LANES PAVED WITH GOLD

By BILL BAROL

It's hard to miss from Virginia Street, Reno's main drag: an 80-ft. aluminum geodesic dome that looks like nothing so much as a huge bowling ball, proudly and appropriately perched atop the city's new $47.5 million National Bowling Stadium. Three years in construction, the Taj Mahal of tenpins opened in February. Its 80 lanes, under a 42-ft. ceiling, are wider than a football field; it has mauve banquettes, purple and green trim and permanent seating for 1,100 spectators. Scoring is fully automatic and displayed on the world's longest rigid, backlit video screen. Every aspect of the operation is overseen from a computerized command center on the fifth level. From there, high above the bowling floor, executive director Reg Pearson looks down on an ongoing tournament in full swing. The crash of bowling balls, the staccato of falling pins, the clatter of automatic pin-setting machines: the din is unimaginable. "It sounds like a cash register," Pearson says. "I love it." The sound echoes around Reno, which is being renewed by bowling.

Ummm ... bowling?

Why not? Reno has been lapped by Las Vegas in the race to capture the imagination of visitors to Nevada. There was a glut of hotel-casino space after a late '70s building boom and "for much of the 1980s, Reno was the wallflower of the casino industry," says Bill Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno. But four years ago, the city staked much of its future on bowling. And the gamble is paying off. The stadium's inaugural event, the 92nd annual tournament of the American Bowling Congress, pumped $150 million into the local economy between February and July.

Even before it was open, the stadium gave a jump start to the local hotel-casino scene: it eased the way for operators Eldorado and Circus Circus to build the new $380 million Silver Legacy, which opened in July only a block away. A raft of expansion projects are under way, just completed or about to begin at existing hotel-casinos Eldorado, Fitzgerald's, Peppermill and Harrah's, adding hundreds of new hotel rooms. The dusty downtown streets are crowded with construction equipment.

After years of indecision about Reno's economic doldrums, the city fathers finally saw a real threat in the spread of casino gambling around the country at the start of the '90s. Reno had been host of three successful A.B.C. tourneys by 1990, and city officials began to talk about how they might get the event back on a regular basis. A.B.C. agreed to come back every third year if the city would build a first-class permanent facility. Armed with that commitment and one from the Women's International Bowling Congress, Reno persuaded the Nevada legislature to raise the hotel-room tax by a point and dedicate the proceeds to the project. The stadium's real goal is to promote the city and draw tourist dollars to its hotels, casinos and other facilities. "It's a self-perpetuating deal," Pearson says. "The more bowlers I bring in, the more tax is paid, the faster I get the place paid off, the more I can put back into tournaments."

Now travelers can buy National Bowling Stadium souvenirs right in the airport gift shops ("Reno Pinhead" caps are $14.95). On the bookshelves there, Dan Herbst's Bowling 300 shares space with Scarne's on Cards. The city and the sport are a good fit, says Eadington. "Reno by image is a working-class to middle-class locale, and that's consistent with bowlers. The way bowlers come in on these tournaments is ideal for a resort town: they're here for a fairly short period, and they don't strain the infrastructure capacity to the extent that major conferences in Las Vegas do." Neither do the visitors get swallowed up. "We're just the right size," says Pearson, a 30-year veteran of the bowling business. "They go to Vegas, they get lost."

And Vegas can't offer bowlers a facility like Reno's. No place can. The stadium is enormous, a city-block square; the gift shop alone is 11,000 sq. ft. The 80 bowling lanes can be covered over to make 38,000 sq. ft. of convention space. A 172-seat theater opened last week, with 70-mm showings of To Fly and a Reno travelog on a four-story screen. Pearson is already booking the theater for lectures and the space outside for a wide array of events, such as an auction in which 1,000 Harley-Davidsons will be displayed on the stadium's gleaming approaches. "You have to be able to attract events, and I'm going to concentrate on that," says Pearson. "Versatility is the key. You can't make it on leagues anymore." League bowling is in fact down by almost 50% since 1980, a victim of changing life-styles: longer commutes, an explosion of amusement choices, a shortage of leisure time. "Let's say you used to sign up to bowl every Monday at 6:30 p.m. from Labor Day to Easter, which would be a typical bowling season," says the A.B.C.'s Mark Miller. To day's American doesn't want to do anything every Monday at 6:30 p.m. from Labor Day to Easter."

But every sport needs a showplace, and now Reno has bowling's. It remains an open question, according to Eadington, whether the extra business drawn by the facility will be enough to keep the North Nevada gaming industry healthy and growing over time. Reno is still the kind of city where the railroad tracks run right through the middle of downtown, no matter how many welcome bowlers go up outside the Reno Turf Club. But for Pearson on a recent Saturday, what he sees as he looks down on the 18th annual Reno Nisei Invitational is good news enough: 80 clean, well-lit, smoke-free lanes, and several hundred happy, busy, free-spending bowlers. He's a man with a mission. "It's going to take me a lot of years, maybe more than I have,'' he says. "But I think I can change the image of bowling a hell of a lot.'' And maybe in the process, as a local priest prayed at the stadium's opening ceremonies, make "this Big gest Little City become the bowling capital of the nation and the world.'' An auspicious sign: the invocation was delivered by Father Robert Bowling.