Dick Caplan had it the very first time he released a 16-pound black rubber bowling ball toward the pins. He was a young man then and his nation was heading into a European war.
That was 1941.
He still has it today.
It is the perfect hook.
The right-hander, now 85 and using lighter and lighter balls to keep his game under control, remains graceful, slides at just the proper point and releases his high-tech, 12-pound ball effortlessly.
Caplan attributes all of that to decades of dedication to another game, volleyball. He was on national championship teams for years in the 1950s, and it has helped keep his moves fluid. There is no creakiness to him.
Think of him as part of a generation that built bowling into a big business after World War II, but that will play almost no role in its long-term future.
The sport is changing, shifting and searching all over the world in its quest for new markets. In the U.S., it is trying with some success to shed its smoky, old-fat-guy’s night-out image.
The people who owned the bowling alleys of the ’50s are selling out, retiring and closing down their lanes even as bowling becomes bigger business – it’s now the marketing turf of corporations eager to sprinkle “bowling centers” everywhere.
AMF and Brunswick have spent a fortune on bowling technology (there are synthetic lanes now that need little maintenance) and put up millions upon millions of dollars in capital to build new centers and acquire and refurbish old ones.
No one has to learn the mysteries of bowling scoring anymore, because computers and video screens take care of that.
Corporate bowling interests are eager to make their bowling centers pleasant. They have also invented new ways to bowl and dusted off some adaptations — bumper bowling for kids, cosmic bowling with flashing lights and disco music for teens — in a bid to improve the demographics of the sport.
“People are looking for affordable, close to home family fun,” says Doug Stanard, president and chief executive officer of AMF, the biggest bowling equipment company. Brunswick is second.
The industry loves the game because of the numbers it produces, he said.
“A well-run bowling center has no inventory or receivables,” Stanard said. “A well-run bowling center will generate about 25 to 30 percent cash margin on the bottom line. It is a very steady business from a cash point of view. You can get your investment paid back in four to five years.”
AMF has been pouring money into bowling centers, and currently operates 416 of them worldwide, with 330 in the U.S.
There are plenty of bowling alley options in Chicago and its suburbs, ranging all the way from the long alley that still has human pinsetters to small, sleek art deco lanes to the big old smoky bowling alleys of the past.
Bowling centers or bowling alleys, what will remain, of course, is the clientele, the people who have spent night after night working on their release, their approach, collecting their equipment, perfecting their game.
They have built the leagues that fill places like Morton Grove’s Classic Bowl almost every night of the week and Sunday mornings, too. They spend small fortunes on all the latest equipment, from sophisticated, liquid-center balls to thumb billows that expand to fill any space left in the thumb hole.
They have a happy, loud, good time, fueled by cola and beer and (at least in some cases) cigarettes, all to the thundering clack of bowling balls against uncounted thousands of head pins, hour after hour.
But not many bowlers will ever be as good as Dick Caplan. His whole story is contained in the few seconds it takes for his ball to reach the pins.
After his release, the ball drifts to the far right hand side of the lane, then, almost mysteriously, cuts toward the center when it seems all is just about lost.
Then it floats right into the pocket, a spot behind the first pin in the triangle of pins that takes the first hit when a ball is on target. Of course, it is a strike.
The pins don’t hop and bang and blast against the back bumper the way they used to, Caplan explains, because the 12-pound ball is just too light to deliver that much momentum.
He can still put it just about where he wants to put it. It is a lovely thing to watch. But there is no guarantee anymore that the pins will fly out of their places as though they had been frightened nearly to death.
At his peak, Caplan had a 190 average, good enough to put him alongside the pros. But he never took that route. He was happy to run his graphics design business and live his bowling life in the leagues that pepper the Chicago area and work on his other sports passion, volleyball. He will be inducted into the National Volleyball Hall of Fame in October..
He is Yoda-like in his assessment of what is important.
“It is a game of concentration and consistency,” Caplan says as he surveys the other bowlers on a Tuesday night at Classic Lanes. “You have to stay within yourself. Within your form.”
The captains of big bowling are not much interested, at least not yet, in what happens in Morton Grove. Chicago and its suburbs, the bowling industry notes, is a mature market with lots of traditional bowlers.
The long-term target of the industry is, on this evening, just a few lanes down from Caplan and his friends. There Phil Gorelick, a Chicago insurance executive, and his daughters Alicia, 10, and Jennifer, 4, and son Joseph, 6, are having a very good time playing bumper bowling.
Bumper bowling has eliminated the biggest frustration the game holds for children, the gutter ball. Some heavy plastic guard strips stick out over the gutters and prevent the ball from falling in.
“When I was a kid, you would go home with a 15 score,” said Gorelick, who takes his children bowling five or six times a year. “This kind of bowling gives the little kids a chance.”
He says he takes his children bowling for the same reason he takes them to amusement parks, video parlors and sports events: They all have a good time.
And that is exactly what the bowling industry wants to happen, a transformation that will guarantee a big family market to replace all of those old-timers as they pass on.
That is also why so much of the industry is looking to China.
They are all betting, based on a strong performance as the game moves to the Orient, to South America, indeed to just about anywhere anyone has enough money to invest, that bowling will catch on all over the world.
One important measure of that idea is the fact that it already has — in China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and all over Europe, the bowling business is doing very well.
There is only so much bowling money anyone can make in the United States. But the world is bowling’s frontier, particularly those places that are becoming so Americanized that KFC and the Golden Arches have become part of the restaurant scene.
This year alone, AMF expects to sell 205 complete bowling centers around the world, with about half of that number heading for China. Last year, the company sold 1,000 lanes (about a bowling center every week) to Chinese investors.
What that means is a long-term, dependable market.
No matter where the industry moves around the world, though, it will likely continue to be an important player on the American entertainment scene.
One finds some pretty unlikely people in bowling alleys these days.
Jon Powell and his wife Diane dropped in at Lucky Strike lanes on Lincoln Avenue one evening a few weeks ago just to share some time doing something physical. They are not great bowlers. In fact, they are not even good bowlers.
Powell, 40, a muscular man who runs and plays tennis, is a management consultant. Diane, dressed in black for this evening out, is a psychotherapist.
“We bowl three, maybe four times a year,” Diane says.
“It gives us something to do that is physical at night. We enjoy it,” adds Jon.
For this couple, bowling also has a sense of something the people at AMF and Brunswick probably have not tapped yet in their marketing quest: romance.
Jon notes that he proposed to Diane a year ago while they were bowling during a vacation along the lake in Michigan.
STATISTICS SHOW THE SPORT IS ANYWHERE BUT IN THE GUTTER
– More than 54 million Americans bowl. Around the world, there are 100 million bowlers.
– In the U.S. alone, bowling generates $10 billion a year.
– 44.2 million of the nation’s bowlers are adults.
– 4.7 million are teenagers.
– 5.1 million are pre-teens.
– 55 percent of bowlers are female, and 33 percent are under the age of 30.
– 23 percent of adults have bowled in the past year.
Source: Roper Starch Study for Strike Ten Entertainment Inc., the marketing company for the bowling industry.
