Bad Boy Marshall Holman vs Bo Bowden in 1981 Title Match

Marshall Holman's Infamous Double Gutter Balls

Bowling's Score Inflation and What to Do About It

"The balls we used in the 70's would be like golfers today using hickory shafts."

--Marshall Holman

Do you Facebook? If not, you might want to consider signing up. Even if you don't have the time or inclination to do much posting, you might want to befriend or "like" other people, groups, or organizations.

For instance, I "like" the PBA. As a result, I get updates from the PBA on my Facebook "wall" about players, tournament results, and other news concerning the PBA in particular and bowling in general.

This morning, I followed a link on the PBA's Facebook page to an article written by Tom Clark (I don't know if it's the same Tom Clark who is currently PBA VP and COO) for USATODAY in 2002 about the proliferation of 300 games since bowling's inception. The article begins by mentioning 84-year-old Joe Nagy Sr's 300 ring that he received from the American Bowling Congress in 1952 for being one of only 192 ABC members that year to bowl a sanctioned 300. Yet, in 2001, a staggering 42,163 sanctioned perfect games were bowled. This is despite the fact that in 1952, there were 1.6 million ABC members nationwide and only 100,000 more members than that in 2001. And in 1980, when there were 4.8 million ABC members or three times more members than in 2001, there were almost eight times fewer 300 games rolled.

The USATODAY article explores the issue of why people are bowling so many more 300's and other high scores today than they used to and what, if anything, can and should be done about it. Pros such as hall of famer Marshall Holman blame it on the newer hi tech bowling balls that flood the market due to a lack of reasonable restrictions placed on bowling ball manufacturers. Hall of famer Johnny Petraglia believes that this could be offset to a significant degree by making the bowling pins heavier. "Heavier pins," he says, "would bring back the need for a combination of power and accuracy."

You can read the entire article here.

Mark Baker's Coaching Philosophy

Mark Baker was a pretty good bowler in his day. He won four PBA Tour titles, 6 PBA regional titles, led the PBA Tour in average in 1985, and finished second to Marshall Holman in the Firestone TOC in 1986. But he may be an even better bowling coach. He is one of the most respected coaches in the game and works with bowlers at all skill levels from the Tour elite on down.

He has just started blogging on the PBA website, and he posted a very good entry recently about his coaching philosophy. Here is some of what he writes:

"Every bowler throws a good shot now and then, relative to his or her skill level. But what's the one thing most bowlers don't want to do? Change! I hear it all the time. I want to raise my average, increase my rev rate, have better balance, I want to throw it better, but I don't really want to change my game." Well, guess what? That's pretty much exactly what I try to do as a coach. That is, changing a bowler's game without them feeling that they are being changed."

Baker goes on to write about a misconception that many bowlers have about the mistakes they make and how he deals with it:

"The hardest part for me is when the feedback I get from a bowler comes in the "I pulled it" or "I elbowed it," variety, which is basically just a bunch of baloney about the release which, in reality, is more a byproduct of something that went wrong somewhere in the approach way before that. It's simple cause and effect. The bad release is the effect and once you find the cause and fix it, a miracle happens. The bowler has the "A-HA" moment. Now you have something, because once a bowler knows what he does (and what it feels like) when he throws his best shots, and can then start to tell me why he missed in a larger (and sometimes, like Barnes, more mechanical) vocabulary. At that point, the improvement is immediate."

This is a really good article that coaches, aspiring coaches, and those who are contemplating receiving coaching should read. And let's hope Mark Baker keeps blogging.

You can read Mark Baker's entire blogpost here, check out his official website here, and watch his 1986 Firestone TOC championship match with Marshall Holman and a coaching video with Walter Ray Williams Jr. below.

Billy Hardwick's Story

"His focus and concentration were unreal. When he got into that zone, the other guys would recognize it and say, 'Well, I guess we are playing for second place again this week.'"

--Phantom Radio's Len Nicholson speaking of his lifelong friend Billy Hardwick

I spent much of my boyhood with my grandparents in San Mateo, CA. My grandfather bowled and watched professional bowling on TV, and that got me interested in bowling too. If you lived in San Mateo and loved bowling, you knew about Billy Hardwick.

Hardwick, born in 1941, was a young, local bowling legend who had already became one of the best bowlers in the world by the mid 1960's, and my grandfather and I were very excited when he made the televised finals of the first Firestone Tournament of Champions in 1965. He went on to win the title against Dick Weber and the $25,000 first prize. This sounded like otherworldly money to me, a boy from a working class family who had just turned twelve.

