Professional Bowling

By Chris Jones

America and Americans did not invent bowling. They were, however, the first to take a silly little game in which a ball was rolled at pins and turn it into a legitimate sport with rules. And then they took that new sport of theirs and transformed it into a genuine professional pursuit with TV spotlights and gravitas. That's amazing when you stop to think about it. Only America could take an ancient Egyptian hobby and make it into one more bloodless approximation of war.

And because Americans made bowling what it is, because they have given bowling a brash and spangled style all its own, they've also given birth to men like Pete Weber, the most American American in the history of America. Only in this beautiful country could a skinny dork with lacquered hair, Terminator sunglasses, and a preternatural ability to spin a bowling ball become a famed bad-boy millionaire. Weber, when he triumphs over his fellow bowlers — at bowling, let us not forget — will howl pure crazy into the cameras ("Who do you think you are? I am!") and perform his signature celebratory move, the Pete Weber Crotch Chop, striking his flat karate hands against the front of his thin thrusting hips. The Pete Weber Crotch Chop is what happens when so many admirable American qualities — drive and desire and mastery over an incredibly narrow but marketable skill — are distilled into one rebel man's aggressively directed undercarriage.

I am not making fun. I think all of this is awesome. America, more than any other country, has an almost hyperdemocratic knack for manufacturing bizarre ways for its otherwise most ordinary citizens to qualify for greatness. You don't have to be a scientist or a politician or an inventor to make your mark here. You can be pretty much anything you want; you need only be a world-beater at whatever it is you choose. Professional bowling just happens to be one of the best invented lotteries in America's enviable collection, one more in the litany of contests and duels that are just waiting for you to rig them in your favor, so long as you have the balls.

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