If You’re a Serious Bowler, You Need to Know About Bowling Lane Oil

Each time EJ Tackett steps to his lane to throw a shot in the upcoming Professional Bowlers Association World Championships, he’ll be thinking about more than just ball spin or angle. Tackett has won the last three world titles, and there’s a convincing case that he’s currently the best bowler on Earth. While his ability to throw a consistent ball is certainly key to his success, there’s another factor he and his fellow PBA pros are paying closer attention to during matches: lane oil patterns. Most of us amateurs have never thought about the thin layer of oil that coats the surface of the bowling lane—unless someone at our local bowling center slips and falls on it hilariously. But at the highest levels of the sport, lane oil is a foundational element of tactics and game-planning. The oil is applied in a distinct pattern that reduces the friction of specific parts of the lane, allowing a well thrown ball to slide across certain areas, then grab ahold of the surface and curl when it’s supposed to. But lane oil patterns aren’t always identical. Oil distribution can change over the course of a game, and in fact the starting pattern is intentionally redrawn for various PBA events, forcing pros to adjust on the fly. “All of us as professionals are playing a guessing game by watching our bowling ball go down the lane,” Tackett tells me. “And trying to figure out where the oil has moved from and has moved to.” Tackett says understanding and reacting to lane oil patterns has become one of the single most important skills for a pro bowler in recent years. Technology plays a growing role in the way lane oil is understood and applied. And as the tech has continued to improve, the sport’s powers that be are increasingly relying on those advances to keep the top pros guessing. Back when bowling lanes were made from actual wood like maple or pine in the 1970s and earlier, lane oil’s primary purpose was protective. It provided a lubricating barrier between ball and wood, helping reduce the wear and tear on both. During that era—and even into the early 1980s when synthetic lane materials began replacing wood—lane oil drew the ire of serious bowlers due to the inconsistency of how it was applied. There was no method for ensuring standardized oil applications; sections of lanes would often have too much or too little oil. Bowlers would essentially be blind to the lane’s conditions until partway through a game, after enough balls had been thrown to get a gauge of which areas were light or heavy on oil. Maybe certain bowlers enjoyed the randomness, but it was untenable for professionals. John Davis, at the time a mechanic who oiled lanes for his local bowling center in Arizona, was the first to address this issue. He invented a lane cleaning tool in the early ’80s to address lanes that were often cleaned inconsistently, allowing oil to pool or run as a result. By the early ’90s, he had started a company named Kegel that had perfected what’s known as Sanction technology, which is still used today. The bowling equipment giant Brunswick, the other major player in the space, uses similar technology in its Max lane machines. “It looks almost like an inkjet printer,” Chris Chartrand, Kegel’s CEO, says about the Sanction tech. “You have this head that travels back and forth, and it applies that stream on whatever board we want to apply it to.” The technology has kept improving. Kegel used to produce two separate machines, one for lane cleaning and one for oil; now both steps are handled by a single machine. More recently, the machines have become battery-powered, removing issues of power cords stretching across lanes.