Walter Ray Willams Eliminated Early, Ron Mohr Wins PBA Senior Miller High Life Classic

Last week, I posted about Walter Ray Williams Jr. seeking to defend his PBA Senior Miller High Life Classic title. He led both qualifying rounds and was seeded first going into match play. Because of his seeding, he was able to sit out the Round of 32 and the Round of 24 and was matched against the #16 seed, Steve Licklitter, in the Round of 16. Walter Ray lost three games out of four in the best-of-five match and Licklitter went on to lose in the Round of 8. Ron Mohr won the championship.

This reinforces what I wrote previously about how the bowlers on the PBA Senior Tour are a lot tougher than you might think and that even someone as good and accomplished as Walter Ray on the regular tour cannot expect to waltz in and dominate every event of the senior tour. Not only is the senior competition too good for that, but also the "softer" conditions and the match play format that follows qualifying makes it easy for the best bowlers to be eliminated by a momentary cold streak in themselves or by an opponent's hot hand or good fortune in match play.

Having said this, Ron Mohr, who won the championship, has done extremely well since coming out on the senior tour. He was the 2009 PBA Senior Player of the Year, started out strong in 2010 before losing his wife to surgical complications and sitting out the latter half of the season, and now he's come roaring back to place high in every tournament and win his fourth senior title. He is a force to be reckoned with on the senior tour and seems poised to give Walter Ray all he can handle.

Here are the match play and final results respectively.