With the future of women's professional bowling in doubt, one of the tour's leading bowlers has invested in the latest concept in bowling to carry her through the lean times.
Kim Adler and her husband Tommy are part of an investment group that runs the restaurant and bowling center, which caters to the upscale crowd of cruise ship tourists mixed with other visitors and some locals who want something more from bowling than the usual 40 lanes with basic food and beverage.
Adler hates to be idle and she feels great pain when her bowling tour took a nosedive off the air. Adler says she wants to get back on tour because the waiting makes her edgy.
"I'm a type A personality so me just sitting still is very frustrating," Adler quipped. "When I'm in the off season I will fill my time up with activities at Splitsville and doing my consulting work. I have set up my own Adler Training Institute because I haven't done any instruction in a few years and now I'm back to teaching so I also do instructions on my website and if anyone needs any bowling tips, look me up on Adlertraininginstitute.com. I've been going across country to instruct bowlers so, I have my hands on a lot of things."
The opening of Splitsville was well covered by the local "Daytime" talk show which the Washington Post characterized as Tampa's "Today"-style local show as its NBC affiliate with Brian Fasulo as "Daytime's" Matt Lauer and Debra Schrils as their Katie Couric. Paid advertisers feature sponsored segments on both shows and the owners of Splitsville got their money's worth with detailed explanations of what this restaurant with bowling lanes offered.
I bowled with the WFLA-TV crew, and I found out first-hand what Splitsville offered, so I could set the record straight.
The 12-lane, $10-million center is symbolic of other upscale restaurants around the country found in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Boston to name a few with less lanes and better food and billiards than the average Stuckeyville-type bowling house along with valet parking.
Fasulo and Lindsay Brien, who has her own show known as "The Spot" which also featured Splitsville, Larry Cotton, the food critic, Sam Hallenbeck, the movie critic, and April Wilson, the senior producer of both shows and her husband Tim bowled with me and considering the fact we all used balls and shoes from Splitsville while we watched "ED" on WFLA-TV on giant overhead screens, our game scores were entertaining at best.
We all learned better techniques from the Adlers and Kim joined us in shooting strikes and spares, some of which made it on camera and over the airwaves. That's one way to put Kim Adler back on TV. Luckily, nobody paid us to play at this bowling session.
"I love the flavor of this pizza," Fasulo said. "These quesadillas are special so now I'm going to see if I can eat and bowl or if it's a real sport as our colleague Jim Rome alludes to with his beer in one hand and ball in the other."
Walter Ray Williams Jr. and I challenged Rome to compete on the bowlers tour for one of their weekly stops and he never answered the challenge.
Adler added that bowling is a real sport when you compete on tour as she does and Fasulo watched her demonstrate.
"I'll be checking in to Splitsville quite often from Merritt Island on the east coast of Florida, and if it wasn't so far, I'd be here all of the time," Adler said. "I bring a little bit of Tampa Bay home with me every time I come here."
"I've been involved in Splitsville from the very beginning and it was hard for me to visualize this place even though I'm good at visuals on concepts but this was a hard one for me to see at first, but now that I'm experiencing it I find Splitsville is lovable."
Kim says Splitsville will help introduce more people to bowling as a recreation and later a sport.
"The bowlers who are serious about bowling who come from what we call the Jillian's concept will understand how this atmosphere takes bowling less seriously than we're accustomed to as pros and upper level competitors, but the open players and bringing them in as newer bowlers are what's driving our sport now. The more people I can introduce to bowling who can have fun will be interested in moving on to the next level where I can help them in their potential careers."
Splitsville is actually designed for recreation and a good time and not for tournaments but the Adlers are glad to give you lessons in the style of the old Kegel Training Center in Sebring, but otherwise Splitsville in Tampa's Channelside district is the opposite as far as high-tech emphasis is concerned. It has increased immensely in popularity with waiting lines up to three hours long.
Splitsville Bowling, Billiards, and Restaurant Lounge sponsors local country and rock concerts such as George Strait where they had a one day special of splitting the price of tickets in half for buying two tickets for the price of one at his January concert at the St. Pete Times Forum which is the home of the NHL Tampa Bay Lightning and the Arena Football champion Storm.
