Isn't It About Time Then?

For those of you who do not watch the Professional Bowling Association tournaments on ESPN in the middle of your weekend days, you may not be familiar with the tour’s pride in its collective past. Bowling greats are revered; their progeny, if competitive in the professional ranks are also respected. Bowling is a sport that thrives on etiquette, respect, and tradition.

Ironically, bowling is a sport that is intensely dictated by technology. Oil patterns get tougher to master with automated equipment; hooks get more drastic with counter-weighted, urethane balls.

Bring Jason Belmonte to the fore, a young Australian professional bowler with a unique two-handed delivery that only 3 or 4 professionals in the world use. A WSJ story written by Adam Thompson on February 5, 2009 shed light on the controversy this technique is causing in the mild-mannered sport. Purists are against its potentially destructive ways and the attention it gives the 25 year-old Belmonte. Some are afraid young fans will hurt themselves trying to emulate his style.

After a strong showing in the PBA World Championship in October, he was granted two exemptions for tournaments the following December, which meant he got to skip to an advanced round. Many pros had a problem with this.

They saw this as a blatant attempt for the PBA to foster interest in the later rounds of their tournaments. It was, but it was also a reward for an excelling young star in the sport. The attention Belmonte is bringing to the sport is phenomenal and not every pro is jealous. In Thompson’s story, PBA pro Mike Fagan was quoted as saying, "Bowling's lost its luster, and I think he could bring it back."

This begs the question, what is pure? And why do so many athletes deem their sport as being such? If they thought about it, surely technology would render most of their purity arguments moot in any sport, especially where so much of the success is currently based on equipment improvements, like bowling. Don’t believe me? Review this list of the PBA's Annual Average Score Leaders and notice how the scores get dramatically higher after 1980, coincidentally about the time the urethane ball was made popular.

Let’s take a look at some other firsts that were hotly contested in their time which we, I think, can all agree worked out for the best.

The Dunk

We know that a certain Julius Erving helped revolutionize the dunk, but that was way after forerunners like George Mikan, Bill Russell, and Wilt Chamberlain occasionally used their brute force and obvious size advantages* for a dunk shot, as it was called. But it took a progressive if under-funded brother league known as the ABA to bring in such commodities as the three-point line and applied a new style and flair to what was eventually coined as the slam dunk. As players took the dunk to the next level, it became a statement of power; a graceful punctuation to a drive to the basket. Darryl Dawkins gave the dunk its undeniable promise of power, whereas Julius Erving, or Dr. J, portrayed the dunk as a manifestation of man’s eternal desire to soar—even if it was only from the foul line.

Add names like Larry Nance and Dominique Wilkins to the list. Dee Brown, Cedric Ceballos, Michael Jordan, Vince Carter, Spud Webb, Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Shaquille O’Neal: All of these players helped to revolutionize the slam dunk either in slam dunk contests during various all star weekends or during games. They have all added to a unique NBA legacy that started as a “big man” move to take advantage of the little guy. Consider the following video of 5’9’’ Nate Robinson leaping over 6’11’’ Dwight Howard in this year’s All-Star Slam Dunk Contest. We’ve come a long way.

The Slap Shot, And Then Inevitably…

As with much of sports lore, the origins of the slap shot aren’t necessarily crystal clear. Canadiens Hall-Of-Famer, Bernard “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, aptly nicknamed for the sound his shots made off the boards, is often credited with inventing the shot as a youngster in the late ‘40s , although an American named John Mayasich (an Olympic player) was allegedly using the slap shot since the early 1950s. Regardless of who invented it, goalies still had to deal with it with virtually no protection. Bobby Hull’s thundering slap shot instilled fear in just about every goaltender, and today, the likes of hulking defensemen Zdeno Chara of the Boston Bruins can crank slap shots out at bone-splintering speeds of 105.4 mph.

It’s easy to see how the early days of the slap shot, opposed by many as brutish and ungraceful would have precipitated a change in the goalies’ approach to the game.

The Goalie mask

Although Clint Benedict wore a nose guard for several games after breaking his nose, the first official mask worn by an NHL goalie was in 1957 by Jacques Plante. He was only allowed to do so because he was struck in the face by a puck and refused to act as the Canadiens' only goaltender until he was permitted to wear the mask. He faced his fair share of disdain and questions of his toughness, but with the ever-increasing speed of the game, the players, and consequently, the puck, Plante’s pragmatism opened the door for other goalies to protect their faces and heads, play more aggressive styles of goal tending and keep up with the evolution of the forwards and defensemen. The last goalie not to wear a helmet was Andy Brown in ’73-’74, long after the slap shot and curved stick blade were in common use. After viewing the following, consider if Plante had not been so bold.

The Forward Football Pass

American Football owes its very soul to soccer and rugby and other sports that gave rise to the current megalith that is the NFL. Football has changed so dramatically from its start in America that it is not in many ways comparable to its former self; however, one of the most positive changes or rule adaptations American Football ever made was the adoption of the forward pass as a means of making the game safer. Previous to the forward pass, plays were built strictly out of blocking and running on offense, and blocking and tackling on defense. Every play garnered extreme physical contact and too many players were getting hurt to continue in this vein. There had been many illegal and experimental attempts at the forward pass before it was deemed legal, but it took 18 deaths, 159 serious injuries, and Presidential intervention on Teddy Roosevelt’s behalf to reform the rules in 1905. In 1906 Bradbury Robinson threw the first legal forward pass for St. Louis University to teammate Jack Schneider, which went for an incompletion—perhaps the most important incompletion in history. The governing body to legalize this new offensive weapon was the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, which would become the NCAA in 1910.

As a first-hand witness of the event, St. Louis Post-Dispatch sportswriter Ed Wray would later write in an October 1947 "Wray's Column", "The football world in general and the college and professional treasuries in particular are indebted to [Coach] Cochems and Robinson and St. Louis University... That's because the tremendous rise of gridiron interest everywhere can be traced directly of the Cochems-Robinson forward passing and to the improved spectacle it has made of this fine and manly game."

Integration In Baseball

For a long time baseball mirrored our nation’s scarred history. Baseball was just as beset with segregation as our closed-minded nation was and both suffered for it. At first, it was simply a victory for minorities to have a league at all, even if it was segregated. Eventually, when it was obvious that the skill level in the minority and Negro leagues was at or above that of the white professionals, questions needed to be answered: Hey, why can't we play?

One of the most hotly contested changes in sports history was the integration of baseball, of that you can be sure. Jackie Robinson, who was the first African-American baseball player in Major League Baseball played his first game in 1947 and opened the door for minorities everywhere. Granted, that door was slow to adjust to its fully ajar position in the sports world, but opening it was vital, and Jackie Robinson, while not the first to play with whites, was the first to do so on such a grand scale.

He received death threats, endured barbaric verbal abuse from players, coaches, and fans. A lesser man could not have possibly represented the cause as well as Jackie did. I think it's only too obvious to state that we, as sports fans, and we, as a nation have benefited from this step immensely. Not only has it opened our eyes to view the amazing feats of athletes we would have never been privy to, not only has it opened our minds to accepting others and embracing the global community, but it has also opened our hearts to understand that sports are transcendent. Anything you put your mind to can be done. That is Jackie Robinson’s enduring legacy.

And it would have never occurred without change.

Never.

Roll that ball with two hands, Jay.

We all might be doing the same thing in a few years.

* not one of them was shorter than 6’10’’ in an era where the average height of an NBA player was 6’5’’ vs. today’s NBA average of 6’7’’