Nick DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes upstairs at his North Centre Mall on Station Road in Thompson, offering both five-pin and 10-pin bowling, opened in March 1999 and celebrated its 16th anniversary March 19.
My first trip to Nick’s NC Crossroad Lanes – at least to bowl – was for some five-pin bowling a few weeks before that on Feb. 28 when my friend Paul Boge, the Winnipeg writer and filmmaker was in town for the weekend as guest speaker for Pastor Ted Goossen’s annual Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship Family Enrichment weekend, and a Saturday afternoon outing to the bowling alley was on the agenda. My curiosity got the best of me in wondering if Boge is as good a bowler as he is speaker and Christian apologist. He is.
DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes has been the only game in town when it comes to bowling since May 2010 when the last strikes were thrown at Thompson Lanes on Churchill Drive, which opened in 1965 and was operated by the Stuart family for 40 of its 45 years in existence.
Before my end of February five-pin outing at NC Crossroad Lanes with my friends from Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship, I think my most recent bowling outing had been back in Kingston, Ontario when I was a grad student at Queen’s University in the mid-1990s.
Five-pin bowling, for my American readers, is a Canadian thing, invented by Tommy Ryan in Toronto in 1909. Original pin count (values) are established as (from left to right) “4-2-1-3-5.” The first five-pin bowling league was formed at Ryan’s Toronto Bowling Club the following year in 1910. While there are some five-pin bowling alleys in the United States and in Europe, the vast majority of five-pin bowling alleys and leagues are found in Canada.
Ryan ran his own pool hall in Toronto prior to inventing the sport of five-pin bowling. Ryan came up with the idea of five-pin bowling after many of his clients complained that the balls in 10-pin bowling were too heavy. As a result, he produced a version of bowling with a new scoring system, lighter balls, and rubber rings around the pins.
The first five-pin bowling organization was the Canadian Bowling Association (CBA) formed in Toronto in 1927, which followed a year later in 1928 with its first Official 5 Pin Rule Book printed by the CBA. In 1952, the pin count was revised to (from left to right) 2-3-5-3-2 (as it is currently). The highest possible score that can be attained in five-pin bowling is 450. This can be accomplished by achieving a strike in the first nine frames and then achieving three more strikes in the tenth (final) frame. In five-pin bowling, three strikes in a row is a total of 45 points (in the first frame in which the streak began). When multiplied by 10, the final point total would be 450.
The Canadian Five-Pin Bowler’s Association now determines the rules and rule changes in five-pin bowling, while the Bowling Proprietors Association of Canada (BPAC) represents the interest of bowling alley owners.
When a player uses all three of their throws to knock down all of the pins, it is known as a “full set.” Three consecutive strikes is known as a “turkey”; three consecutive strikes in the tenth frame is called a “Strike Out,” while hitting both three pins (in your first two throws) is called a “Howie.”
Each week nearly one million Canadians go bowling and five-pin bowling was voted the fourth-greatest Canadian invention of all time on the CBC Television series Greatest Canadian Inventions.
The United States had 4,061 bowling centers in 2012, down 25 percent from 1998, the earliest year for which the U.S. Census collected consistent data, Bloomberg Business reported last July. By contrast, the United States added 2,000 bowling alleys between the end of the Second World War and 1958, when the American Society of Planning Officials reported in May 1958 that “the bowling alley is fast becoming one of the most important – if not the most important – local center of participant sport and recreation.”
While Canadians may have the claim on five-pin bowling, Americans can point to the unique distinction of having a bowling alley – albeit 10-pin – right in the White House in Washington. In fact, it turned 68 last Saturday, as President Harry S. Truman officially opened it on April 25, 1947.
Fellow Missourians funded the construction of the bowling alley on the ground floor of the West Wing in honour of the president. They had intended to open the alley as part of Truman’s 63rd birthday celebration on May 8, 1947, but construction was completed ahead of schedule. Truman’s favourite pastime was poker and although he had not bowled since he was a teenager, A&E Television Networks’ This Day in History notes, “he gamely hoisted the first ball, knocking down 7 out of 10 pins. One of the pins is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution.”
Truman allowed staff to start a league but presidential bowling was moved to the Old Executive Office Building in 1955 to make way for a mimeograph room. But in 1969, President Richard Nixon, an avid bowler, had a new one-lane alley built, which was paid for by friends, in an underground workspace area below the driveway leading to the North Portico.
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