A Striking New Sound Hits the Alleys : Aluminum Lanes Are Making Their Impact Felt as Bowling Splits With Tradition

No one knows who is responsible, but someone in the aluminum industry keeps taking the little pleasures in life away from us.

First it was arrows. Remember the joy you got in seeing a friend’s arrow leave the bow and crash into a tree, turning itself into a neat pile of toothpicks? Well, someone took that little slice of life away by making aluminum arrows.

Then someone ruined baseball, turning the symphonic crash of wood against ball into an ugly sounding aluminum thud reminiscent of the time the transmission fell out of your Uncle Walter’s station wagon.

Now, prepare to kiss bowling goodby.

Bowling always has taken place on lanes made of wood. Good, hard wood. Wooden bowling lanes have been traced all the way back to a time when the rental shoes hadn’t yet begun to smell like someone else’s feet.

And who can ever forget the childhood joy derived from pretending to get your fingers stuck in the bowling ball, then lofting that 16-pound beauty high into the air and listening with pounding heart as it slammed down onto the wooden alley?

“It got stuck. And then it slipped,” you would lie to the furious manager. “Sorry.”

Your friends would laugh. The louder their laughter, the higher you had “inadvertently” heaved the bowling ball and the deeper the dent in the alley.

Those days are about to join the days of pin-setting by hand. Gone forever. Welcome to the age of synthetic bowling lanes.

And the culprit once again, straight from a bauxite strip mine, yes, it’s Mr. Aluminum.

“They will not dent,” said Gorden Murrey Sr., president of Murrey International in Gardena, the firm that invented, patented, manufactures and installs the aluminum lanes.

“I mean they will not dent. Oh, I guess you might dent one with a sledgehammer, but not with a bowling ball.”

The latest bowladrome to install the aluminum-based lanes is the Conejo Village Bowl in Thousand Oaks. As you walk through the glass doors of the establishment, your eyes instantly are drawn to the new lanes, glistening, shining perfect lanes with inch-wide slats and deep wood grain just begging to be bowled upon.

It’s a mirage. You are not looking at wood. What you are looking at is aluminum with a thin coat of hard plastic and a photograph of wood superimposed onto it.

It looks like wood and it even feels like highly polished wood. But if you see a termite chewing through this stuff, you’re about to see a termite with monumental dental problems.

The first hint is that it doesn’t sound like wood.

“When the ball lands on it, it’s just a light tap rather than the old familiar bonk you’d hear with the wood lanes,” Murrey said.

“The old wood lanes went thunk ,” said Reed Freeman, general manager of the Conejo Village Bowl. “The new lanes sort of go tink .”

“I kinda’ miss the bam you got on the wood lanes,” said 73-year-old Jack Pollick of Newbury Park, who has spent much of his spare time in the past 50 years bowling. “Now, it’s just kind of a little click when the ball hits.”

Hello, tap , tink and click. Goodby, bonk, thunk and bam.

“In 10 years there won’t be any more wood bowling lanes,” predicts Murrey, whose company has installed more than 100 lanes and is, in Murrey’s words, “very, very busy” trying to fill new orders.

And all of this just because the new lanes are cheaper, much easier to maintain, more consistent to bowl on and generally preferred by bowlers over the wood lanes. Other than that, the move to synthetic lanes is ridiculous.

“Before we began marketing them, we took a very serious look at the whole picture,” Murrey said. “First, we wanted to determine if the new synthetic lanes were good for the game of bowling and for bowlers. What we found was that overall, they were. They give the bowler a more accurate, more consistent surface to bowl on. There are no grooves like you can get in wood lanes. When you bowl on these new lanes, you’re getting an honest score.

“Secondly, we looked at them from a proprietor’s view, and there’s no comparison. His job is to make his bowlers happy and keep his costs down. Wood lanes require constant work, refinishing and cleaning. They’ve got to be refinished at least every six months, and the cost of finish goes up every year. It’s about $100 a gallon now for any decent stuff.

“With the new lanes, you just wash them once in a while with warm water and detergent. That’s it. Wood lanes need skilled professional maintenance. Give me a glorified janitor and I can show him in 20 minutes how to wash our lanes.”

The 3/8-inch-thick lane surfaces cost $8,500 per lane if installed in a new bowling house and $6,200 per lane if installed over an existing wood lane. Murrey said the melamine plastic surface will last for 25 to 30 years under average bowling pressure and the aluminum will last “longer than the building they’re in.”

Freeman said he undertook an exhaustive search for the best product before recommending Murrey’s lanes be installed at the Conejo Village Bowl, where the last of the 24 lanes was completed last week.

“We had to replace the wood lanes. They were just plain worn out,” Freeman said. “First, I wanted to find out just what was the best lane available. After researching new wood lanes and synthetic lanes and talking to everybody I could find, Murrey’s lanes were the answer.”

The conversion took one week, with Freeman able to operate 20 of his 24 lanes each day as workers installed the aluminum sheets on four lanes each day.

And they have been given a warm reception.

On Monday, between league sessions, Sue Riall and her 8-year-old son Martin tested the synthetic lanes. Early in the match, the ball flew out of Martin’s hand during his backswing. His mother dove at the ball as it hurtled back toward the seats, intercepting it just inches away from serious property damage.

Apparently shaken by the incident, Martin proceeded to drill a pair of gutter balls. At this point it seemed Martin wouldn’t much care if the lanes were made of a high-tech aluminum alloy or varnished airline meat loaf.

Not true. He did care.

“I don’t know if I bowl any better, but they’re nice to look at,” Martin said of the gleaming lanes.

His mother also liked them. Sort of.

“Oh, they’re much nicer than the old wood lanes. They’re more slippery,” she said. “But you gotta get used to them. I almost fell on my butt the first time I threw a ball.”

With the new lanes, who cares? There aren’t even any splinters to worry about.

Veteran bowler Pollick, who has watched his league average leap from 149 to 174 with the installation of the new lanes, said he was sad to see the old wood lanes covered up until his average started to climb.

“I love ‘em,” he said. “I throw a hard, fast ball with a hook, and it just seems to hook better on this new stuff. It’s beautiful. The old lanes were nice. Traditional, you know. These are better, though.”

But you know bowlers. Always worried about something. Shoes are too big. Shoes are too small. Hand is too wet. Hand is too dry.

“I worry about going somewhere else to bowl,” Pollick said. “Someplace with wood lanes. Now that I’m getting used to these new ones, will my average go right back down on the wood? I don’t know. But it bothers me.”

These days, nothing seems to bother Freeman. He’s got state-of-the-art bowling alleys. Undentable bowling alleys.

“We had a guy here a few years ago, big guy, a football player at Cal Lutheran,” Freeman said. “He was with some of his buddies and his thumb got stuck in the ball. You could tell it was an accident. I swear, that ball went up and right through one of our ceiling tiles, carried over two more tiles and came down through the ceiling about 10 feet feet from where it went into the ceiling. Boy, what a dent that put in the lane.

“I was mad for a minute, but you could tell from his reaction that it was an accident.”

Right, Reed. Those accidents used to happen all the time. But not anymore. Not since Mr. Aluminum crashed the party.