Metro Pulse/Gamut/Bowling Leagues

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Looking for friends, family, fun? Hey, there's always bowling leagues. Yes, we said bowling leagues.

by Barry Henderson

The parking lot is full at Family Bowl on Hayfield Road in West Knoxville at 6 o'clock. It's a big parking lot, and it's overfull, actually, with cars and SUVs and pickups making their own spaces along the edges.

The Tuesday Nite Mixed League is warming up on its 24 reserved lanes and the Pins Up League made up of Maremont Corp. employees and their families is already marking up their strikes, spares...and less...on the overhead boards above the eight lanes they're using in the bright, happy atmosphere of a modern suburban bowling alley.

Entering into Family Bowl on a league night is walking into a hive of buzzing humanity. The bowling crowd is an eclectic mix of races and of blue- and white-collar and professional career types, sophisticates and rednecks. Their attire attests to their social diversity, with designer outfits and 3-carat diamonds adorning men and women studying their next roll alongside dudes in muscle shirts and fading tattoos. They mingle in a veritable sea of multi-colored gloves and wristies and elbow braces and shoes in what appear to be infinite varieties. No two bowlers look alike, but there is a likeness.

Bowling in a league around Knoxville is a great leveler. Of course, nobody strikes every time, but everybody strikes at least once in a while. The bowlers know that and seem to like the way the pins favor no class or race or age group.

Both the leagues on the lanes this Tuesday are mixed leagues, with members of both sexes and ages varying from late teens to early seventies. The employee league from Maremont, the auto manufacturers' equipment plant at Loudon, is there because there is no bowling alley currently in business in Loudon County and because bowling gets them together away from the plant.

"We want to win, but we compete with each other as much as with the other teams, and we cheer just as much for the other team when it does well as we do for each other," says Debbie Zernica, whose husband, John, and daughter, Debbie, anchor a Pins Up team of four. The Zernicas moved to Lenoir City in a company transfer for John from suburban Chicago a little more than seven years ago, and being bowlers up North, they immediately joined up with the Pins Up. "We don't even need to see each other all that much outside of bowling, says Elizabeth. "We get all the gossiping done right here."

The other league in progress, the Tuesday Night Mixed bunch, are mostly also there for the fun of it, for the camaraderie and conviviality, to hear them tell it.

Asked how long he's been involved in league bowling, Rick Evans, a Knoxville lawn sprinkler system installer, looks quizzical. "Does it count running all around here when my mother bowled when I was a little kid? More than 30 years then. My whole family bowls. There's nine of us here tonight. I love bowling, and I get to spend time with my family. Besides, I'm a lousy golfer, but I'm a good bowler."

Evans' family motivation strikes a chord that becomes increasingly familiar in discussions with mixed-league members.

Jerry Connatser, the manager of Judy's lounge on Middlebrook Pike, bowls Tuesday nights with his mother, Jeannie, and father, Jerry Sr., the former a veteran of 30-plus years of league bowling. Jerry Jr.'s average is above 200 pins, making him a high-scoring bowler in this league. His mom rolls a 160-pin average and his dad's is around 170, but they argue who's best. She says he is and he insists his wife is the bowler in the family. "She beats me any time she wants to," he says.

Sherrie Smith Armstrong, a daughter of the late former publisher of the old daily Knoxville Journal, and her husband, Bill Armstrong, son of Jack Armstrong, the former head of Knox County's Parks & Recreation Department, bowl on a team at Family Bowl in the Tuesday Night Mixed League. She says, "It's something we can do as a couple. We've met a whole new group of friends. We've met people we get together with about every weekend."

Likewise, Richard Barnett, greens keeper at Dead Horse Lake golf course, bowls with his wife and two daughters and has been in the league more than seven years, since moving his family here from Savannah, Ga. "We used to bowl more, but cut down because of the cost—$40 for the four of us here, plus what we drink, and if we go out to dinner afterward, at least another $30 or $40. It can easily run $100 a night for us." He says that's a good deal, but it limits him to once a week.