Hardwick was one of my favorite bowlers for a long time after that and went on to have a relatively short but absolutely stellar career that landed him #12 on the PBA top 50 list of all time. He retired with 17 national titles and won 7 of them in 1969 alone, was the first bowler to win the "triple crown" of the TOC, U.S. Open, and PBA National Championship, and still holds an all-time PBA record by averaging 271 for 8 games at the 1969 Japan Cup, which he accomplished throwing a rubber ball.

However, it was only after reading an article recently in bowl.com that I came to an even greater appreciation of how amazing Billy Hardwick's career was given the obstacles he had to overcome. For one thing, he sustained a severe childhood injury to the ring finger of his bowling hand that made it very inflexible and led him to win his first Bowler of the Year award bowling with his index and middle finger. After that, he was christened "the boy with the golden claw."

Hardwick also had rheumatoid arthritis early on that prevented him from straightening his arms and prompted his doctor to tell him he'd "be crippled by the age of 28." Ironically, it was in his 28th year that Hardwick won a record-setting 7 titles, a season's total second only to Mark Roth's 8 titles in 1978.

I also didn't know that when Hardwick first came out on tour in 1962 with an awkward style a Bowler's Journal article described as looking "like he's falling out of a tree," he didn't cash in his first 17 tournaments, and the great Don Carter finally admonished him to "Go home." He did until he was able to raise enough money to come back and with indomitable determination and ungodly accuracy start dominating the tour.

But after one of his children, Billy Jr., died suddenly in his crib, his first marriage dissolved, and his second wife gave birth to a baby who died two days later, Billy lost his competitive spirit. As he puts it, "At that point, who really gives a damn about bowling? People say they understand, but until you actually lose two children--including an infant--there is no way to describe what it was like. At the time, I was No. 1 in the world, and I said 'So what?' I just didn't care. You just check my records after that, because they're all zeros."

Well, actually, Hardwick did win another tournament seven years later and then lost the final match to Marshall Holman by only five pins in the Firestone Tournament of Champions the following week. For a brief moment, he had regained the all-consuming will to win that lifted him to the top of the bowling world years before. But after the Firestone, he never regained that spirit and quit not long after and, according to his son Chris Hardwick, hasn't bowled even recreationally for over 25 years. However, he is the proprietor of Billy Hardwick's All Star Lanes in Memphis, TN, and in an interview in 2005 said of himself, "Self-pity was my best friend. Now I wake up with a smile on my face."

You can read the entire bowl.com article here, and below is a reposting of the wonderful commercial he did for Miller High Life followed by his close match with Marshall Holman in the 1976 Firestone Tournament of Champions.

Bowling Bytes--4/29/10

~ Kulick takes 2010 USBC Queens title -- "Kelly Kulick proved she could beat the men earlier this year and Wednesday she came out on top against a field of the top women bowlers in the world, earning her second United States Bowling Congress Queens title. The Union, N.J., native climbed the five-player stepladder, winning four consecutive matches, and defeating top seed Tennelle Milligan of Arlington, Texas, 232-188, to win the Queens at the El Paso Convention and Performing Arts Center..."

~ "Mt. St. Marshall": The man behind the volcano that was -- "The car fire that firefighters squelched outside the Hilton Inn Lounge in Akron, Ohio, just up the block from Riviera Lanes where the next day a 21-year-old Marshall Holman would win the first of his two Firestone Tournament of Champions titles, raised no one from their seats that night. “They had stayed in their seats while the fire department extinguished a pretty good car fire in the hotel driveway,” writer Doug Bradford observed of the bowling royalty mingling in the lounge. The figures crowding the lounge after a final round of match play that Friday night were characters that defined an irreplaceable era of professional bowling — Billy Hardwick in his “rainbow trousers,” Dick Weber with his “ice cream suit” and the peroxide-brightened hair that prompted Tour pals to dub him “The Blond Fonz,” Earl Anthony chatting with the Ebonite execs whose contract offer would soften his resistance to “PBA School” in a few years. If any of them thought back to that driveway fire after Holman sealed his historic win at the 1976 Firestone Tournament of Champions and considered it a sign of things to come, they would quickly find that they were on to something — something the PBA Tour had never seen before. The fire Holman brought to the lanes the following afternoon would do more than raise people out of their seats; it would raise hell..."

~ Minnesota team back on top at USBC Open Championships -- "After an uncharacteristically poor spare-shooting performance left them just shy of the Regular Team lead at the 2010 USBC Open Championships, the members of Linds Lakers 1 of Minneapolis easily could've lost their focus on the tournament lanes. Instead, the group turned to 124 years of Open Championships experience and averaged more than 226 during doubles and singles to take over the top spot in Team All-Events with a 10,187 total, the eighth-highest in tournament history. Red Carpet Lanes of Greenfield, Wis., previously held the lead with 10,131..."

