PBA Announces Its 2010-2011 Award Winners

Congratulations to Mika Koivuniemi for winning the Chris Schenkel PBA Player of the Year award, to Scott Norton for winning Harry Golden Rookie of the Year honors, and to Jack "The Ripper" Jurek for taking the Steve Nagy Sportsmanship award.

Koivuniemi won the PBA Tournament of Champions, was the only player to make it into the televised finals of all four "majors," earned the third highest amount in prize money for a season in PBA history at $330,040, and led the PBA Tour in average at 222.50. Norton, who won the Pepsi Chameleon Championship his first time on national TV, was the only rookie to win any national title this year. And Jurek, who also won the Steve Nagy award in 2006, was, according to the PBA press release, "an overwhelming choice" to win the award again this year.

I can't say that I disagree with any of these choices. The only question I have is about the Rookie of the Year voting. Scott Norton received 445 votes, while "no other player received more than 15." My question is, Wasn't Dan MacLelland also a rookie this season, and didn't he qualify for four telecasts and outpoint Norton by a wide margin in the major statistical categories? If so, why did he lose to Norton by such an overwhelming margin? It seems to me that either he wasn't officially a Tour rookie, or a grave injustice was served in his receiving so few votes relative to Norton.

You can read the PBA press release on the award selections here.

Wayne Webb, One of the All Time Greats

"I always bowled well on TV, and I was known for being able to make a big shot when I needed it."

--Wayne Webb

I grew up watching PBA telecasts. I've seen almost every one of them and every top professional bowler since the mid-60's. I've never compiled my own PBA top 50 list, but if I were to do so, Wayne Webb would rank high on it. He ranked 18th on the official PBA "50 Greatest Players" list released a few years ago.

Whenever Wayne Webb stepped foot on the approach, he had my full attention. There was just something unusually charismatic and commanding about his demeanor. It was all business and brimming with equal measures of standout competence and quiet confidence.

And then there was that compact, efficient style of his that just pleased the eye. You know how some bowlers on tour have styles that you just love to watch every chance you get? David Ozio, Brian Voss, Bryon Smith, Chris Barnes, Parker Bohn, and Robert Smith are among the many who come to mind, while there are others, whom I won't name, whose styles are an eyesore. Well, Wayne Webb had and still has the kind of style you love to watch.

But that great style also generated one powerful ball. Back in the day, it was one of the most powerful balls on tour, and I heard an old-timer on PBA Xtra Frame once say that Wayne was the first or one of the first on tour to move in deep enough to loft the gutter cap. Everybody else would be struggling to play outside or shallow inside lines, and there Wayne would be firing strike after strike from deep inside with all that skill and power of his.

For awhile, he was nearly invincible. He won the Tournament of Champions and was PBA Player of the Year in 1980. Between 1980 and 1985, he won over $100,000 three times and over $90,000 twice, which was great money for the PBA back then.

But he began to struggle after that, and although he had a few more good years, particularly in 1988 and 1997, he left the Tour in the early 2000's to concentrate on running pro shops. The end of his career on the regular tour is profiled in the outstanding 2004 bowling documentary "A League of Ordinary Gentlemen."

Wayne eventually moved to the Sacramento area and opened a couple of pro shops here, and after I moved to Sacramento, he became my go-to pro shop guy. This wasn't just because he'd been such a great bowler on tour and one I'd always enjoyed and respected more than most. No, it soon became apparent that this guy had tremendous knowledge of bowling and bowling equipment, and he was willing to share it with you at length. You could learn a lot from listening to Wayne Webb.

Once, I asked him to give my wife, who was a beginning bowler, a bowling lesson, and he helped her game. Another time, I asked him for a ball recommendation. He watched me throw a few balls first. We then went into his shop, he gave me his recommendation, I took it, he fit me for the ball, laid it out and drilled it, and the first time I used it, I shot over 800 in league. I was so happy, I called him on the phone the next morning and thanked him. That ball is now several years old, but it still fits me better than any other ball I've owned, and I still use it whenever I can.

I was sorry to see him leave Sacramento to take over a bowling center in Columbus, Ohio. But I was delighted to see him do so well on the Senior Tour and enjoy so much happiness with his new family and business venture.

The reason I bring all of this up is because I've just received the April, 2011 issue of Bowlers Journal International in the mail, and one of its articles profiles Wayne. The article is titled "For Wayne Webb, Life is Fun Again. In an upcoming post, I will write about some very interesting parts of that article.

Below is video of Wayne Webb's title match at age 24 with Gary Dickinson in the 1980 Tournament of Champions.