Terry Evans, the Family Bowl general manager, says the league bowlers are "the nicest people you'd ever want to work around," and he's been doing it since he was a teenager, learning the business from the ground up. He started as a mechanic on the pin-setters.

As the mixed leagues ease out and bid each other goodbye, the Tuesday Night Men's Only League moves in. Nice people, too, but a bit more testosterone-driven. They'd been stretching or exercising in the warmups and are more styling in their approaches. Again, they present a mix of races and ages and backgrounds, but they show a little less care as to the propriety of every bit of language, and they display a little more in the way of bellies over belts than the scattered cups of beer would seem to justify. They are obviously more competitive than the mixed-leaguers, but this ain't an aerobic sport, after all.

Bill James of Maryville, a Y-12 employee who bowls in both the mixed league ("for practice") and the men-only league, also bowls in several other alleys in the area and participates in some tournaments around the state and as far away as Cincinnati. "I used to bowl five or six nights a week," he says, indicating that his wife, a former league bowler, influenced him to cut back some.

His weekly highlight is the Transportation League at Starlite Lanes on Western Avenue across from Cumberland Estates. "It's one of them cut-throat 'got-the-habit' trash-talkin' leagues," he says, with a competitive level unmatched locally. Sporting a 208 average, James clearly loves the competition there as much as the friendships he's made.

Charlie Beagle, manager of AMF Fountain Lanes on Broadway, hosts more league play than any of the four other active Knoxville alleys. His establishment is home to about 20 leagues a season, with about 1,300 participants, compared with about a dozen leagues each at Family Bowl and Starlite. The fourth alley, Western Plaza Lanes off Kingston Pike, is down to a single league, a tremendous drop from its heyday. Nearly all of the leagues, some affiliated with churches or other institutions, are mixed, although a few are women-only and one, at Fountain Lanes, is an "alternative" league of mixed gays.

The men-only Transportation League, Beagle agrees, is Knoxville's toughest, even though it resides at Starlite rather than Fountain.

Starlite has another unique feature; a dozen of its 36 lanes are in a separate, non-smoking room. It's helpful in courting kids, to get them bowling early in life, which all alleys do to some extent with Saturday or summer leagues. Most bowling alleys, it should be said, are no place for the non-smoker who's bothered by a tobacco haze. None of the other three alleys has non-smoking lanes.

Aside from that, the facilities themselves are reasonably similar. The differences are in size, to some extent, and decor. All of them have snack bars, with sandwiches, fries, pizzas, salads these diet-conscious days, soft drinks, beer and wine coolers, the latter a relatively recent addition. Family Bowl even has stuffed baked potatoes and a for-sure sports bar with seven TVs, six of which were tuned to a Lady Vols game and the seventh to a Nashville Predators hockey match on the Tuesday in question. No one was watching, as league bowling prevailed.

Distinctions are noticeable in terms of period. Western Plaza, opened in 1959, is the oldest. The others came along in the '60s.

Western still has a 1950s feel in furnishings and is on the shabby side, but it does boast the only DJ's booth, which it staffs every evening. It also advertises a Notary Public service in its office, an oddity that Jim Hardin, one of the managers, doesn't attempt to explain. He says the league business dried up there as members "moved off." Perhaps that's why its snack bar menu is the only one to feature pain relievers and Rolaids.

Fountain Lanes, itself a little down at the heels, gives off 1960s vibes from its dark paneling and floor tiles, and it sports a hot jukebox. Starlite has a '70s feel in the main room and a more nearly '80s-ish non-smoking section. Family Bowl, the newest of the bunch, has a functional 1990s look in its sparkling and sprightly, not to say garish, durable plastic and tile motifs.

Whether the 21st century will be as good to bowling as was the last half of the 20th is anyone's guess. But while down in raw numbers from the 1960s peak, league play continues to thrive in the surviving alleys.

"Where else except church," asks Fountain Lanes' Beagle, "can people get together to participate in anything so likely to lead to lasting friendships?"

Good, solid 2002 question.