The ten pin bowling game, or just bowling for short, is enjoying a renaissance. Bowling was very popular during the swinging sixties and survived through to the late seventies, but it failed to keep pace with changing and increasingly sophisticated tastes and fashions of the eighties and, as a result, it was abandoned by the public. Bowling alleys were forced into liquidation and the majority of them were repurposed as bingo halls and supermarkets or demolished to make way for new shopping arcades.
It was towards the end of the eighties that the revival of the sport began. The availability of new technologies meant that it had become possible to give bowling a facelift. One particular advance was the introduction of automatic scoring systems which had two major benefits: no longer was it necessary to calculate the score using fairly complex rules; and even more importantly the barrier to playing the game had been lowered as no longer was it necessary to understand the complex scoring system; instead the score was calculated by a computer.
More and more people decided to go bowling for their entertainment and as a result more and more bowling alleys were constructed. These were very different from the kind of alleys that had been popular in the sixties. No longer were they just places to go bowling; as time went by they were developed into entertainment centres that included many alternative activities suitable for all tastes and they also became very family friendly.
Bowling has grown to be the most popular participatory sport in the world. More people bowl than participate in any other sport; it is claimed that worldwide over a hundred million people go bowling and that bowling alleys can be found in over ninety countries.
There are many reasons for the popularity of the sport and an important one is its learning curve. Once the basic rules have been understood it does not take very long for a compete novice with average abilities to gain sufficient skills to be able to bowl over at least a few pins. Once that has been achieved progress can be quite rapid and after only a few games the beginner is playing well enough to enjoy the game; before very long, sufficient skills will have been developed to enable the player to enjoy a game with any average player.
However, moving up in ability level from average player to very skilled requires ascending a much steeper learning curve, and moving up to expert and championship levels requires complete dedication to the sport.
Above all, ten pin bowling is fun and it is an activity that can be enjoyed by the whole family, with a group of friends, or as a club sport.