The restaurant features such novelties as portabello mushroom sandwiches, spicy chicken quesadillas and steaks with fine food prepared by gourmet chefs. Prices are higher than most bowling centers but Kegel Training Center never served portabello mushroom sandwiches.
A special room in the restaurant section is devoted to sports nostalgia featuring bowling and adds to the ambiance of the place which is designed to attract sports fans alike who can have conversations ad infinitum around the full bar.
The Splitsville operation is headquartered by the Millennium Corporation in Orlando and the Adlers are in partnership with Mark Gibson, Guy Revelle, and Tom Buzyniski.
According to entertainment agent Jane McKee the location and concept for Splitsville was planned well in advance.
"The concept here is to offer a complex which has some of everything to increase the foot traffic for all age groups such as movies, Hooters Restaurants which has an interest in Splitsville with Ed Droste, the creator of Hooters, and it's not just another bowling alley so people won't be bored, "McKee beamed. "We have other restaurants here known as Suds and Howl at the Moon and together they offer fun for all. Mark Gibson has been researching this place for eight months in drawing ideas from other places such as this restaurant around the country."
"I did a lot of research for this center and I visited other locations with similar concepts to ours including Strike Bethesda in the Washington, D.C. area and Kings in Boston and I've read the press on Lucky Strike in Hollywood so those places took more of the traditional approach on bowling and more nightclub driven but we differ in that we offer a full restaurant until 10 p.m. with our gourmet appetizers and classic entrees in our nostalgia room. If you're not bowling, you still get entertainment with our music appealing to the 20 through 40 year olds but we'll experiment with several things and a big ad campaign in January through March. I love the "ED" TV show and we like to be creative here like they are on that show and we want to put bowling out front again."
Owner Mark Gibson said that leagues at Splitsville will be flexible.
"We'll have leagues but they won't be traditional, serious leagues because we have the lanes arranged offset in pairs so it may not be conducive to those bowlers," Gibson said. "Kim Adler wants to do some tournaments and each year she is going to do a high rollers tourney and some shootouts but nothing large in size. She wants to pair together pro men and women here, and the pros shouldn't mind our design of pairs of lanes offset in sections apart from each other."
Walter Ray Williams Jr. is out front again on the PBA Tour beating Lonnie Waliczek in the championship match 211 to 205 for $40,000 when Waliczek had an unexpected open after Williams hit a turkey in the 10th frame to back into his 38th victory in the Earl Anthony Open in Seattle. Williams is only three tournament victories behind Anthony's tour record of 41 wins.
Williams credits a tip on tour from PBA Hall of Famer Tom Baker for his sudden improvement in competition. As a result, Walter Ray now holds the ball closer to his body as he brings it through from his backswing for better alignment with his target at the release or explosion point at the line.
Both Williams and Waliczek were sporting T-shirts for the first time on tour while the other finalists still wore their polo shirts with a collar and buttons. The PBA relaxed their rules on shirts and what they wore apparently relaxed Walter Ray enough to beat Lonnie in the finals while the others labored along in their polo shirts. Williams and Waliczek wore similar black T-shirts sporting the same sponsorship logos. Now the average Joes who are bowling instead of trying to date former Miss Missouri 2001 Larissa Meak on the NBC-TV show can relate to Williams and Waliczek in the championship match of the Earl Anthony Open being more casual and comfortable enough to win.
American Idol star Clay Aiken went bowling recently to celebrate his graduation from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. He also sang at his alma mater's basketball game where several thousand Clay Aiken bobble head dolls were distributed to the delighted fans. Clay recently made a guest appearance on "ED" and also "On Air" with Ryan Seacrest, the host of the "American Idol" where he presented Ryan with a Clay bobble head doll.
Michael Jackson recently moved into a Beverly Hills mansion after leaving his Neverland Ranch and his new huge house features a pair of regulation bowling lanes. Now Jackson can moonwalk on the approach and sponsor his own youth-adult bowling league, and he could even bowl for kids sake as a big brother.