He stands still, facing the pins, the bowling ball held to his chest, just like a pitcher before a wind-up. He takes a half-step forward and slowly arcs the ball back from the end of his extended arm... back, back, back, like a golf driver coiling to strike. Then with two quick steps forward, the ball comes down and forward, his upper body following the path of the ball to the right, his right leg counterbalancing to the left.

The ball seems to fly right down the center of the lane, spinning freely, backspinning as it gracefully arcs right to the edge of the gutter over the oiled wood, floating seemingly without purpose, like a walk in the park. Then, 40 feet down the lane, it reaches the dry back end and hooks back sharply to the left, furiously colliding with the pins between the kingpin and the number three.

By the time the ball hits the back wall, the man is standing stock still watching, waiting an extra long second after the gate comes down, wondering how it is possible that two of the pins-the five and the nine-can possibly still be standing.

He is Ryan Wengrzynek, a lifelong Portsmouth resident and a fixture at Bowl USA in Newington for the last 16 years. That may not sound like all that long, but Ryan is just 20 years old.

It's 9:30 on a Saturday night, and the lights have just gone down for Cosmic Bowling. Disco balls turn, lights flash, and behind us, a DJ has just begun playing tunes, the volume quadrupling from just a few minutes earlier.

"The lights are messing me up," Ryan tells me. "Earlier today I bowled a 298." At least I'm pretty sure that's what he said. That would be just two pins missed on one of the last two throws of a game: a perfect game for 10 frames.

Ryan stopped bowling for three years; in fact, he just started playing again five months ago. He's resumed with a passion. He bowls nearly every day, playing in several leagues every week. On this Saturday he took a long break to bowl in the middle of his other job, before spending the evening working at the bowling alley.

why bowl?

Like many people, I bowled periodically as a kid-the usual family outings and birthday parties. But I never really took to it. In my mind, it wasn't a sport, therefore it wasn't worthy of too much time and energy. Also, I was pretty terrible at it. And so, I forgot about bowling for over a decade.

Then at a family get-together six years ago, my grandfather unceremoniously handed me an old leather bowling ball bag. It contained his old ball, a well-used red AMF Strikeline engraved with the name "Huey." I was living in New Jersey, right down the street from the 82-lane Brunswick Zone. I started going on a regular basis with a bunch of friends. And I realized that the more I went, the more fun it became, despite the frustration of barely being able to average 100 points per game.

Bowling has a long history. It has been called the second oldest sport, being just barely edged out by sex. The earliest evidence of a bowling-like game dates back over 5,000 years, to ancient Egypt in 3200 B.C. In 1366 A.D., King Edward III purportedly outlawed the game. In America, Rip Van Winkle woke up to the sounds of "nine pin," a form of bowling. Today, more than 100 million people in over 90 countries play some version of the game.

bowling: New England style

Five years ago, I moved to the Seacoast, and found out that there was more than just one kind of bowling. As anyone who moves here quickly learns, candlepin is the most popular form of bowling in northern New England. Candlepin is played in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Brunswick and Nova Scotia, just barely making it an international sport. The International Candlepin Bowling Association is headquartered in Bow, N.H., and the final World Candlepin Bowlers Congress season tour stop took place this past weekend in Lynn, Mass.

Candlepin and "big ball" (more legitimately but confusingly known as tenpin) bowling both start with lanes 60 feet long and 40-42 inches wide, with gutters running on either side of the lane. And both sports use 10 pins set in a triangle. From this point, though, the games diverge.

Candlepin uses a ball easily cupped in the palm of your hand, 2.7 lbs. with a 4.5-inch diameter. Big ball bowlers contend with 6-16 lb. behemoths. Candlepins are not removed from the lane after each throw, like they are in big ball bowling. The dead pins, or 'wood,' can be used in subsequent throws to ricochet around, knocking down other pins. Unlike big ball, in which the first 37-42 feet of the lane is heavily oiled, the entire candlepin lane is dry. As a result, candlepin balls, even when thrown with spin by the best players, take a direct path to the pins, versus big ball's arcing hooks.

Candlepin was created in 1880 in Worcester as a more challenging version of bowling. In the 125-year history of the sport, no one has ever bowled a perfect 300 game, despite the addition of a third roll in each frame (the highest recorded score in candlepin is 245, bowled 20 years ago by Ralph Semb of Erving, Mass.).

Another variety of bowling that evolved on the East Coast is duckpin. Invented in Baltimore, Md., as an amusing diversion during the summer months when big ball bowling traditionally stopped, and popularized by Babe Ruth, the sport uses balls similar in size to candlepin and miniaturized versions of big pins. The rules are just about identical to those of big ball, with the sole exception (like candlepin) of adding a third throw per frame.

