I would think a lot of the older balls would have been softer -- from some of the Yellow Dot/Gold Dot balls to the Roto Grip UC line that had a hard time punching 68 on a durometer. The old Blue Dots were a lot harder, though.

Still, the crankers could use harder balls to their advantage -- i.e., getting through the front part of the lane, and/or to overcome the effects of bowling on natural wood. So I guess even back then, ball tech was an issue.

The problem with tech reversion in the here and now is that we can limit ball tech but we can't go ripping up synthetic lane beds. Some of our current technology is completely irreversible. I think discussions of who could be successful, from today's game, need to be framed in that context -- especially since most of these guys aren't old enough to have ever bowled in the "old" era to get a baseline measurement of how they'd perform on it.

I came up in a house that still has 10 wood lanes, telescores and above-ground returns, and until a few years ago still oiled the lanes with a bug sprayer. They've since upgraded to a "state of the art" Century 100 machine.

Jess

I get what you're trying to say NoseofRI, but I have to call out this one quote:

quote:

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Did you pay attention at ALL to the plastic ball tournament?  Look at the top 8, I believe 7 were VERY HIGH Rev players and Pete Weber who's unique roll creates carry.

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I also noticed during the telecast and watching the streaming video of match play that these guys were all pretty darn accurate!  According to the CATS numbers, PDW never missed by more than 1 board left or right of his target the entire first match on TV if I remember correctly.  It's not like these guys were swinging it out wide one shot and tugging it left a mile the next -- they just had more room to hit the pocket and carry because of the extra backend angle and reduced deflection.  They were almost as accurate as the lower rev guys, they just had a larger pocket to hit and still carry.  (Low rev guy goes 4 pin if he gets it a pinch high, the high rev guy trips that same 4 pin out on the same kind of hit, you know?)

It's hard to say how most of today's bowlers would have done on older wood lanes with unpredictable oil, etc. since their styles were directly influenced by what technology they had to work with.  If you just took today's bowlers and had them grow up 30-40 years earlier, they would probably all be using stretched spans with lots of reverse in the thumbhole still, for example.  So the original question in this thread is basically impossible to answer since there's just too many variables and too many ways to approach it.