The first time America's biggest bowling tournament came to Knoxville
by Jack Neely
Before it gets warm, you will have seen your share of bowlers. Starting in two weeks, the American Bowling Congress's national tournament will form something like a small city of its own at the new downtown convention center. Over a period of four and a half months, 60,000 bowlers from all over the country are expected to come to Knoxville just for the opportunity to roll some hard-rubber spheres on hardwood flooring. The mammoth convention has been touted as the great triumph of the new convention center.
But it's actually not the first time the ABC has hosted its big event in Knoxville. The first time, they came to a different city than the one we know.
It was the dramatic spring of 1970: the season of ill-fated Apollo 13, the Cambodia bombings, and the Kent State shootings. As the ABC tournament opened, newspapers reported the 75th death of a Knox County resident in Vietnam: a young black man killed by a booby trap. That death toll would increase further before the bowlers left. UTK, sometimes called the most activist campus in the South, had a healthy antiwar movement. Knoxville was part of the world, no question. But the city was still, in some ways, a half step behind the world.
In 1967, when the announcement came that Knoxville had landed the ABC, it surprised some, because the city itself didn't seem to have a whole lot to offer its own citizens, much less the anticipated 25,000 expected to take part in "the world's largest participant sports event." Knoxville hardly had any museums or top-flight hotels or restaurants. It didn't have much in the way of nightclubs. Knoxville had, by some accounts, fewer parks than any other American city. It had lost its baseball team when the Smokies, dismayed by losing seasons and low attendance, gave up on Knoxville. It had a zoo, improving, maybe, but still a forlorn little thing. In 1970, Knoxville didn't have either trendy urban districts or protected historic quarters. Most cities had modern, enclosed shopping malls, but Knoxville didn't. It didn't even have liquor by the drink. Knoxville in 1970 wasn't a city built to impress.
But Knoxville did have some weather, so it was touting itself as "the Four-Season Vacation and Convention Center." It was, at least, near some attractions, especially the lakes and mountains. A promotional booklet from the era shows few photographs of recognizable Knoxville landmarks or public events, but several of people sitting on houseboats, golfing, or barbecuing in backyards.
However, among the public assets Knoxville had going for it were several thriving bowling alleys. Besides UT's, there were Fountain Lanes, Western Plaza, the Starlite, and the Palace, and they all did good business.
The movement to get the ABC here allegedly began back in the '50s, with local bowler Bob Price getting the ball rolling. But today, bowlers credit the late Ed Irwin, president of the Greater Knoxville Bowling Association, with making the actual strike.
Organizers said Knoxville got the ABC nod mainly because it was cheaper, and for a majority of American bowlers, fairly convenient. And it had the Civic Coliseum, which was big enough to host a national bowling tournament. Built as an urban-renewal project less than a decade earlier, it still looked modern.
Knoxville lacked quite a few things as a city, but some believed the ABC could help in a big way. "The tournament will help give Knoxville the 'big city' image," claimed coliseum General Manager Fred McCallum in 1967. "It'll give the city prestige throughout the country."
It opened on March 7, and people came from all over, but especially from the Midwest: Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois. The bowlers were expected to spend $3.5 to $5 million in Knoxville.
Most of the businesses that apparently expected to profit from the ABC convention were outside of the central business district. The ABC convention's two main sites—the Coliseum and the Andrew Johnson Hotel—were both downtown, but most of the hotels that advertised to bowlers were outside of downtown: The Ramada Inn in West Knoxville and the Sheraton near UT advertised to bowlers. The so-called "Downtown Holiday Inn" was on Chapman Highway.
Downtown's restaurants were mostly old-line places content to trade with local regulars. Most of the restaurants that advertised to bowlers in the newspapers in 1970 were in the suburbs. One ad ran, "BOWLERS: FOLLOW THE CROWDS WEST TO ARBY'S."
One of very few downtown businesses to advertise directly to the bowlers in newspaper ads was the Bijou Art Theatre. It was, at the time, a pornographic movie house, advertising films called "Bar Maid" and "Three-Way Split." Pornography on Knoxville's main banking and shopping street was no big deal in Knoxville in 1970. But a glass of wine with dinner was strictly forbidden. To most Knoxvillians of 2003, Knoxville in 1970 would seem stranger than Baghdad.
The ABC convention opened the day of the great solar eclipse. That late-winter Saturday, about 2,700 spectators showed up at the coliseum, fitted with 32 bowling lanes and, for the spring, worthless for anything else. They watched as a representative Joe Bowler was chosen by lot to roll the first ball. To do so, he wore a crown and robe, and carried a scepter, which did little for his form. It was all worth it, though, because he got an official kiss from Miss Knoxville.
