Professional Bowlers Association

This season, Sean Rash is blogging his life on the Denny's PBA Tour for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website in Seattle, Wash. Follow his blog all season long on either www.seattle-pi.com or PBA.com.

2008 Bayer Classic, El Paso, TX
Weekly Blog
By Sean Rash

Anytime I get to be at home, I feel grateful. I’m only home for two days, but I still get to sleep in my own bed for two nights. I bowled league on Monday night and had a blast showing off pictures from the Super Bowl and the concerts I got to go to. Not a bad night at league but we got smoked.

Tuesday was packing day and trying to get ready for El Paso. While I was at the Super Bowl, I had met some guys who work for Fox and Hound Restaurant, so I had set up a Pro-Am type deal at The Alley that night with them and seven of my friends. I didn’t even know Fox and Hound’s headquarters were in Wichita. We started at 7 p.m. that night and went until 10 p.m. We would have gone out, but we got a nice little weather storm that night. It was so bad I didn’t think I was going to fly out for El Paso in the morning.

I want to say thanks to Jim and Steve at Fox and Hound for a great time.

Wednesday was travel day this week and a after a couple of quick flights I was in El Paso. Now, this place is literally in Mexico and as far away as you can be. If you don’t speak Spanish, you don’t get around much, they say. I checked in at the hotel and relaxed before I headed to practice. Practice session was pretty good overall. I was able to use anywhere from Ultra Zones to Vapor Zones to our new ball, the Avalanche. I then had dinner with Tom Baker and Rick Benoit and it was time to call it a night.

Thursday I saw some good things for me on the lanes. The first round I used an Ultra Zone that I drilled up the night before and found myself leading after seven games. For those who know me, I normally don’t have a lot of success on the Shark pattern but for some reason, everything was clicking. Going into the second block, I knew I would be able to experiment and get ready for match play. After the second block, I was in fifth place and was able to try a lot of knew things. I went to dinner with “The Bakes” after we knew we both made it and it was time for sleep. Bowling 14 games really take a toll on the body. I needed to get back to the room and stretch and work out and ice the knee.

Friday morning I felt like I never got any sleep. I had to bowl Mitch Beasley in the Round of 32. I ended up winning the match, 4-1, and was heading back to the room to rest. I also had a lot of emails to catch up on. You can really get bogged down, too, if you have to stay in the bowl all day.

I didn’t know who I was going to bowl until I got back either. I ended up having to bowl Riga Kalfas in the Round of 16. Riga beat Mike Fagan in a pretty good match, I heard.

What a match. If you would’ve watched in person, you would have said I didn’t deserve a PBA card. I shot 150, 150, 160 my first three games and looked as if I was going home. The good thing about our format is that you have to lose four games. I came back and won the next four games to win the match, 4-3.

The next match was one everyone wanted to see. I was getting to bowl my mentor, Chris Barnes, the hottest player on Tour. Chris had made seven shows coming into the week and was throwing it pretty good. As you read in my blog last week, he puts himself in the situation to win more then anyone else. He is bound to win a lot. Well, the match didn’t go my way. I lost 4-1. I can say this: I had my chances and didn’t throw the shots when I needed to. Against some guys on Tour, you can get away with mistakes, but not against the best, like Chris, Walter Ray, Pete, Tommy and a few others. If you slip, they are going to jump all over you and take full advantage of it. So, for me, in game one and game five I threw two bad shots and didn’t get it done.

Chris goes on to make his eighth show of the season. What a show it will be: Tommy Jones, Mike Devaney and Chris’s roommate, Mika Koivuniemi. After I lost my match, I put my stuff away on the truck. I got a bite to eat and hung with my best friend Kevin for a while.

I was suppose to fly home Sunday, but I changed my flight and was able to get home Saturday. It was nice because I was going to be home three days before the event in Omaha. This is the longest I have been home since December and is the longest I’ll be home until April 1st.

