Prosperous & Proper

"It's just a couple of guys bowling," complained TV Critic John Crosby when he watched the show for the first time. "The pins go down--or don't go down, as the case might be--and that's about it." But like millions of other televiewers, Crosby kept right on watching. "The darn thing does have a sort of morbid interest," he discovered. "First one guy's ahead, then the other one. Pretty soon you find yourself rooting for one or the other."

Unlike Crosby, most bowling fans take more than a rooting interest. Egged on by TV (which devotes an estimated 9,000 hours each year to bowling), they have succumbed to an athletic urge to topple tenpins themselves. When the 54th annual championships began in Fort Worth last month, the American Bowling Congress needed every inch of the vast Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum to accommodate 16,000 competitors from all over the country. Last week, after five weeks of clamorous competition, the tournament was still drawing big crowds. With only two weeks to go, the battle was so close that it was still impossible to pick a winner in any of the team or individual events.

Somebody Knows Me. For the bowlers themselves, the trip to Texas was a worthwhile gamble. When all the rolling is done, they will share 7,743 prizes totaling $227,652. For the spectators it was always a good show. The list of top teams read, as usual, like a roll call of breweries. St. Louis' Falstaff Beer sent its 1956 A.B.C. championship Chicago team almost intact; Detroit's Pfeiffer Beer, only team ever to win three championships (1952, '53, '55), lit up the Coliseum with their brown and yellow uniforms. The Budweiser team drove down from St. Louis in a flashy, $250,000 bus, complete with galley, six bunks, a bathroom with shower, and a private compartment for Budweiser's August Anheuser Busch Jr. In the individual competitions were all bowling's big names and, to TV fans, familiar faces. Chief among them was Lou Campi, Dumont, N.J. contractor whose awkward, wrong-foot bowling style has made him the Lucille Ball of TV bowling, recently won him $6,000 and two Fords in a single TV tournament. In another, an East-West TV tournament, he has been rolling up winnings for twelve weeks; if he bowls a perfect game before the cameras (he has come within one strike twice), Campi stands to win $100,000. Bowling against him at Ft. Worth were such other old pros as Detroit's Buzz Fazio and Steve Nagy, veterans of a quarter-century of bowling.

"I can remember," said Fazio last week, "when people wouldn't have walked across the street to bowl. I'll bet a plugged nickel to a $5 bill that I can walk down any street in any town and somebody'll recognize me. Even the children are coming into the game."

The TV revolution has vastly sped bowling's rise from the old alleys in seedy, down-at-the-heel side streets, among pool halls and beer parlors. It has long since nudged into bright new homes, often near the best suburbs. Modern "family bowling centers'" are embellished with cafes, drugstores, beauty parlors, nurseries for the children. As a final embellishment of respectability the Bowling Congress last week was urging all fans to join in a quiet campaign to replace the "alley" and its back-door connotation, with the more genteel word "lane."

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