The Columbia 300 Yellow Dot was the most common bowling ball in America for twenty years, and in 1982 a man rolled the first 900 series ever on one. The sport refused to count it.
It started in Ephrata, Washington in 1960. A plastic specialist named Nick Mushkin had worked out how to pour polyester resin into a mold and cure it into a ball that rolled true, something people had tried and failed at for years. A group of local investors put up five thousand dollars each, and Roger Zeller bought the struggling company that same year. At the start the whole operation made about forty balls a day. Polyester was cheaper and faster to produce than the hard rubber balls that had dominated bowling for half a century, and for the first time a good ball was something anyone could afford. It opened the game up to everybody.
Columbia 300 sorted its balls by a colored dot pressed into the surface. The White Dot was the hard, durable plastic, by most accounts the best-selling polyester ball ever made, the ball that taught two generations to bowl. In 1975 Columbia gave the softer, higher-hooking ball its own name and its own color, and that is the one people remember. The Yellow Dot stood out on a rack of black house balls, and for the better part of two decades it sat in every league bag, every trunk, and every birthday-party ball return in the country. Touring pros threw the same brand on television.