Once I got home, I was able to unpack and relax at home before I went to a Wichita Thunder hockey game with some friends. What a game, I guess. They finally won; they had lost the previous seven games. We then went out for a few hours like the good old days in college.

Sunday was show day and it was a good one. If you missed it, Chris broke through, as they say. But it was only a matter of time until he would win this year. Chris beat Tommy by playing a part of the lane that wasn’t easy to play on the Shark pattern, but he took a risk and it paid off. This was his ninth career title, and like Randy Pedersen and I and many others said, he will go on a winning streak and will win more then he loses for sure.

So for me, I had a great week on my hardest pattern, but I wasn’t too happy because I have made four Round of 8s this year and I have been knocking on the door for another TV show. I can feel something good is about to happen. I hope everyone has a good week

Happy Valentine’s Day to my sweetheart, Sara, and my awesome Mom.

See you in Freezing Omaha…


Click on one of the links below to read more Rash's Rants:

Etonic Championship

Lake County Indiana Classic

CLR Windy City Classic

Great Lakes Classic

Lumber Liquidators Championship

Spartanburg Classic

ConstructionJobs.com Championship

Lumber Liquidators Earl Anthony Medford Classic

Motel 6 Dick Weber Open

H&R Block Tournament of Champions/PBA Exempt Doubles Classic


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The PBA and Motel 6 announced today fans will decide key elements of the 2008 Motel 6 Roll to Riches — a special winner-take-all postseason event featuring the highest top prize on Tour of $150,000 — via a special text message and online voting campaign.

Fans will be able to vote on three key elements of the 2008 Roll to Riches — the location, the oil pattern and two of the participants. Those who choose to text-in their vote will be charged $.99 per vote plus standard text messaging rates and are allowed a maximum of 10 votes per day. A free once-per-week voting option will also be available at PBA.com.

The promotion kicks-off Sunday, Jan. 6, as the first question will be introduced on the air during the live ESPN-televised finals of the ConstructionJobs.com Championship which takes place at 1 p.m. ET. A new question will be introduced in each of the following seven PBA telecasts on ESPN, with the last question being presented during the Denny’s World Championship on Sunday, Feb 24. Results of each question will be revealed during the following week’s Denny’s PBA Tour telecast on ESPN.

The Motel 6 Roll to Riches features six PBA stars — the winners of each of the four PBA Major events and two players from the text/online fan vote — bowling head-to-head in a unique format for a winner-take-all $150,000 prize.

Last season, Doug Kent defeated Norm Duke in the finals of the 2007 Motel 6 Roll to Riches in Columbus, Ohio, to take home $150,000 en route to his first career Player of the Year award.

Members of the Buffalo Bills joined exempt bowlers from the Denny's PBA Tour Wednesday night at AMF Thruway Lanes in Cheektowaga, N.Y., for the Etonic Championship Pro-Am.

The Pro-Am coincided with the 2007 Etonic Championship, the fourth stop on the Denny's PBA Tour, which began Thursday morning and runs through Sunday's live ESPN televised finals at 1 p.m. EST.

Lee Evans, the Bills’ first round pick in 2004 who has established several Bills’ receiving records in his short career, led the five Bills players with a 236.00 average over the three games including a 265 to end the night. The format featured 9-pin no-tap where nine counts are as good as strikes.

Also joining PBA stars such as 2006-07 PBA Player of the Year Doug Kent and Buffalo native Joe Ciccone were Bills’ players Mario Haggan, Gibran Hamdan, Justin Jenkins and Rian Lindell.

Three more Etonic Championship Pro-Ams will take place at AMF Thruway Lanes Saturday at Noon, 3:30 and 7:30 p.m. EST.

Fans interested in bowling in Saturday’s Etonic Championship Pro-Ams should contact AMF Thruway Lanes at 734-946-9092.

On paper, the team of Norm Duke and Walter Ray Williams Jr. should have been dominant in the first outdoor PBA event since 2001. In reality, they were.

Duke and Williams, two of the most decorated bowlers in history, completed their march through the special summer doubles event, sweeping the championship round matches against Tony Reyes and Robert Smith to win the GEICO® PBA All-Star Shootout Hosted by Six Flags at Six Flags St. Louis.

