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WIBC has conducted an annual national championship for women since 1917, it too moving among the nation's large cities, but being held in commercial bowling centers. More than 48,000 women took part in the 1973 event in Las Vegas, Nevada, the 105-day duration and the entry of 9,644 five-player teams making it the largest tournament of its kind ever held. The previous high came in the 50th anniversary year, 1967, when 30,000 women took part in the annual tournament in Rochester, New York. WIBC also conducts a special event for the top women bowlers, the prestigious Queens tournament. It was begun in 1961, modeled after ABC's Masters tournament.
The largest individual tournament is the Petersen Classic, held for about seven months each year in Chicago, offering a first prize in excess of $40,000 and attracting more than 30,000 entrants, most of them men.

Steady growth boosted the bowling membership through its first 50 years, then the bowling "boom" began in the early 1950s with the approval by ABC of the first fully automated pin-setting machine. Pinboys had come into short supply during a wartime economy that continued into peacetime. The machines knew no physical limitations and actually made bowling a 24-hour recreation in some cities. Widespread air conditioning and architectural innovations lent their strong effects to the game, which also developed its total "family" aspects as more and more women took to the game and encouraged their children to do the same. Television was a great influence in popularizing the sport. National series were developed, "live" and "taped," that took bowling into people's living rooms and helped broaden the concept that bowling truly was a pursuit for everyone from "8 to 80."

There always have been competitors who stood above the rest, but never were they brought to the front more than in 19$8 when the Professional Bowlers Association came on the scene. Whereas most of the game's stars had been semiprofessionals, maintaining regular employment to supplement their earnings in league and tournament competition, the PBA quickly developed a "star" system and a tournament tour fashioned after that of professional golf. Helped by television, the PBA soon had its members playing for more than $1 million in yearly prize money. Don Carter, already a much-heralded performer, became "Mr. Bowling" in the late 1950s and was succeeded by Dick Weber in the '60s. Don Johnson appeared to be taking on the role in the early 70s but later in the decade, left-handed Earl Anthony was threatening to outdo all of them. Their earnings and product endorsements put them into the $100,000-plus yearly income bracket and gave the game new stature.

The Bowling Proprietors Association of America, with national headquarters in Arlington, Texas has been a major influence on the structural level of the game since 1932. In addition to its trade association functions, BPAA conducted a number of tournaments for both men and women. Its most notable was the All-Star, a superb match game event that began as a Chicago Tribune promotion on Pearl Harbor day, Dec. 7, 1941, and continued under BPAA direction through May 1970. Then it was given over to the PBA, renamed the U.S. Open, and made a part of the PBA's regular winter tour.

As membership in the three groups-ABC, WIBC, and AJBC, plus the Youth Bowling Association of the BPAA-peaked at more than eight million, the leading manufacturers of equipment in the U.S. began to look elsewhere for markets. So did inventors in other countries who had been exposed to the phenomenal growth of the sport in the United States through their travels. Suddenly tenpins, the game that had crossed the Atlantic as a ninepin game years before, was on its way back to Europe. Foreseeing the development, some Britishers asked ABC to lend its aid in the formation of an association. The British Ten Pin Bowling Association came into being in 1961, its equipment specifications exactly those of the ABC, its rules only slightly modified. Australia followed suit and other countries hurried to restructure their regulations as tenpin centers were built in Paris, Antwerp, Berlin, and other cities. The British alone reached a playing membership of more than 40,000 in five years. Japan bowlers recently were swept up in the "boom" and centers went up-and up-with one Tokyo establishment boasting 504 lanes, by far the world's largest. The bubble has since burst. At least half of the more than 100,000 lanes that had made Japan a numerical rival in that respect to the United States have closed.