There are a lot of things that bother Chris Sargent, including the fact that no one seems to care that he is the greatest candlepin bowler of his generation.

There are other bothers — his health, which we’ll come back to — but this gripe about bowling is the one from which most of the others are spawned.It is the reason that so much about the world of candlepin bowling aggravates him, and it is the reason that so many in the world of candlepin bowling are aggravated by him.

“The more I win the madder they get,’’ he says, for example.

To understand Sargent’s irritations, you need to go back, way back, to the 1970s and ’80s, the golden age of candlepin bowling, when this quirky regional sport was a staple of New England television in the pre-cable era, with four or five different shows running on the air. The biggest, “Candlepin Bowling with Don Gillis’’ on Channel 5, was so popular it would regularly top the weekend sports ratings, beating the Celtics and the Bruins and crushing the Red Sox and lowly Patriots.

Sargent, who is 47, was just a child then, but he remembers this era well because his late father, Mike, was one of its biggest stars. “You’d go into a store or a restaurant, and it was like, ‘There’s Mike Sargent!’ He was kind of a big deal.’’

Chris Sargent is not a big deal. And that’s a big deal to him.

As a young man, he had no interest in bowling, but instead focused on becoming a professional hockey player, before injury cut short his career in college. And so, on a whim, he entered a bowling tournament with his father, did well enough to get on television, and then decided that if he was going to be a bowler, he was going to be the best bowler.

He practiced maniacally, and in a few short years he became the guy to beat. But by the time he did, the TV shows had dried up. And so had the recognition.

“Look around, no one here knows who I am,’’ he said recently as he bowled a few practice games at Academy Lanes, near his home in Haverhill. “These kids should know who I am. They should know who Jeff Surette is,’’ he said, mentioning his chief rival. “If you want kids to get into a sport, there has to be something at the top for them to aspire to. But instead, we’re at the point where if you tell someone you’re a professional candlepin bowler, they laugh.’’

It’s not so much that he thinks Chris Sargent should be famous. He thinks that any person who is the best at a given sport should be. Or, at the very least, well compensated. He is neither. “You used to be able to win a couple grand in a tournament, sometimes more,’’ Sargent says. “Now it costs $100 to enter and you’re lucky if you win $500.’’

Sargent pulls out his phone and looks up the career earnings for Walter Ray Williams Jr., a top ten-pin bowler: $4.5 million. He shakes his head. Williams is a multimillionaire; Sargent works as a landscaper at a golf course.

He is a stocky guy with tattooed arms, a trim goatee, close-cropped hair, and a stare that can be his way of telling you he doesn’t like you. He has used this stare many times when dealing with the chief recipients of his ire — the organizers behind the Massachusetts and New Hampshire bowling associations, as well as the International Candlepin Bowling Association, the sport’s governing body.

“Candlepin is still plenty popular. You go to a bowling alley on a weekend and the place is packed,’’ he says. “Yet the professional sport is a joke. They say it’s from a lack of sponsors, so I say, ‘Why not get sponsors?’ They say it’s because there’s no TV show, so I say, ‘Why not start a TV show?’ ’’

He has criticized the organizers publicly, privately, and to their faces. They have, in turn, suspended him, stripped him of titles, and, he says, done their best to smear his name and cost him money.

“I’ve lost track of how many titles I’ve had taken away from me,’’ Sargent said.

In 2011, when Sargent bowled a 245, tying the world record for a single game, organizers — as well as jealous bowlers — did everything they could to poke holes in his record, he says. There were rumors that the pins had been sprayed with a lubricant to make them fall easier. There were whispers that the lane where he bowled the record — Metro Bowl in Peabody — had been warped in a flood and should disqualify him. And there were claims that his bowling balls were too heavy, so he was required to have them weighed.

“There’s only one guy in the world who manufactures candlepin bowling balls, but somehow mine are illegal?’’

Sargent got his record, and, eventually, the record for the highest three-string total, 530. (He says he broke that record five times before they finally gave it to him.)

The three-string record was of particular significance to him because he took it from his father, who held it for decades with a score of 525. (Mike Sargent still holds the world record for highest five-string total, at 841.)

On a recent day at Riverwalk Lanes in Amesbury, Chris Sargent was bowling in the Friday Night Pro League, and behind the counter, Brian Bazylinski, one of the owners, was watching him. They’ve known each other forever — their fathers bowled together — and Bazylinski said that Chris Sargent’s problem is that he’s too much like his dad.

“Neither of them have ever been able to just fall in line with the organizers,’’ Bazylinski said. “But I don’t blame him. It’s hard for all of us to sit here and watch the demise of the game.’’

Even at its height, candlepin was always limited mostly to New England and the maritime provinces of Canada. And it is quite different from the ten-pin style of bowling that is popular elsewhere. Invented in Worcester in 1880, candlepin uses small bowling balls — slightly larger than a softball — that lack finger holes. The pins are roughly straight, like a candle, and much tougher to knock down than the curvy pins used in ten-pin. Players get to bowl three balls per frame — as opposed to two in ten-pin — and felled pins stay in the lane throughout a frame. Despite the extra ball, candlepin scores are much lower than ten-pin. No one, including a specially built bowling robot, has come close to a perfect 300 game, something that happens tens of thousands of times a year in ten-pin. Top professional candlepin bowlers hope to average about 130 a game.

As Sargent gets ready to bowl in the pro league, he gets into a zone. First, he puts Corn Huskers Lotion on his hands to keep them from chafing and give them a bit of stickiness. Then he goes through his superstitions — money in a certain pocket, SpongeBob shoelace on one shoe. He grabs the ball that’s at the rear of the ball return — always the one at the back — and then, well, he fires.

His game is entirely without finesse. He does not so much bowl as unleash a rolling rocket, and he claims to not know the numbers of the pins or have anything approaching a strategy.

“I just hit them hard,’’ he says. “Try to stick them to the back of the curtain.’’

On this night, he’s bowling OK, not great by his standards. But at least he’s not doubled-over in pain. That’s the other big thing bothering him.

Sargent has recently been diagnosed with diverticulitis, a disorder of the colon. He’s had two major episodes that have required hospitalization, and if he has another, doctors tell him they’ll have to cut out a stretch of his colon, ending his bowling career. Sargent believes it’s inevitable.

As for how he feels about this, it’s tough to get a straight answer. Sargent says he does not love bowling. He’s not even sure he likes it. What he likes is being good at something, but he feels like he wasted his time and talent with bowling.

“My daughter is going to be a golfer,’’ he says. “Screw bowling.’’

Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker@globe.com. Follow him at facebook.com/heybillybaker.