Although Reyes and Smith came into the finals as the only team to go 3-0 in round robin match play, they were no match for Duke and Williams, who swept the two singles matches – worth one point each – and the final doubles match worth two points for the 4-0 win. The pair of Hall of Famers – Williams a PBA and USBC Hall of Famer and Duke a USBC Hall of Famer – with a combined 68 Denny’s PBA Tour titles split the $50,000 top prize.

The event featured 16 of the PBA’s biggest stars split into eight teams for an alternate shot doubles event, where any split converted was worth five bonus pins and teams striking on their fill ball were allowed an extended 10th frame.

In the finals, Duke won the first singles match over Reyes, striking seven consecutive times in frames 3-9 to give “Will Duke ‘Em” a 1-0 lead. Duke finished the match with a score of 258, striking on his fill ball to give himself the extra frame possibility. Reyes had a chance to take the lead by striking out in the 10th and throwing one extra strike, but he left a 3-10 split in the 10th frame to fall, 258-233.

The second match also featured some drama as Williams converted a 2-5-7-8 split in the sixth frame to earn five bonus pins which turned out to be the difference. Smith led after a five-bagger in frames 2-6, but a spare in the seventh frame stopped his momentum. After the split conversion, Williams struck four consecutive times to take the lead, but a nine-spare with his second ball in the 10th meant he didn’t have an endless 10th frame opportunity.

That gave Smith a chance to double in the 10th to win. After a strike with his first shot, he knocked down just eight on his next shot, giving Williams the 259-255 win and his team a 2-0 lead in the finals.

With the doubles match worth two points, Reyes and Smith could have sent the finals to a one-ball sudden death roll-off with a win.

Both teams had opens early in the match but Reyes and Smith held a slight edge heading into the seventh frame. Then Duke and Williams stepped up their game and struck four consecutive times, but were unable to strike with their fill ball and finished with 219. They watched as Reyes and Smith left a 2-4-5-7-8 but converted in the 10th then needed a strike on their fill ball to push the match to extra frames. Instead, Smith left a 10-pin and the game and match went to Duke and Williams, 219-202.

Duke and Williams split $50,000 for the win, while Reyes and Smith, who beat Doug Kent and Danny Wiseman, 222-219, in the final round robin match to advance to the finals, took home $30,000. Each team earned an additional $2,500 for each round robin win as well.


Denny’s PBA Tour
GEICO® PBA All-Star Shootout Hosted by Six Flags
Six Flags St. Louis
Eureka, Mo.
Sunday, July 22

CHAMPIONSHIP ROUND
(Norm Duke-Walter Ray Williams Jr. vs. Tony Reyes-Robert Smith. Singles wins worth one point, doubles win worth two points)

Norm Duke, Clermont, Fla., def. Tony Reyes, San Bruno, Calif., 258-233
Walter Ray Williams Jr., Ocala Fla., def. Robert Smith, Captain Cook, Hawaii, 259-255
Duke-Williams def. Reyes-Smith, 219-202

ROUND ROBIN GROUP PLAY
(Winner advances to championship round)

Dick Weber Group
Tony Reyes-Robert Smith def. Doug Kent-Danny Wiseman, 222-219

FINAL STANDINGS
(Winning team earns $50,000. Second-place earns $30,000. All other teams earn $15,000. Each round robin win worth $2,500)

Team		Record		Earnings
Norm Duke-Walter Ray Williams Jr.		6-1		$55,000
Tony Reyes-Robert Smith		3-3		$37,500
Doug Kent-Danny Wiseman		2-1		$20,000
Chris Barnes-Mika Koivuniemi		2-1		$20,000
Jason Couch-Billy Oatman		1-2		$17,500
Sean Rash-Pete Weber		1-2		$17,500
Patrick Allen-Parker Bohn III		1-2		$17,500
Tommy Jones-Wes Malott		1-2		$17,500