Remembering Bill Taylor - even if you may not

Chances are, if you ask 10 Prince William County bowlers who Bill Taylor was, you will get 10 people who have never heard of the man. Bill Taylor was little known in the bowling industry, yet he was an inventor, coach, author, visionary, guru and prophet.

Taylor did nearly everything in the industry but with very little fanfare. He died this summer at age 84 and the bowling world hardly noticed.

About Bill Taylor

Like many avid bowlers, Taylor took up bowling as a teenager, achieving a 185 average on difficult condi-tions in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1940s. He never reached the higher levels as a bowler but he was a student of the game and he coached some the greats -- like Billy Welu, Don Ellis, Dick Weber, Glenn Allison, Mike Durbin and David Ozio -- to great success.

Taylor's non-bowling livelihood was derived from a unique car-polishing technique he developed which could remove seemingly impossible materials like cement, paint, tree sap, glue or tar from new cars. His company flourished, which gave him the financial freedom to invest millions of his own dollars into his crusade to save bowling.

Taylor's mission

So just what did Bill Taylor do to make him so important to bowling? It all started during a 1958 All-Star tournament when he noticed that the bowling pins seemed to offer less resistance to the balls than usual. He stole one of the pins and sawed it in half vertically, exposing a new, second internal void, just under the pin's center of gravity making the pin lighter and more bouncy.

This discovery set him on a mission to save bowling from what he called "soft conditions." He believed that pins that were easy to knock down and lanes that were oiled in such a way to make the bowling ball follow an easier path to the pocket sent false signals to a bowler, thus impeding the bowler's ability to improve.

He wrote and distributed a pamphlet titled, "Warning! SSC [Super Soft Conditions] is Bowl-ing's Cancer." This began his campaign to save bowling that lasted over 40 years until he finally concluded that the bowling industry was "deaf, dumb and blind" to the issue.

Mission not accomplished

Over the years, Taylor submitted more proposals to the American Bowling Congress, forerunner of the United States Bowling Congress, for maintaining the integrity of the pins, balls, lanes and scoring than any other individual in history. Almost all of his recommendations were rejected even as the number of honor scores soared while USBC membership was slipping.

He was a thorn in the bowling industry's side because while pushing his integrity agenda, he tended to be confrontational and thus made people uncomfortable in their dealings with him. But he still managed to introduce many innovations to bowling, especially in lane maintenance, ball fitting and drilling.

Predictions come true?

When Taylor made his dire predictions about bowling's eminent demise, nobody listened. Maybe he was tilting at windmills, maybe not. Virtually all of Taylor's predictions about the decline of the sport of bowling have come to pass. At less than 3 million sanctioned bowlers today, USBC membership is down 67 percent from a high of 9 million in 1980. The number of bowling centers in the U.S. peaked in 1962 at 11,500 and has steadily declined to a 2008 level of less than 6,000 -- while the number of honor scores has reached stratospheric proportions.

But for all of Taylor's accurate prognostications, few of his solutions to bowling's problems have ever been practical in terms of marketability or commercial viability and none ever had the necessary financial backing to effectively reach the marketplace.

Gil Sanchez is a freelance bowling writer for the News & Messenger. He is a member of the Bowling Writ-ers Association of America and the United States Bowling Congress Advisory Council. Reach him at 703-587-6792 or at gsanchez@insidenova.com.