Five fun facts about candlepin bowling

Small balls, skinny pins, and guaranteed failure. What’s not to like?

For people who grew up in New England, it’s just bowling. For everyone else (and that includes me), here are five things you should know about candlepin bowling.

When most Americans think about bowling, they envision the game of tenpins — a game where players use large balls to topple curvy pins. Bowlers have two turns per frame to knock down all ten pins.

Candlepin bowling is a little different. Candlepins are taller than tenpins and skinnier. The cylindrical pins are almost 16 inches high, three inches across, and tapered slightly at each end. The balls fit in a player’s hand and do not have finger holes. Candlepin players have three turns per frame and the downed pins are not cleared between rolls.

Justin “Pop” White owned a bowling and billiards parlor in Worcester, Massachusetts, and John J. Monsey was a pool player with a gift for promotion. Working together in the last decades of the nineteenth century, they developed the game of candlepin bowling. Today the game is played mostly in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.

The other small-ball games are duckpins, rubber-band duckpins, and five pins. All were developed around the turn of the twentieth century, and all are still played today. Duckpins are played in parts of New England and the mid-Atlantic. Rubber-band duckpins are played almost exclusively in the province of Quebec. Five-pin bowling is played throughout Canada.

The small balls and skinny pins mean that candlepin bowling requires precision. Playing the wood, or using the fallen pins to knock down others, calls for finesse. Big-ball bowling (otherwise known as tenpins) is a game of strength. It’s not unheard of to roll a perfect game in tenpins. But in more than a century of play, no one has ever rolled a perfect candlepin game. Two men share the record high score of 245: Ralph Semb, who set the record in 1984, and Chris Sargent, who tied it in 2011. The difficulty of the game is a point of pride for candlepin players.

The first and longest-running show was Candlepin Bowling, which was hosted by Don Gillis and ran on Saturdays from 1958 through 1996. Televised bowling put candlepin games on equal footing with other professional sports contests — sometimes beating them in the ratings — and turned everyday people into household names because of their extraordinary skills on the lanes. Viewers flocked to candlepin centers to see if they could bowl as well as their on-air idols.

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