bowlarama hosts every March and which was won this year by Wynne's league partner, George Smith.
``I was watching duckpins on TV up in Connecticut,'' Smith says, eyeing Wynne as he warms up. ``I wanted to go south, to move out of the ice and snow, and this was as far south as I could come and still stay competitive in duckpin bowling.
``I didn't have a job, didn't have a place to stay, didn't know anybody. But I said, `This is it. I'm moving to Tidewater.' ''
Such dedication gives Wynne hope that in Hampton Roads the game ``will be here a long time.'' That, and the fact that the area produces good players, generation after generation. Portsmouth's Victory Lanes routinely fields the country's top youth teams. Bowlarama has one of the largest senior citizen leagues. Local bowlers like Tiger Baker are often listed among America's top duckpinners.
Oneil Wynne stands motionless four steps behind the foul line and peers down the lane. Then, as Smith and Baker and a host of younger players watch, he steps forward, eyes locked on his target.
The ball rolls off Wynne's fingertips and races smoothly down the lane, straight down the middle, straight into the pocket. It looks to be a perfect throw. Pins scatter with a muffled whumph.
Then they stop falling.
Two are left standing.
Wynne heads back to the ball return to try again. ILLUSTRATION: JOSEPH JOHN KOTLOWSKI/Staff color photos
Former national duckpin Bowler of the Year Oneil Wynne receives
congratulations from a teammate during league play at Bowlarama in
Norfolk.
The pins go flying at Bowlarama, but getting a strike is much more
difficult with duckpins.
Wynne shows how the ball for duckpin bowling fits in the palm of his
hand. Unlike the tenpins ball, it has not finger holes.
JOSEPH JOHN KOTLOWSKI/Staff
Tiger Baker of Norfolk once held the world record for high game in
duckpins with a 272. No one has ever had a perfect 300 game.
Graphic
HOW DUCKPINS AND TENPINS DIFFER
The ball
Tenpins: Weighs up to 16 pounds; can be no more than 27 inches in
circumference. One hole for thumb, one or two for fingers.
Duckpins: Weighs 3 pounds 8 ounces to 3 pounds 12 and measures 4
3/4 to 5 inches in diameter. No holes.
The pins
Tenpins: 15 inches high
Duckpins: 9 13/32 inches high
The action
Similar in both games, with bowlers attempting strikes and spares
with first two balls rolled in each frame. In duckpins, players who
don't spare get a third ball in each frame; toppling all the pins
with this third ball doesn't net a spare, just a 10 for the frame.
by CNB