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Landing an interview with the elusive Steve Cooper was not an easy task as most of his professional contacts had lost touch with him years ago. I knew that he had to still have some sort of insight into the business so I made it my mission to find him and find out what he had to say. It had been almost two decades since Steve’s designs had hit the scene and nearly as long since he had spoken to anyone about it. He was also a man who had gotten so frustrated with where bowling had gone that he had essentially isolated himself from the sport. Steve was the man responsible for Reactive Urethane bowling equipment and the pioneer of modern designed weight blocks. While that name may not ring a lot of bells in modern circles his inventions and contribution to bowling have completely changed the landscape of the sport. Everything that has an ending has a beginning and, for what modern bowling has become, that beginning is Steve Cooper. I knew that in order to find all the answers that I would have to dig further and find a point where the sport divulged. After many hours of interviews, columns, opinions and videos my search landed me in a place where I put the blame solely on the bowlers but I now realize there is more to this problem then just acidic attitudes towards the game. I traveled far and near attempting to figure out what people were complaining about and, more importantly, why. NORWALK - For the last several years I have searched for an answer to a question that has plagued the bowling industry in “what happened to bowling.” What Happened To Bowling? The Beginning Of The Change
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This story is set free for all to read because it’s centered on Markowitz’s piece 8, 2011 that the story appeared in is attached to the bottom of the story.
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A PDF of the California Bowling News issue of Dec. Markowitz’s story follows and then the questions I wish I could ask Cooper.
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However, the posting of a picture of one of the two Xcaliburs Mac used during that famous AC-Delco Classic led to a long string of comments and eventually to Dustin Markowitz sending me the story he wrote for the California Bowling News in 2011 after he interviewed Cooper not long before he died of a brain tumor. Someone sent me a copy of it back then, but I couldn’t find it. I did vaguely recall an interview with him many years ago that I saw published in a bowling newspaper. That remains the case, and now it’s impossible to do the story proper justice as Cooper died of a brain tumor several years ago. The short columns I wrote for the Ten Pin Journal in Milwaukee for many years weren’t the proper forum for telling the story of the Xcalibur and the man most associated with its creation: Steve Cooper.īy the time I started 11 th more than a decade ago, the Xcalibur story was too daunting a project for the time I had available. I became a full-time news reporter for The Capital Times starting in 1990, and only wrote the occasional bowling story for the paper when Mac made a PBA Tour show. Things like automatic pinsetters and scorers were hugely impactful changes, but they didn’t change the nature of the sport as reactive resin did.Įspecially when coupled with exotic cores, reactive resin coverstocks hugely increased potential scores on soft lane patterns, while also resulting in far greater lane transition that made the game more complex and difficult on tough lane patterns - ironically leading to a reverse revolution of sorts to plain urethane in recent years.Īs I'm nearly 58 years old, I lived through it as a bowler and a journalist, as well as a close friend and teammate of Marc McDowell, the man famous for launching the Xcalibur frenzy when he won the 1992 AC-Delco Classic on the PBA Tour. If there was one historical story I wish I had the time to do as thoroughly as I did this story, it’s the story of the Xcalibur and the birth of reactive resin, arguably the most impactful technological change in bowling history.