Bowling night at the McClean Bowl-O-Drome in Yonkers, New York, in the early 1940s. The bowling center closed in the 1990s.
Photographer: Bettmann/Getty Images
For a Dying Sport, Bowling Is Wildly Popular
HBO’s Born to Bowl captures the disconnect of a sport with shrinking leagues that’s still played by tens of millions of Americans.
Behold the paradox that is bowling. More than 67 million people in the US bowl at least once a year, according to a widely cited figure from the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America, a trade group. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association puts the participation rate a little lower, at 53 million for 2025, but that’s good enough to crush golf (48 million), basketball (36 million), tennis (27 million) and fast-growing pickleball (24 million).
Still, the narrative of the sport in the US has long been framed around collapse. In its mid-1960s peak, some 12,000 bowling centers (not alleys, please) carpeted the nation; just over a decade later, league membership grazed 10 million. Now a little more than a million Americans bowl in sanctioned leagues, rolling at 3,400 bowling centers certified by the US Bowling Congress.