Hidden Virtues to Bowling Alone

The recent death of the great bowler Don Carter prompted some serious thinking about the sport over which he ruled in the 1950s, a sport which has been making something of a comeback in recent years. There are a lot of things to like about bowling: the jazzy shoes, the retro shirts, memories of the iconic announcer “Whispering” Joe Wilson (and, okay, even of Chris Schenkel), and the fact that real people used to set the pins—actually, they still do in about ten bowling alleys in the United States, including Southport Lanes, near where I grew up in Chicago. Not to mention the miracle of automatic scoring, surely one of the greatest developments of the 1970s! As I said, there is a lot to like about bowling, or at least there was until 1995, when Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam came along and spoiled everything with his “Bowling Alone” article, rendering the sport into yet another metaphor about America’s decline.