Mayor Leonard Rogers was a conservative in charge of a city where liquor by the drink was still strictly illegal. When the Chamber of Commerce tried to prevail upon Rogers to relax enforcement and lay off the police raids, just while the bowlers were here, he snipped, "I don't see anything to do but enforce the law."
Rogers was a longtime bowler, himself, though, and had been instrumental in securing the ABC event. He did some bowling in the tournament. But some bowlers claimed that his aggressive enforcement of Knoxville's unusual liquor-by-the-drink ban would hardly enhance "the big-city image" McCallum had promised. After KPD raids on several Knoxville speakeasies during the first weeks of the ABC tournament resulted in several arrests, some visiting bowlers were declaring they'd never come back to Knoxville "under any circumstance."
Local bowlers were especially steamed about the raids. John Eaton, secretary-treasurer of the Greater Knoxville Bowling Association, announced that "Big Orange Country," a Knoxville team scheduled to bowl on the high-profile Hall of Fame night, would be officially changing their name to "Closed City USA."
In those days of political defiance, it looked like it was going to be the equivalent of the U.S. Olympians' Black Power salute. Eaton and his teammates apparently had second thoughts, though; as city boosters watched nervously, the Knoxville four appeared on the floor as Big Orange Country.
Today, the tournament veterans that Metro Pulse caught up with who remember the event fondly. Glenn Bloomer, now manager of Starlite Bowling Lanes on Western Ave., was then manager of Fountain Lanes on Broadway. "That was a big event, for me," he recalls. "It was quite a thrill. I got acquainted with people from all over the country."
One of those people was Hall of Fame bowler Steve Nagy. "He showed me some faults to my game," Bloomer admits. "He said that when you release the ball, see yourself release it: see your hand with your peripheral vision." Nagy died a few years after that tournament.
Something worked. The tournament was dominated by out-of-state competitors, but Bloomer led in points for three days. "The big-city papers wrote it up as 'Local Man Leads ABC,'" he says. He didn't save the clippings. "I never even kept a scrap book. I really took everything in stride."
For those who didn't get enough bowling at the coliseum, Bloomer hosted a private tournament at Fountain Lanes, with cash prizes derived from a $2 entry fee. "I was paying out about $13,000. That gives you an idea of how many people came." The champ at Fountain Lanes that spring was 20-year-old prodigy Larry Lichstein, later inducted as a national hall-of-famer.
The scorekeeper at that tournament was a 24-year-old accountant and former Young High bowling-team member named Jim Bevins. He was, from the sound of it, agog. "I kept score at the tournament every night and every weekend," he says. It paid, he says, enough money for him to buy a car. Today he doesn't remember the car, but he does remember a perk that may have been more important than the wages. "It got me close to the bowlers, the professionals, the guys I idolized." He mentions in particular Dick Weber and Don Carter.
"I guess that Knoxville would be remembered in ABC history as the place where Dick Weber and Don Carter were inducted into the Bowling Congress Hall of Fame," Bevins says. The ceremony took place on the lanes at the coliseum. At 40, Weber was the youngest man ever to receive that honor, and was visibly choked up about it as he gave his acceptance speech.
Both champs are still alive and active bowlers in their 70s. Bevins said he's gotten word that both will attend a ceremony on March 13.
"People are making a lot of the fact that I was a scorekeeper in 1970, and the next time it's here, I'm president of the organization." Bevins is that, president of the national organization, but still a Knoxvillian. He's credited with bringing the 2003 ABC convention to Knoxville.
What did they all think of Knoxville? Bloomer and Bevins don't remember many complaints about the city's shortcomings: what Knoxville lacked in terms of art or opera weren't necessarily the sorts of things 25,000 bowlers were looking for.
Bloomer recalls that some had fun on Norris Lake. He remembers only the tie-ups involved with the traffic on the interstate, already known as "malfunction junction."
"The bowlers had a great time in Knoxville," Bevins says. Some had questions about the liquor-by-the-drink issue, but Bevins says "That was the only negative thing about the whole tournament."
Neither Bloomer nor Bevins mentions the student demonstrations on UT's campus only a mile west of their tournament. One of those, the post-Kent-State student strike, was among the most dramatic moments in the university's history.
The ABC tournament was dramatic in its own way. Published reports indicate that it added $4 million to the Knoxville economy. Some later estimates from ABC officials are much higher.
In 1971, though, the city reported a precipitous drop in revenue: it was blamed primarily on the fact that Knoxville did not host the ABC tournament that year. Reports of the decline sound a little wistful, as if maybe city boosters suspected Knoxville would never host anything that big again.
Maybe the ABC had a longer-lasting impact on Knoxville. Within two years, the liquor-by-the-drink referendum came up again, for the third or fourth time since Prohibition. This time, it passed.
January 23, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 4
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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