That is very true. The helicopter release gained popularity a few years back in some of the Far East countries that had lane beds that were very old (wood lanes). Scoring conditions were tough and very unpredictable. Hooking the ball was often a gamble.
A spinner (or in this case the extreme "helicopter") allowed the bowler to keep his/her trajectory pretty straight farther downlane. In many ways, these types of conditions were fairly common when I first started to bowl over 50 years ago. The lanes would often develop a track. If the track was well worn, scoring would often be very difficult. In those days, balls did not have the dynamic cores and aggressive coverstocks of the balls of today. In addition, lanes were often oiled by hand, gutter to gutter (and beyond-lol), and for most of the lane's length. The only "friction" to be found was in this track area. Misses to the right (or left) of the track were out of bounds, regardless of one's rev rate. For this reason, the spinner was a very effective way to keep the ball within the track without it overreacting. Many top PBA stars of
that era won titles throwing spinners (Don Johnson, Gary Dickinson, Glenn Allison, to name a few). This is one of the reasons why a lot of old timers (myself included),
still have to work very hard at keeping our thumbs "up" in today's scoring environment---an environment of synthetic lane surfaces, higher and slicker oil
volumes and viscosities, where the spinner is no longer effective unless there is
a lot of friction on the lane.