Duckpin's popularity peaked in the 1960s with 300,000 sanctioned bowlers. Geographically, duckpin spread along the Atlantic Seaboard from Georgia to Maine. Though duckpin's popularity has waned greatly since then (no one is manufacturing pin setting machines anymore), there still are duckpin alleys in New England in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine.

big (ball) business

Bowling alleys in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and New Hampshire could all be interchangeable. They all seem to have been designed in the 1950s. Even latest equipment has the same look. Durable molded plastic seats or benches encircle colorful, curvaceous molded ball chutes, and retro-futuristic computers tally scores. It gives most bowling alleys a bit of a Jetsons feel.

So, why not modernize the look? Bowling seems like such a low-key, simple operation from the front end of the house. It isn't until someone lets you into the dark underbelly of the industry that you see how intricate and expensive an operation running a bowling alley is.

Sharon Jassmond, owner of Bowl USA in Newington and affectionately known as "Ma," took me on the grand tour. We started by walking 40 feet down the gutter of lane 1. "This is where we stop oiling the lanes," she said. The front 37-38 feet of lanes in most bowling alleys are coated daily by a special oil (40-42 feet in professional tournaments). Everything is regulated, from pin weight to units of oil used.

The "back end," or last 20 feet or so of lane to the pins, is cleaned and dried every morning to make sure that there is no oil residue. When quality players bowl, they use this to their advantage. Since the best place to hit the pins is between the front pin (the #1 or kingpin) and the pin just behind the kingpin (the #2 on the left for left-handed bowlers or the #3 on the right for righties), the most consistent way to knock down all the pins is to spin the ball and make it hit the pins from an angle instead of straight on. "The ball skids for the first 30 feet or so," said Jassmond. "Then, by the time the ball gets to the end of the oil, it flips (or stops backspinning and starts to roll)." When the ball hits the dry back end, the previously free-spinning ball starts to gain traction on the pine and hooks back across the lane, striking the pins from the side and wreaking much more havoc than a ball rolled straight down the lane ever could.

We walk the rest of the way down the lane, where Wengrzynek pulls down the front panel covered in painted neon bowling balls and pins to reveal the pin and ball-collecting mechanism. The first automatic pinsetter was introduced in 1946 by AMF (American Machine and Foundry Company). At nine feet tall and nearly two tons, it was a monstrosity. Modern pinsetters aren't much smaller, and they look terrifying up close: belts whirring, hydraulics pumping, pins zipping by in every direction on various metal tracks and balls getting sucked through tubes at 40 mph. After a ball crashes through the pins, there are over 4,000 parts working to reset the pins. From a narrow hallway behind the machines, I climb up on top of a machine and look down into the mechanism. A 300-pound rack sorts and holds a set of 10 pins in place and then drops down to set the new pins in position with thousands of pounds of force and a sinister hiss. Each machine holds 21 pins, and as I peer down the line of 14 machines, I see nearly 300 pins in play.

The pins consist of a maple core with a hard plastic covering. They are 15 inches tall with a 15-inch circumference and can be any weight within a range, but once a house picks a weight, every pin in the building has to be identical. Pins in big ball take a beating: covers crack and shatter, wood dents and splinters. Pins are occasionally destroyed on their first day of use. Costing $10-$15 wholesale apiece, that can get expensive. If you then take into account that the entire set of pins gets replaced every six months, it's hard to understand how a bowling alley can remain profitable. Candlepins don't suffer quite as much abuse, but they need to be cleaned, degreased and polished by hand on a regular basis.

bowling as metaphor

Bowling cuts across barriers. It's an everyman sport, traditionally enjoyed by doctors, lawyers, mechanics and convicts alike. The premise of Harvard professor Robert Putnam's 2000 book, "Bowling Alone," is that American society over the past 30 years has lost a vast amount of social capital. The decline in popularity of bowling and the resulting loss of social interaction between divergent groups (those lawyers and mechanics joining together on a weekly basis in bowling leagues) has contributed to that loss, creating a much more stratified and socially poor American society.

the future of bowling

Ryan Wengrzynek is just out of youth leagues. He hopes to go pro in the near future and will be competing in the third annual Pro-Am tournament at Strikers East in Raymond on April 23. In order to get into the Professional Bowlers Association, Wengrzynek will have to maintain a 214 average for three years in a row.

"The best thing about bowling is that it's a sport that anyone can enjoy," Jassmond says. From 4-year-olds to 84-year-olds. Whether you're a bodybuilder or wheelchair-bound. From Babe Ruth to Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, who played at Leda Lanes in Nashua wearing his embroidered presidential-seal jacket and rental shoes. You might forget about it for years at a time, but bowling will always be there for you when you go looking for a good time again.