Originally Posted by
RobLV1
I was really excited to read this post as it gives me an opportunity to address a really important subject for modern bowlers. Yes, it was because of wood vs. synthetic. Wood lanes were made of boards of wood which were glued together. The lanes were about 4" thick, and they were periodically planed and sanded to keep them flat. The only times that there were differences between lanes was when there was a variation in the hardness of the individual boards that affected the amount of friction that the ball found from shot to shot. The oil pattern was everything as there was less friction created between the lane surface and the bowling ball. Bowlers found that the most important thing was to find enough friction to let those old-fashioned rubber, plastic, and urethane bowling balls, hook.
When reactive resin balls with dynamic cores were introduced in the early 1990's, it was coincidentally timed with the conversion from wood to synthetic lane surfaces. A great majority of the changes in the game that happened at that time were credited to the changes in the bowling balls, but as was pointed out to me by Don McCune of "soaker" fame, the really big factor that contributed to the game changing was, in fact, the synthetic lanes and the differences in the way that the balls reacted to them.
While what I'm about to say will really upset a lot of long-time bowlers, the fact of the matter is that when you combine synthetic lane surfaces with modern reactive resin bowling balls, the oil has much less to do with the reaction of the bowling ball than several other factors including the topography of the lane surfaces and even the weather conditions inside and outside of the bowling center. The reason for this is because that the oil moves around on the synthetic lane surface much more than it did on the softer, more porous wood surfaces.
The synthetic lane surfaces are comprised of thin sheets of plastic materials that are laid end to end. If you simply walk down the uncoiled lane surface, you can see little humps and dips in the lane surface. If you walk next to the oiled lane surface, you can see how each "seam" where the panels meet are devoid of oil. When you combine these differences in the lane surfaces with the fact that modern bowling balls remove oil from the lane on each pass down the lane, you can see that the effect of the oil pattern is much less significant now than it was in the past. In "the old days" bowlers were looking for friction to help the ball to hook. They were looking for a defined oil line to allow them some miss room. For this reason, league bowlers were adamant about bowling on freshly oiled lanes to give them a well-defined oil line to give them a consistent shot to the pocket. Today, with the differences in the topography from lane to lane, the removal of the oil from the lane surface on every shot, and the tendency of the fresh oil to initially spread to low areas in the lane surface, the first twenty to thirty minutes of play on a freshly oiled surface often presents bowlers with their greatest challenges of the session due to how quickly the lanes change, and the fact that the individual lanes in the pair often change differently.
When you bowled on the synthetic lane surfaces, despite the slightly longer oil pattern, you were able to take advantage of your high rev rate in combination with the increased amount of friction between the reactive resin surface of your bowling balls and the resin surface of the lanes themselves. You were able to use the oil the way that it needs to be used today; to hold off the friction between the ball and the lane until the point that allows the ball to hook back to the pocket at the proper point down the lane.
The bottom line is this: when bowlers automatically refer to differences in ball reaction from lane to lane, or day to day, in terms of the oil pattern, it is a response that was learned in the seventies or eighties that has very little to do with modern bowling. It is only when they understand that the game is not the same as it was decades ago that they can truly reach the potential that they have NOW!
As it is now 4 a.m., I hope that I have at least begun to express what I have to say adequately. Hopefully, your post will create a meaningful and very important discussion.
Bowling under pressure?
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