Knockin' 'em down with beers, booze, and bowling: a study of how pins and players alike tumble as time ticks on during league night - drinking behavior of players in Chicago Metropolitan Bowling Association

TUESDAY NIGHT, WAVELAND Bowl, Chicago. You can drink rum and Cokes or pitcher after pitcher of High Life, but it won't blur the state of the game.

At the far end of the building, past the video arcade, the business-casual members of the Chicago Sport and Social Club crowd around their allotted lanes. They've been placed here, away from the amenities, so that their music--innocuous pop, blaring from someone's gleaming boom-box--won't distract the real bowlers in the men's league of the Chicago Metropolitan Bowling Association, which commands the lanes at the front of the building, where the bar is close at hand.

The Social Club twentysomethings, fresh from their offices in Chicago's Loop and the corporate campuses on the city's expressways, match or exceed the CMBA players in number, if not in skill. In their awkward approaches to the line and aw-shucks attitudes about gutter balls and unmade spares, they represent the complacent, non-competitive face of so many bowlers today.

"We're yuppies," one girl says, unashamed. This isn't the only label this group likes to wear; there's Abercrombie & Fitch, J. Crew, and The Gap as well. And later, when their game breaks up, T-shirts that commemorate their participation in the Social Club's bowling league will be passed out as if it was one of the frat parties they're now too old to attend. But why not? No one keeps a record of their bowling averages.

And it's bowling averages I'm here to examine, among other things. The league at Waveland Bowl is one of the CMBA's better ones. Most players average in the high 170s, and more than a handful of teams are anchored by bowlers who regularly top 210. More importantly for my purposes, Waveland Bowl is open 24/7/365, and patrons include socialites like Hugh Hefner's daughter, would-be gang-bangers in baggy pants, and punk-rockers who bring balls they bought from the Salvation Army.

Joe Six-Packs come here to blow off steam after all three shifts, and, well, yuppies come here, too. It's an ideal place, open to all. Not only are Waveland's lanes well-kept and modern to a fault, with the day-glo, black-light accessories necessary for "cosmic bowling," they also contain the full range of the city's citizens--or should I say drinkers?--all of them engaged in the grand old game of tenpins. Which, as legend or fact has it, was invented in 1841 in Connecticut as a way of getting around a puritanical law that banned nine-pin bowling due to its supposed encouragement of sin, including the gambling and drinking that many of today's bowlers rightfully take to be fundamental aspects of the game.

I want to know how drinking affects bowling. Subconsciously, with a plastic cup of High Life in one hand and a tape recorder in the other, I suppose I'm hoping to find a legendary Marlboro Man of a character--the guy who knocks down beers and pins in heroic proportions, whose sheer skill and indomitable prowess flies in the face of sensible Surgeon General warnings.

According to the American College of Sports Medicine--and good sense--I'm not likely to find him. As you'd expect, doctors point out that alcohol and athletics don't mix. "Alcohol affects the body's every system," they write. Then they list the usual horror show of consequences, not the least of them being myopathy, other wise known as "muscle damage, wasting, and weakness." So much for 12-ounce curls.

But some bowlers here think otherwise. "Bowlers drink. Period," says Dave Seide, a 205-average bowler for a team called the Sidekicks. Seide and his comrades are throwbacks. In a league where individuality holds sway, they wear matching polo shirts with their team logo on the back, and they sit at a table littered with empty plastic cups and well-fingered playing cards from a nudie deck. "That's Christy Canyon," Seide says when he sees me eyeing the card in front of him.

The team runs a card game based on what they bowl, he explains. The higher your bowling score, the better your cards are likely to be. This league isn't turn-back-the-clock as much as it's time-stand-still, really. Not much has changed since Connecticut banned ninepins in 1841.

Right now, however, the Sidekicks are in a slump. Though they're one of the best teams in the league, for the last two weeks they've bowled horribly. I ask them if drinking has anything to do with their decline. "Actually," a team member says, "we've been drinking less."

Perry Malen, with a 187 average, is the Sidekicks' second-best bowler and heaviest drinker, according to his teammates. He describes his drinking strategy this way: "You've got to start strong and then ease off."

Indeed, there's a consensus: Almost every bowler tells me that he has one or two drinks before play begins and then limits himself to one drink per game. Those who believe that drinking actually helps them say that their scores always go up from their first to third games. "It's just like golf," says Chanadris McKinney, who bowls for a team called the Mullets. "Whenever you find your game going a little awry, have a couple of drinks. It relaxes you. And guess what? You start having a good time--which is what you should be doing in the first place."