Guys Like Us, Baby We Were ‘Born to Bowl’

I don’t know if it’s the impending doom spiral of life, but I just gave my life over to HBO for an hour to watch a guy who bowls professionally, calling himself “The Pro with a Fro” because yes, white pro-bowler Kyle Troup has an afro.

And Troup is just one of the people on the new A24 produced HBO series Born to Bowl, which treats a pack of dudes from around the country with the same intensity as their franchise football series, Hard Knocks treats its subject – the same butter-voiced narrator and all.

Born to Bowl isn’t really about bowling so much as a deep dive into real Americana, the stuff that’s beyond the Waffle House menu, a look into blue collar life that doesn’t view it  as Trump trauma porn — the kind of people who orbit it like it’s the last honest thing they’ve got. The first episode keeps the focus tight on the lifers who treat weeknight frames like high-stakes theater; letting their personalities do the work instead of turning anyone into a caricature.

The directors plays it straight, which is what makes it land: the rituals, the petty rivalries, the beer-league bravado, the quiet sense that this matters more than it probably should. They don’t play up to the notion that this isn’t serious for these guys, they never lean into a joke but treat the players’ quest to win a National Championship with the same steadfast journalism as if they were NFL quarterbacks on a quest for the ring.

Featured in the series are bowlers Troup, E.J. Tackett, Anthony Simonsen, Jason Belmonte, and rising hot shot Cameron Crowe. (No, not that Cameron Crowe!) These five are the spine of the series, basic archetypes: the star, the showman, the hothead, the legend, and the hungry younger guy trying to break through. Ironically, Crowe bowls at the alley right by my mom’s house in south suburban Chicago. So I naturally had to pull for him and even more so because I’m a total Chicago homer and his dad was rocking a White Sox shirt, my forever baseball team.

What makes Born to Bowl click is that it knows exactly how ridiculous it could look — and refuses to lean on that. This series could be a bunch of fat bastards chowing down on nachos, while yokels have Bud Lite parking lot parties, but it’s not, it’s about what these guys will go through to make their mark in a sport they love, but also know isn’t hip or even widely beloved. The filmmakers, with Liev Schreiber lending his deadpan, almost mythic narration, walk a careful line: yes, there are plenty of unavoidable “ball jokes,” (the tag line of the series is “They’ve got the balls for success.”) but the point isn’t to punch down. It’s to treat these bowlers like any other pro athletes grinding through a fragile ecosystem, chasing relevance in a sport that exists somewhere between cultural punchline and blue-collar lifeline.

The tension between humor and respect, absurdity and sincerity is where the show actually finds its voice. And all while I was watching it, I was thinking, “God, this would have been huge if it had come out during COVID.” If America collectively fell for the Tiger King controversy, these bowlers would have had every kid in America wanting to hit the lanes.

The pedigree behind Born to Bowl is worth noting. The directors, James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte, previously made the HBO hit McMillion$ — a docuseries on how $24 million was swiped from the clutches of Ronald McDonald thanks to some savvy criminals who read the fine print and played the game better than the company had hoped for.

As for Born to Bowl, the team knows how to find the absurd inside the serious without winking at the audience. Ben Stiller executive produced through his Red Hour Films banner, which makes sense given that his first comedy short was apparently a bowling parody. The filmmakers have said the goal was a Ron Howard in Arrested Development energy — the straight-faced narrator in the middle of chaos — which explains exactly why Schreiber works so well. The filmmakers of Born to Bowl aren’t people who stumbled into bowling. They came to the sport deliberately knowing what it was. And for me, their approach to the lanes was a strike.