~ Hall of Famer Nancy Chapman dies at age 80 -- "Nancy Chapman, a member of the United States Bowling Congress Hall of Fame, passed away Wednesday, April 28, at the age of 80. The Oneida, Wis., native was inducted into the Women's International Bowling Congress (now USBC) Hall of Fame for meritorious service in 2002..."

~ USBC Convention opens in Reno, Nev. -- "The 2010 United States Bowling Congress Convention and Annual Meeting takes place this week with a theme of "Moving Forward Together." This year's convention will feature workshops that will cover such topics as growing membership, coaching and future initiatives. At the USBC Annual Meeting, delegates will vote on 24 proposed amendments related to bylaws, league rules and tournament rules. Additionally, delegates will elect four members to the USBC Board of Directors..."

~ It's down to four women in 12th Sinai International Open -- "Zandra Aziela, Malaysia, Mennat Soltan, Egypt, Shalin Zulkifli, Malaysia, and Cassie Staudinger, Australia, will battle it out for the women's title in the 12th Sinai International Open Bowling Tournament Thursday at International Bowling Center in Cairo, Egypt..."

~ Michigan Bowlers: Take Your Last Puffs -- "Saturday, May 1, 2010 is the beginning of a smokeless Michigan. At least in public establishments. As a resident of and bowler in Michigan, this will be one of the best days of my life. Cigarette smoke has always bothered me, and I will not be sad to remove cigarettes from the classic bowling smell: cigarettes, oil, fried food, stale beer. Instead, I'll return home from the bowling alley with a new and improved bowling smell: the same as before, but without the most offensive of the aromas..."

~ Tommy Jones: The Interview, Pt. 2 -- "Yesterday Tommy Jones discussed last season's struggles and why he will return to the Professional Bowlers Association spotlight in 2009-'10. Today, Jones goes farther back to the days when he spent Saturdays dreaming of the glory that his idols Marshall Holman and Mark Roth owned when he was growing up, explains how he developed his high-rev style, why the mantra "straight is great" continues to hold true in the era of the "rev rate," and much more..."

~ A How-To For Adjusting Ball Speed: The Importance of Ball Speed Change and a Research-Based Method to Change It-- "Many bowlers arrive at the Kegel Training Center with a strong desire to increase their rev rate. These individuals perceive higher revolutions as a panacea or the ultimate solution for improving their game. Yet, in reality, the ability to manipulate axis of rotation and ball speed would result in being able to alter their ball motion significantly more..."

~ Analyzing the lane graphs of the Hoosier Classic: What the data reveals about how the lanes will play (Coaching the Youth Bowler: Dug Barker--Bowling This Month, May 2010, pgs. 21-25) -- "...One of the items every team discusses before competition begins is the lane graph and charts as they apply to the team. This is the subject of this article. I am going to provide an overview of lane graphs and charts from the perspective of a collegiate coach..."

Bowling Video of the Day--Johnny Petraglia on SyberVision

A long time ago, a company called SyberVision sold videotapes featuring top performers in various sports like tennis, golf, and martial arts demonstrating techniques in those sports at normal speed and in slow motion over and over with hypnotic musical accompaniment. The idea behind this was that if you watched these videos, your brain would learn the demonstrated techniques without you even having to practice them physically. Or at least, you would learn them more quickly once you actually went to the court, course, or dojo to practice them.

One of these SyberVision tapes purported to teach you how to bowl strikes by watching Marshall Holman and Johnny Petraglia do it in the manner described above. The video below features the Johnny Petraglia portion of the bowling demonstration. Watch it and see if it makes you a better bowler.

Crotch-Chopping in the PBA?

"Right here, right now!"
--Pete Weber

I think Pete Weber is a lot more popular with bowling fans than Chris Barnes is, but some don't like Pete either. This became very evident after a tournament earlier this year when Pete lashed out at a photographer who took photos of him during his approach. He stuck a 10 pin and then berated the female photographer for distracting him with the audible clicking of her camera and warned--some would say threatened--her not to do it again. I blogged about this in my entry Is Pete Weber a Bad Boy?

The dislike that some feel for Weber or, at least, for some of his antics on the lanes surfaced again after he won the Marathon Open last Sunday. I wrote that I thought he exhibited a new level of touching humility and impressive maturity during his exciting performance. But not everyone agreed with me, judging from comments on the PBA website. Here are some of the choicer ones:

"PDW is a great competitor but a horrible role model for young people tuning in to watch. There were other fierce competitors like Earl Anthony and Pete's father, Dick, who wanted to win so badly but had class Pete will never know."