Bowling Quote of the Day--4/13/10

"You're an exempt professional bowler. One of the givens at that level of the sport is not missing single-pin spares, especially in the clutch. So when you miss such a spare in the last frame of a national tour event that opens the door for a victory by your opponent, should you even be allowed to be Player of the Year?"
--Jim Dressel, from his Bowlers Journal column 'Bowlitically Incorrect'

In a word, yes. In my humble opinion. Even the best of the best players on tour are human. All except Walter Ray, perhaps. I've seen him miss a single pin spare or two in his 160+ TV appearances, but I don't think I've ever seen him do it in a clutch situation, although I did recently see him leave six pins on his fill ball when he needed only seven to make the U.S. Open telecast.

But my point is that it's easy for some bowling writer to denigrate and dismiss from his armchair an outstanding bowler just because he makes a single costly mistake. But Player of the Year is an assessment of a bowler's ENTIRE season and not just of one human mistake. The bowler in question had a very good season and almost won Player of the Year despite that mistake. But Walter Ray won it instead, despite his own big mistake in the U.S. Open.

One mistake does not a season make.

Bowling Bytes--4/8/10

Today I begin a new feature of this blog. I'll be providing links and citations to bowling news and information that I think you may find interesting or useful. I'll be looking at blogs, websites, journals, and other online and offline publications related to bowling and pointing you to the best of what they have to offer. I'm going to try to do this every day, but I may or may not be able to do that. Yet, I should be able to do it most days. So please be sure to stop by and check it out.

~ PBA Action Continues Sunday on ESPN with PBA Experience Showdown presented by BOWL.COM -- "The 2009-10 Lumber Liquidators PBA Tour’s regular season is over, but competition continues Sunday on ESPN with the first of two special events from the new International Training and Research Center located on the International Bowling Campus."

~ Former Junior Team USA members take doubles lead at USBC Open Championships -- "Erik Vermilyea of Mansfield, Texas, and Jeffrey Mersch of Orlando, Fla., are former Junior Team USA teammates and have bowled doubles together at the USBC Open Championships for five of the last six years...Their familiarity with each other's games has helped them to continued success on the tournament lanes, including a 25th-place doubles finish in 2007. This year, everything came together for them again as they turned in their best effort yet and took the Regular Doubles lead with a 1,507 total at the National Bowling Stadium on Sunday."

~PBA.com's Xtra Frame to Continue Live Event Coverage This Spring -- "PBA.com’s subscription video service Xtra Frame hits the road again later this month to give bowling fans first-ever comprehensive coverage of several PBA Senior Tour and PBA regional events...Xtra Frame co-host and expert analyst “The Bowling Doctor” Jeff Mark will be travelling the country and calling the action for the final rounds of at least eight tournament stops beginning with the PBA Senior Dayton Classic April 20."

~ Andy Morton: PoY Comes Down to Year's Final Game...Again -- "In very few professional sports does Player of the Year boil down to one game. However, for two consecutive years on the PBA Tour, Player of the Year has come down to the final game of the final tournament...This season-ending tournament also brought to an end one of the most disappointing years for number one seeds heading into the stepladder final. The top seeds this year went an astonishing two for eight...over those 53 games, we saw the cream of the crop rise to the top. Five of the top seven players were former Players of the Year. Your number one seed was vying for his first POY award and your number two seed is remarkably the only player among the top 10 of the 50 greatest players of all time not to have a POY award. No matchplay, no bonus pins, no gimmicks. Just bowling for 53 games on seven conditions."

~ Ohio bowler records sixth perfect game of 2010 USBC Open Championships -- "Most bowlers dream of achieving perfection at the USBC Open Championships, but after a 133 start to singles, things were far from perfect for Mark Frazier of Lorain, Ohio, at the National Bowling Stadium on Tuesday...With a few adjustments and a ball change, the 36-year-old right-hander turned his dismal start into a dream come true as he closed out his 10th Open Championships appearance with 20 consecutive strikes for games of 253 and 300 for a 686 series. Frazier's 300 was the sixth of this year's event. Terrence Syring of Bay City, Mich., leads Regular Singles with 833."

~ Get More Length -- "How do you get the ball to skid farther down the lane without moving your line or changing bowling balls?"

~ Mental Game: Inside Your Head -- "Want to become a PBA champion? Take responsibility. Want to raise your average? Take responsibility. Want to become a better person? The onus is on you, and you only, to succeed or fail, win or lose, rise or fall."

~ Ong, Healy to bowl for the title in 4th Kingdom International Open -- "Healy must defeat Ong twice to win the $25,000 top prize."

