Tenpin bowling’s triangle of ten is the default “bowling”
Bowling rolls a ball at pins or other targets. Pin bowling—especially tenpin with a triangular rack of ten—dominates the word’s everyday sense. Lanes of wood or synthetic sport oil patterns that steer hook; finger (and maybe thumb) holes grip the ball for a strike when all pins fall.
Some 120 million people bowl in more than 90 countries, about 70 million of them Americans. Beyond tenpins, players roll at nine pins in a diamond, the German kegeln; at tall, thin candlepins with balls weighing just 1.1 kilograms; at squat duckpins; or at Canada's five-pins with their rubber girdles. Target games such as lawn bowls, bocce, pétanque and even curling instead reward landing nearest a mark.
A royal Egyptian tomb from about 3200 BCE holds wall drawings of the game, and a child's grave excavated at Naqada in 1895 contained stone balls and nine alabaster figures resembling skittles. Herodotus credited the Lydians with inventing bowling, and Roman soldiers' stone-tossing grew into bocce. Southampton's Old Bowling Green, laid out in 1299, is the oldest surviving green and still in use. Berlin and Cologne capped bets at five shillings in 1325, Edward III banned the game for distracting men from archery, and Henry VIII in 1511 barred the lower classes from playing. Martin Luther fixed the number of pins, previously anything from 3 to 17, at nine.
Legend has Francis Drake finishing his game on Plymouth Hoe as the Armada approached in 1588. Dutch settlers carried pins to New Amsterdam, and Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle of 1819 is the first American literary mention of ninepins. A painting of Ipswich from around 1810 already shows ten pins in a triangle. The American Bowling Congress codified tenpin rules on 9 September 1895, introducing the 300-point, 12-ball scoring and a 16-pound ball limit, and Floretta McCutcheon, who beat champion Jimmy Smith in 1927, went on to teach half a million women the game.
Balls evolved from lignum vitae hardwood to rubber, polyester in 1960 and urethane in 1980. Prohibition split alleys from saloons and turned bowling into a family outing.
Source: Bowling
