Geography and Participant Sports

So far, our discussion of sport and geography has focused on the spectator sports of baseball, football, and basketball. Other sports like golf, bowling, and tennis are primarily participant sports. To be sure, professional golfers, tennis players, and bowlers compete for large prizes. Yet American sports fans display far less interest in professional competition in these sports than they do in professional baseball, football, and basketball, unless they themselves are active as amateurs.

Golf and bowling illustrate the role of geography in participant sports. In recent years, golf has undergone a remarkable renaissance of popularity. Some have attributed the recent increase in the popularity of golf to the aging of the baby-boom generation. An aging population displays increasing interest in sports that are less physically demanding than the contact sports.

In part because golf courses require substantial amounts of land, their availability on a per-capita basis varies substantially from place to place. The most courses per capita are found in the Upper Middle West, where available land is abundant, population pressures are minimal, and the rigorous climate discourages golf during the winter months. Although a majority of professional golfers come from the Sunbelt states, recreational golf is less available on a per-capita basis in this region than in the North.

In some areas of the Sunbelt, developers have been able to satisfy the public's demands for golf by building housing developments in conjunction with private golf clubs (Figure 6-16a). In these golf-oriented suburban developments, residents can play golf whenever they wish to do so. In Japan, driving ranges are built on tiers to help satisfy demands for golf in that crowded country (Figure 6-16b).

Figure 6-16 Golf in Small Places, (a) In order to cope with rising demands for golf courses and facilities in areas with high population densities, suburbs (Brookline, Massachusetts) in crowded cities have been developed around golf courses, (b) In Japan, driving ranges are built on several tiers to save space

Bowling represents another interesting example of geographic variability in popular sport. Although millions of people bowl regularly, they bowl in a variety of ways. One broad category of bowling games includes those that are played outdoors between two teams. The object of these games is to place a ball close to a designated point or marker. Games based on this objective include English lawn bowling. Italian boccie, and the winter sport of curling, in which stones slid across ice are substituted for balls.

Another broad category of bowling games is based on the objective of knocking down pins with a rolled ball. The most common form of this game is tenpins, which for many Americans is synonymous with "bowling." There are regional variations, throughout North America, however. These variants of tenpins differ on the basis of equipment. Tenpin bowling is played using a ball twenty-seven inches around and weighing from eight to sixteen pounds. Four other varieties of bowling use much smaller, lighter balls. The balls used in duckpins, fivepins, rubberband duckpins, and candlepins weigh from two to four pounds.

All five varieties of North American bowling are derived from ninepins, a German folk game that spread to the Netherlands and the British Isles during the Middle Ages. Although Dutch settlers brought ninepins to North America (as immortalized in Washington Irving’s classic tale of Rip van Winkle), bowling achieved substantial popularity in the Americas only following the large-scale arrival of German immigrants in the nineteenth century. During that period, many communities banned bowling, associating the game with the evils of drinking and gambling. Bowling became increasingly popular in the twentieth century, when the invention of automatic pinsetters and other new technologies greatly expedited the diffusion of the sport.

Tenpin bowling is popular throughout North America, but all four small-ball types of bowling are popular within small regions of the eastern United States and Canada (Figure 6-17).

Figure 6-17 Bowling Regions. Four alternatives to tenpin bowling—fivepins, duckpins, rubberband duckpins, and candlepins—are popular in various areas of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada

Candlepins, which was invented in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1880. is the most popular form of bowling in northern New England, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Fivepins and rubberband duckpins are popular in Canada. Although rubberband duckpins was invented in Pittsburgh, it is most popular today in Quebec. Fivepins is especially popular in Ontario, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island. Duckpin bowling was invented in New England, but today is dominant only in parts of Connecticut and in the Washington-Baltimore area.