by FRANK DEFORD
The last frame 
Baltimore's duckpin bowling
Updated: Thursday December 28, 2000
This is a wistful after-Christmas story.
When I was a boy in Baltimore, the post-Christmas letdown was alleviated greatly by The Evening Sun's duckpin bowling tournament, which brought together all the best bowlers in town. Baltimore could be very idiocyncratic, in sports as well as in other matters. In the spring, Baltimore was the only city in the country where lacrosse was as big a sport as baseball. And all year we Baltimoreans bowled ducks.
Duckpins were actually invented by two old Orioles Hall of Famers, John "Mugsy" McGraw and Uncle Wilbert Robinson. So as not to hurt their throwing arms, they designed smaller balls and pins, and installed those alleys in their fancy saloon downtown -- the Diamond Caf. Duckpin balls are barely bigger than grapefruits, so it's much harder to knock down the little pins. You score a hundred -- hey, that's a pretty good game. It was symbolic of a hard, workingman's town like Baltimore -- "Balmer," we say -- that our bowling was more difficult. And, in general, for better or for worse, about all we know about the 20th century is that both bowling and America got easier. That practically ruined bowling. America? The jury's still out.
Anyway, the post-Christmas Evening Sun tournament was the Baltimore Super Bowl, the duckpin Wimbledon, and what made it even more fascinating was that the star was a woman. Oh, the men could bowl harder and make higher scores, but, year in and year out, the attention went foremost to the women's division and the proclaimed "Queen of Duckpins" -- Toots Barger. Toots had a few regular challengers: Ethel Dize, Alva Brown, Min Weisenborn. But rarely could they dethrone the queen. Oh sure, there would soon be Johnny Unitas and Brooks Robinson and Cal Ripken Jr., but any real Baltimorean knows that the best there ever was in our fair city was Toots Barger, bowling ducks.
In fact, Toots taught me an important lesson: it isn't always the biggest and the strongest -- the men -- who mean the most in sports and are the most interesting. It doesn't matter if a man can beat a woman in some sport. What matters most is which athlete is more intriguing, more engaging.
Like most Balmer guys, I even worked some as a pinboy, setting ducks. Later, I was a copyboy at The Evening Sun -- the very sponsor of the duckpin Wimbledon. These were two of the jobs I enjoyed the most in my life: pinboy and copyboy. Of course, that was when you could still be a boy. Nobody yet called you a "young man."
A few years ago The Evening Sun went out of existence. The Evening Sun's tournament is now gone, too, and Toots has died. And now I hear -- oh, my -- the home of the city's largest and most prestigious bowling alleys, the Southway, is being torn down to build some loft apartments. They had a memorial service for the Southway at the local Lutheran church, with duckpins lying on the altar. Now they'll only have two duckpin houses -- a mere 24 alleys -- all that's left of ducks in Balmer.
So, if duckpin bowling isn't as dead as The Evening Sun, it's headin' down a road -- which is the way we said it. There's no Evening Sun tournament anymore, no Toots to root for before Christmas vacation ended and I had to go back to school. And soon, I suppose, there will be no duckpin bowling. We never imagined whole sports could come and go, just like newspapers and other institutions that seemed so majestic and invincible when we were children -- and Santa Claus had just come down the chimney again.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNNSI.com.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.