Review: 'Born to Bowl' follows the pursuit of glory as bowling struggles to survive

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I don’t have statistics, but just from the disappearance of bowling alleys from the local landscape, most recently Santa Monica’s midcentury Pico Bowl, with its fine coffee shop, I’d guess that the sport is not the ubiquitous American pastime it once was.Still, many if not most of us will have gone bowling at least once in our life, either in the company of parents, or at a birthday party, or as part of some cocktail-fueled hipster fun — to have heard the special music of balls hitting wood and pins crashing, to have traded your street shoes for the bowling kind.

(Unless you have your own, in which case I salute your commitment.)I have bowled, as a child, and later with friends, when it enjoyed a renaissance back in the last century — it was pre-cocktail bowling, the beer years.I am very, very bad at it, but as with every other sport — none of which I have any talent for — I can be drawn in as an observer by the drama, the human interest and the physics of a game.

All these elements are present in “Born to Bowl,” a sprightly five-part documentary, directed by James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte (HBO’s “McMillions”) that follows five bowlers — four champs and one aspirant — on the Professional Bowlers Assn.tour, a four-month season running from January through April and comprising 19 tournaments, five of which are big-money “majors” that pay the winner $100,000.Bowling, you may know from experience, is not easy; professional bowling is grueling, a grind.

It has little cachet; it won’t make you rich the way some sports will, and lacks snob appeal, like, say, golf.(Though Ben Stiller, an executive producer, does make a cameo appearance late in the series.) Its reputation is as a working- to middle-class sport; even the big players drive themselves from tournament to tournament in their own cars, leaving their families to follow an itinerary of ...