The Dirtiest Trick Big Tobacco Ever Pulled Killed Bowling

Everyone says smoking bans killed bowling. They didn't — the leagues recovered in a few years. What actually hurt the sport was the survival plan Big Tobacco sold the bowling industry. In 1994, Philip Morris launched what it called the Accommodation Program. It named the places it wanted to keep smoke-friendly — restaurants, hotels, shopping malls, and bowling centers — with stated aims to "defeat all severely restrictive legislation" and "overturn existing legislation." By the mid-1990s the Bowling Proprietors Association of America had adopted that accommodation approach for its members. The record is precise about what it does and doesn't show: there is no public memo that Philip Morris paid the proprietors, and no document naming the trade body as a knowing front. What's documented is narrower and still damning — the cigarette company built the playbook and named bowling centers as a target, and bowling's own trade body picked it up. Then the cigarette company sent people into the buildings. The National Smokers Alliance — created in 1993 by the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, hired by Philip Morris, a textbook case of astroturfing — paid hundreds of young recruiters to sign up members in two kinds of rooms: bars and bowling alleys. In Chicago alone, the drive put 180 recruiters on the street and signed up more than 40,000 members in two months, all while the Professional Bowlers Association was bleeding the Tuesday-night leagues it needed to survive. The industry's own house split over it. The Bowling Proprietors Association's executive director, John Berglund, argued clean air was bad for business. The retired chief executive of the United States Bowling Congress, Roger Dalkin, asked why proprietors would cater to the 20 percent of customers who smoked. And an executive at the Brunswick Corporation — which has built bowling equipment for over a century — described exactly what happened when a center went smoke-free: after a six-month dip, "people who wouldn't come in are coming in." The control-group centers that ignored the plan and cleared the air — Rab's Country Lanes on Staten Island, Sunrise Lanes in Casper — filled up with families. The often-quoted "10 to 20 percent drop in league play" after a ban was real, but it was the industry's OWN reported figure, and the same industry's experience shows it recovered. The drop was a transition, not a death. CHAPTERS 0:00 Bowling Needed Families, It Chose Smoke 0:55 The Ten to Twenty Percent Drop Myth 2:16 Philip Morris and the Accommodation Program 3:45 The Proprietors' Trade Body Adopts It 4:28 National Smokers Alliance in the Alleys 6:07 The House Splits, Berglund vs Dalkin 7:13 Brunswick and the Six-Month Hump 7:58 Rab's and Sunrise Went Smoke-Free 9:03 Ed Fickes Spent 17,000 Dollars to Lose 11:51 The Last Unread Page in Eighty Million SOURCES UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.ed... SourceWatch — Accommodation Program: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php... SourceWatch — National Smokers Alliance: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php... Wikipedia — National Smokers Alliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa... Wikipedia — Burson-Marsteller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burson-... Pin Action is the bowling documentary channel — the characters, scandals, corporate wars, and forgotten history nobody else documents. New episode every week. The stories bowling forgot it had. #BowlingHistory #Bowling #PBA