Maybe you didn’t think it would be possible to find sufficient content to fill a 24/7 bowling channel on your tv and laptop. I admit to some skepticism when I first saw the icon (begging to be clicked upon), on my Roku TV. After I gobbled up my first six hours of programming, however, it was obvious they could fill two or three BOWLING.TV channels with fascinating bowling footage and bowling-related features and never run out of material.
The bowling matches and tournaments span decades, there is very little national coverage with players whose names you might recognize, and while the specific venue is usually identified, you are rarely told what year it was filmed. That is one of the fascinations of BOWLING.TV---guessing the year from the clothing, hairstyles, jewelry, and tattoo proliferation of the players. On one show, every guy will be sporting a mullet. Then the next show will be mulletless. Corn rows, Hawaiian shirts, mohawks, harem pants, gold chains, dangly earrings, neck tats---all these decorations and fashion statements have their time and place, and many of them go away for a few years and then return. (Caligula supposedly had a mullet, btw.) Some of them are easy to date, of course. A bowling show with skin-tight yoga pants on 250-pound female bowlers is only a year or two old, since this is a fairly-recent fashion phenomenon. This is a fact for which I believe we can all be somewhat grateful.
Most of it is matches and tournaments, from wherever and whenever. However, there are a few oddball shows that don’t feature any actual bowling. There is one extremely dull mono-toned young man who does half-hour lectures on new bowling balls and other products on the market, with detailed observations and strong opinions on polymers and densities and oil viscosities that no one lacking a Ph. D in chemistry could possibly understand.
There are also VLOGS produced by youthful bowlers about the bowling journeys their lives have become. These may not be my favorite shows, partly because they can stretch on, seemingly, for a week or two. There are deep thoughts offered by these young men, though from what I’ve seen, the ruminations of 18-year-olds obsessed with bowling do not contain a lot of deep thoughts. Still, whatever they have to offer, you will find on BOWLING.TV.
Then there was an hour-long show with three young guys in a car driving to a bowling tournament, yakking about other bowlers, where to get good French fries, fun stuff to do in Amarillo, etc. You never found out where they were or where they were going, and it was all shot on the phone of one of the guys sitting in the back seat.
However, when you broadcast bowling content 24/7, not all of it is going to be Citizen Kane. On the plus side, one category I love is the “Beat the Champ” shows. All of these are local productions produced by small stations, and they feature good bowlers in the area in a match designed to be shown at 1:00 AM or on Saturday morning after the cartoons. The winner gets fifty or a hundred bucks, gets to banter with the host, and comes back the following week. Once he loses, he’s done and there is a new “champ.” Since a guy might be champ for several weeks, you usually get to meet his wife and kids, you find out he’s an electrician who plays the banjo, and maybe you meet his grandpa who was in Okinawa in 1943.
But my favorite shows, by far, are the team contests between colleges or community colleges. These are extremely exciting, high-energy events. The stands are packed with students from the two schools, all wearing their school colors, waving pennants, and screaming for every ball. There are also plenty of parents and family members and friends, some of whom may have spent a couple pre-game hours in the car getting lubricated for the match.
The format of the match itself is designed to induce psychosis. There are five players on each team, but rather than have five head-to-head matches, there is one game with all ten players participating by throwing two frames each. This means that in the limited space allotted to a half-dozen seats and the approach areas for two lanes, there will be ten players, coaches and assistant coaches, two equipment boys or girls, and a brace of cheerleaders for each squad. All 25 or 30 of these folks are focused on the one ball being rolled at the moment.
When a strike is thrown, you would think WWII had just ended, with all the screaming and chest-bumps and head-butts and high-fives that ensue. In fact, any positive development for your side justifies a St. Vitus Dance level of celebration and mindless ecstasy. Even a spare is met with screaming and embraces. One assumes (though I haven’t personally witnessed this), that making a 3-10 split would elicit marriage proposals, or at least an offer of fellatio in the parking lot.
Then, thirty seconds later, when another ball is thrown, it all erupts again, though this time it may be the other team and their parents and friends and coaches and cheerleaders.
(A note for this age of bad manners and trash talk: there is NEVER any glee expressed for a bad shot by the opposition---the only acceptable reaction when the other team screws up is a moment of respectful silence.)
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Finally, here’s a tip for maximum enjoyment of the channel. Once you dive deep into BOWLING.TV and begin to bite off twelve- or sixteen-hour increments, you may be tempted to pursue your spiritual and psychedelic goals by watching the channel and ingesting LSD, mushrooms or other hallucinogenic substances at the same time. However, this is completely unnecessary. Since the channel is on both Roku TV AND the internet (watchbowling.tv), and since there is a five-second delay between the two feeds, you can achieve intergalactic consciousness by watching on TV andyour laptop simultaneously (or at the same time), without the expense or potential health hazard entailed in the consumption of powerful mind-bending substances. The time required to achieve the desired state varies with the individual. As a person with extensive experience of hallucinations throughout my life, I found that no more than seventeen hours of simultaneous tv/laptop watching was necessary.
Copyright2026MichaelKubacki
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