~ Analyzing the Player of the Year Award -- "Every year, no matter what the sport, there is debate about who actually should've won the MVP award, or how skewed the system is, or any of a number of other arguments fans and critics throw at the governing bodies of sports...Is it best to vote, as in most sports? Is it best to make a pre-determined points system ahead of time and let the participants go for it, as in bowling?"

~ 2009-10 PBA Tour: The Season of WOW -- "This 2009-10 season was a season that lived on and off of every conceivable brink you can imagine and we all came out remembering something about what bowling fans just witnessed."

~ Attacking the sport patterns in Reno -- "The biggest difference on this pattern will be that when you use more angle in the front part of the lane (swinging the ball greatly away from the headpin), you won’t see the guaranteed hook most house shots provide. What you are going to have to do is throw the ball straighter up the lane and less away from the headpin. This isn’t to say that you have to play one exact part of the lane to have success. One of the best things about the Open Championships oil pattern is that it provides many different ways to get to the pocket, but simply throwing the ball toward the gutter and waiting for it to hook back isn’t one of them...We always try to play as straight as we can during practice, and then we try to stay as far to the outside part of the lane as we can for as long as we can. This gives us a chance to get the oil to transition down the lane where it can give us a little help later on. You also need to use equipment with some surface, but not too much. We also all play as close to the same breakpoint as possible the entire set. That way, when one of us starts to see oil transition, we can communicate it to the rest of the team so that all of us can adjust. This helps minimize the amount we have to move, since there is hopefully no one playing deeper than we are. So, whenever we move deeper, we move into fresh oil."

A New and Improved Pete Weber Wins His 35th Title and Gives Walter Ray an Easter Gift

"That's right...there you go, Rob."
--Pete Weber, shouting to ESPN bowling announcer Rob Stone while giving him a crotch-chopping hambone salute

“I feel like I just won my first title. I don’t know what to say. It’s been three years since I won. I thought I was never going to win again.”
--Pete Weber

This isn't the article I was expecting to write today. After watching Mike Scroggins run away from the rest of the pack yesterday, I was expecting him to win on the same Dick Weber oil pattern today that he dominated yesterday and for me to be grudgingly congratulating him not only on his title but also on winning Player of the Year. I say "grudgingly congratulating" because I really wanted Walter Ray Williams Jr., to win that seventh PoY award, but I was all but convinced that he had a proverbial snowball's chance in Hades of doing it.

And so, after Scroggins won the PoY award this afternoon, I was going to write that it really doesn't matter all that much who wins it. It's just a hollow and superfluous label pinned on someone determined by an imperfect scoring system to be worthy of it. It doesn't definitively tell us who the Player of the Year really is or that such a label is even meaningful except in cases where someone has performed vastly better than anyone else. And in that rare case, we don't need a points system and Player of the Year award to tell us who we already know the best performer of the year has been.

But now that Pete Weber is the newly minted Marathon Open champion and 35 time national titlist and Walter Ray Williams Jr. has been crowned this year's PBA Player of the Year, I have to change everything. I'm compelled to beamingly congratulate Walter Ray on winning his double record setting PoY award and Pete Weber for giving us a marvelous, lingering glimpse of the old Pete Weber, minus the overbearing obnoxiousness of the past, en route to winning his first national title in three, long years of drought in impressive fashion and being so touchingly open with his emotions and so pleasingly gracious in victory.

When Pete Weber is at the top of his game, I can't think of anyone more magnificent to watch on the lanes. That patented, gracefully swooping approach and follow-through, that marvelous slow, hooking ball to the pins that magically carries pocket hits of every variety is one of the bowling wonders of the world. And let me tell you, as good as he looks on TV, his style looks even more beautiful in person. Even when he's not scoring well, as he wasn't the last time I saw him in person in that right-handed debacle at Serra Bowl nine or ten years ago, he still looks great doing it. Go see him in person while and if you have the chance.

But something that stood out about Pete today aside from his always gorgeous style was his attitude. It was a perfect and joyful blend of swagger and humility, of laserlike determination to win and profound acceptance of the fact that he might not, of colorful crotch-chops and shout-outs and cordiality and respect for his opponents. And his exultant tears at the end and effusive words of gratitude to everyone who made his victory possible were genuine and moving. It seems that an older Pete Weber has lost none of his competitive fire, but that his fire has been transformed by trials and setbacks in the crucible of life experience to forge an emerging maturity and wisdom that lifts one of the most, if not the most, charismatic and exciting bowlers on the planet to new heights of greatness.

If this season of the PBA Lumber Liquidators Tour had to come to an end today, at least it ended on an exciting and very satisfying note. Congratulations, Pete. Congratulations Walter.