Adopting glow bowling early saved iconic Academy Lanes

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This article was published 30/04/2016 (2916 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Todd Britton was six years old when his father purchased Academy Lanes, eight when he mastered the art of lacing bowling shoes together lickety-split and 12 when he began catching a bus there immediately after school to assist his dad with the evening rush.

“I literally grew up here,” said Britton, who succeeded his father, Brian Britton, as owner/kingpin of the two-level River Heights institution in 2010.

“My dad has always been very much DIY — he’s never believed in hiring somebody to do something you should be able to do yourself. So yeah, from making popcorn to mopping up spilled drinks to carrying old pin setters out to the garbage… I’ve pretty much done it all around here.”

‘I was completely blown away that all these people had such fond memories of our place’ — Academy Lanes owner Todd Britton

‘All these people had such fond memories of our place’

Because Britton has been a part of the action at Academy Lanes for most of his life, he never really twigged into his locale’s icon status until fairly recently.

“I joined a small-business group a while ago, and I was kind of nervous my first time there,” said the 39-year-old father of three.

“I was in a room with all these people who owned, quote unquote, real businesses and was sure when my turn came around and I said, ‘I own Academy Lanes,’ they were all going to wonder, ‘Who let this guy in?’”

There was no need to be concerned. Immediately after he introduced himself, a man to his left slapped him on the back and said, “Hey, I met my wife at your place.”

“Me, too, and we still go there all the time,” chimed in a second fellow.

A woman at the head of the table said she lives three blocks away and couldn’t remember the last time her family didn’t go bowling at Academy Lanes on New Year’s Eve.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, how cool,’” Britton said.

“I was completely blown away that all these people had such fond memories of our place.”

Competing with televison in the 50s

Academy Lanes, located at 394 Academy Rd., began life on Christmas Eve 1931 as the Uptown Theatre, a movie house that, according to www.historicplaces.ca, was built “to resemble a Moorish palace… with its domed towers and rich array of exterior ornament.”

Every once in a while, neighbourhood residents drop in talk about the good old days, such as a woman in her 90s who remembers ushering people to their seats for the debut screening of Gone With the Wind in 1939 and an elderly gentleman who was in the crowd when the projectionist stopped a film midway through to announce the discovery of the polio vaccine. (Talk about cheap labour: one fellow told Britton he used to get on his hands and knees to pick up empty popcorn boxes after screenings because for every four you turned in, the front desk rewarded you with a pass for a matinee.)

Despite its opulence, the Uptown, along with hundreds of other North American cinemas in the late 1950s, couldn’t compete with the growing popularity of television. Millions of people who used to head to the movies every weekend were content to plop themselves down in their living rooms and catch the latest episode of I Love Lucy or Perry Mason instead.

“A family by the name of Miles owned it before us, and they’re the ones who made the decision to close the theatre, gut it and reopen as a bowling alley,” Britton said, noting the Roxy Theatre, now Roxy Lanes, on Henderson Highway met the same fate.

“My dad is originally from Saskatoon, and he moved to Winnipeg in the ’70s to manage this place for (the Miles family). He eventually left to do something else, but when they decided to sell in 1982, they contacted him to see if he was interested in buying it.”

Bowling was still tremendously popular when Britton’s dad took over. All 30 of Academy’s five-pin lanes operated at near-full capacity morning, noon and night, Britton said, thanks to a mix of men’s, women’s, seniors’ and youth leagues.

By 1995, it was a different story. League play had fallen off significantly, casual bowling was almost non-existent and Brian Britton was having a tough time making ends meet, his son said.

“He was in rough financial shape, there’s no getting around it,” Britton said.

“But my dad had heard about this new gimmick that was coming out, and we scraped together every Air Mile we could to attend a convention in (Las) Vegas to see what it was all about. (Britton recalled catching a connecting flight in Calgary, but because the time differential between arrival and departure was substantial, he and his father slept overnight in the terminal to save money on a hotel room.)

The first bowling alley in Winnipeg

Twenty years ago this October, Academy Lanes became the first bowling alley in Winnipeg — Britton is pretty sure in Canada — to feature glow bowling. The Brittons sank every last dollar they had into new floorboards, black lights and a state-of-the-art sound system as a last-ditch effort to attract a younger crowd. They were pleasantly surprised when they discovered just how young that crowd turned out to be.

“The package was sold as this thing to make your bowling centre more appealing to people in their teens and 20s. But after offering it for only two weeks, we started getting all these phone calls from moms wanting to book us in the afternoon for their five-year-olds’ birthday parties,” Britton said.

“It was something we hadn’t counted on, but after 10 or 15 (calls) we looked at each other and said, ‘OK, let’s figure out a way to do this for kids, too.’

“We haven’t really looked back, since.”

 

A brief history of five-pin bowling

Invented in Toronto in 1909, five-pin bowling is as Canadian as maple syrup and April Wine, which often leads to amusing scenarios when Americans pop in for some exercise.

“Lots of times during the summer, we’ll get families from the States in Winnipeg for a holiday,” Britton said. “They’ll get their shoes, head to their assigned lane and seconds later be back at the counter holding up the ball, asking, ‘Do you have real bowling here?’”

Three years ago, Academy Lanes welcomed its most renowned customer from south of the border — a person who knew exactly what she was in for.

“My husband (Nashville Predators forward Mike Fisher) is from Canada, and he told me one of the things I had to try when I was up here was five-pin bowling,” country superstar Carrie Underwood announced over the PA system, when she visited Academy Lanes the night before her May 30, 2013 concert at the MTS Centre.

Britton had been given a heads-up Underwood and her 100-person entourage were headed his way. Her management team booked the entire facility a week ahead of time on one condition: nobody on Britton’s team was allowed to breathe a word about the seven-time Grammy winner’s coming arrival.

So when Underwood’s security team noticed dozens of Underwood fans lined up outside the alley’s front door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Season 4 American Idol champ on her way out, they brusquely approached Britton, demanding to know who spilled the beans.

“You might want to check her Twitter feed,” Britton replied, referring to a tweet Underwood sent out to her bazillion fans earlier in the evening that read, in part, “Hey y’all… guess who’s bowling in Winnipeg tonight?”

By the way, if you think being the owner of a bowling alley means you get to work on your game any time you want, think again.

“I bowled a ton when I was a kid — my best average was probably around 220 — but honestly I’ve been so busy, I haven’t bowled more than a handful of games in the last few years,” Britton said.

“I’m the president of Bowl Canada, and a couple of months ago we were out of town for a conference. On the last day, somebody suggested going bowling, and after a few frames I was like, ‘Hey, this is fun. Now I see why people are coming to my place all the time.’”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca