Healthy eating advocates support the change, claiming: “Less chocolate is right up our alley!”
Photo by Jack Yang
The storied sport of bowling rolled into a new era last Friday, as the final batch of enormous chocolate bowling ball cores was shipped off the production line. Starting in January 2021, the first bowling balls to forego the iconic chocolate center, which has filled every bowling ball for the last several centuries, will come off of the assembly line.
Longtime chocolatier, Wilf Knapp, reminisced about the many years when bowling balls were filled with chocolate, saying, “It’s been a family tradition. I used to work on bowling balls, diligently crafting these delicious chocolate centers, and so did my father before me, and so did his father before him. Now his father was a farmer, but the farmer’s father, I think, also made chocolate bowling ball centers. I guess four out of the five agreed, just like those dentists from the commercials. Wait, that’s a bad comparison. No dentists recommend chocolate-filled bowling balls.”
The change comes as a result of a new rulebook introduced by the Commission on Safely Putting Food in Bowling Balls. The entire text of the rulebook states simply, “Stop it.” The controversial new head of the commission is Brayden Leech, formerly head of the Association of Full-Contact Tic-Tac-Toe Coaches. On Sunday, Leech posted the following statement to his Myspace, “Although it is a longstanding tradition to put chocolate inside of every new bowling ball, the commission must recommend against this practice. Although it may have been useful at one point in time, the latest surveys suggest that as much as 40 percent of people never even eaten the center of a bowling ball, instead reusing it multiple times for multiple rounds of bowling, and having to explain awkward brown stains on their hands when they come home.”
A PBA bowler was anonymously quoted as saying “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I don’t know anything about bowling. My entire career is a lie. I’ve simply gotten very lucky every single game I’ve played. See those white things at the end of the lane? I don’t know what they’re called. I’m a professional, you know how bad it would look if I asked at this point? Also I never knew the chocolate thing was actually true. I thought it was a bit.”
The change has also garnered some more heated reactions from the bowling-chocolate community. Longtime enthusiasts of the established norm of chocolate centers published an open letter asking the commission to reverse its decision, decrying it as, “belonging in the gutter.” Some welcomed the change, saying the commission should be spared such a response. In the next few weeks, both parties are expected to strike a deal and pin down a plan of action. Within the next week, due to the conflict, the commission is expected to ban bowling puns.