"Just like every other sport, bowling is turning into all hype and no class. Pete Weber is nothing but drug head and has very little class. It's no wonder the professional tour is having such a hard time keeping its head above water."

"I agree with many of you posters that PDW offers some of the best and also the worst to the PBA. His talent is unquestionable, but his manners and attitude sometimes are. I watched him in person 2 weeks ago at the Long Island Open. He did not have a good qualifying session and finished somewhere around 82nd. His last 2 qualifying games were 171 & 156, after which he stormed off the lanes in a huff & screamed at people in his way to move so he could make a quick exit. It was not a very classy display, and unfortunately not unusual for PDW. When he's going well he's a totally different person than when he's not. I was happy to see him once again earn the winners circle, but a little more class and sportsmanship would be nice to see also. Crotch chops on TV? C'mon....."

"I like Pete, glad he won, but the telecast being on Easter Sunday made the crotch chops seem pretty shallow and insensitive in my opinion."

"The crotch chops make him seem like an uneducated fool to any casual observer."

"both the crotch-chop and the sunglasses are ridiculous looking for a member of the "professional" bowlers association."

"That is exactly what it means. It is a vulgar gesture, one of contempt, that essentially means "Right here!" (his crotch) and is comparable to means "Suck my d**k" or "B**w me." Even though he directs it toward the pins, not his competitors, it still has no place in the PBA and more than likely any other PBA member would have been fined and/or suspended. But he's a Weber."

"Pete is a great bowler. There will never be any doubt about that and he deserves respect and congrats on his victory. But with reactions like his crotch chop, as a person, he's a P-Pretty D-Disgusting W-Weasel! Just my opinion. Nothing personal."

What most of these comments refer to is a defiant gesture called the "crotch-chop" that Weber sometimes makes after he gets an important strike. He borrowed it from professional wrestling and it, along with his wearing sunglasses every time he competes, has become his trademark. If you've ever seen the wonderful bowling documentary film A League of Ordinary Gentlemen," you'll know that the PBA actively encouraged Pete to inject as much excitement as he could into the game by virtually any means he could, including the crotch-chop, and that he was plenty willing to oblige. Still, many people don't like it or him for doing it.

I used to be one of those people. I grew up watching the PBA Tour during the staid, at least in bowling circles, 60's and 70's, and you didn't see crotch-chops, shout-outs, and smack talking by the bowlers back then. The bowlers were generally quiet and very reserved and so was the audience. The atmosphere was one of respectful solemnity. Then guys like Marshall Holman and Pete Weber came along to blow the lid off traditional PBA telecast decorum. Though I admired their bowling, I thought they were jerks, and I usually rooted against them.

I think it was when I watched the aforementioned A League of Ordinary Gentlemen that I changed my opinion of Pete Weber. I came to see him not as a crotch-chopping, sunglass wearing caricature of a jerk who just happens to have a beautiful and devastatingly effective bowling style, but as a flawed but essentially decent human being struggling under great pressure to earn a respectable living doing what he loves and being grossly underpaid, like most of the other players on tour, for how well he's able to do it. And even though he's behaved in ways since then that I've found questionable at times, I continue to see the good person beneath the flamboyantly "bad boy" image he's cultivated, and I appreciate his bowling talent and skill more than ever.

Moreover, when he won Sunday, not only did I not feel put off by his trademark gestures, but I actually got swept up in the intensity they expressed. I was loving every incandescent moment of PDW's powerful performance. But now that the white hot intensity of Sunday's telecast has faded some and I've read the comments above and had time to give matters a little thought, I have mixed feelings about what went down in Sunday's telecast. On the one hand, I side with a commenter on pba.com who wrote:

"I have an overall opinion that covers all of the controversial issues when it comes to bowling as far as swearing on the air, crotch chops, smack-talk, etc. And that is that as long as it comes across as authentic from passion and intensity I am all for it. It if comes across as contrived or just being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous or on purpose for ratings, then I don't like it."

I thought Weber's antics at least appeared to be spontaneous expressions of his competitive intensity on the lanes, and I enjoyed them. Yet, on the other hand, when I more dispassionately consider what a crotch-chop actually signifies and ponder the growing incivility and vulgarity that seem to permeate our culture, I wonder if I really want the behavior of the most accomplished professionals of the sport I love most to represent that sport on the world stage the way Chris Barnes, Brad Angelo, and, especially, Pete Weber did at times last Sunday.

I don't have a quick and easy answer to the question except, at this point, to say that I wish Pete Weber would find a different way to express his competitive exuberance.

How do you feel about all of this?