Probably the most famous line from Sunday’s runner-up Ronnie Russell’s favorite movie Talladega Nights was Ricky Bobby’s mantra, “If you’re not first, you’re last!”
By that logic, this week’s Chameleon Championship title match combatants, Russell and the PBA’s most-celebrated prior non-winner Bill O’Neill have finished last in every single PBA Tour event they’ve ever entered (a combined 176 career tournaments).
Of course, this is far from the case, but watching these two fight it out on one of the most demanding oil pattern/lane surface combinations in quite some time actually resembled something more out of the Lord of the Rings trilogy than a trifling Will Ferrell picture.
This week’s show kicked off with Russell taking on his good friend and four-time PBA Tour champion Sean Rash in a match that was about as ugly as it gets. Missed spares, multiple line and ball changes, balks, begging and pleading, and one mid-game four-bagger from Russell that ended up being the difference was the story of this match, but the egregious ending capped off everything appropriately.
Rash entered the 10th frame somehow with a chance to turkey to force Russell to get at least one strike for the win. After X-ing the first one, Rash yanked the follow-up attempt (after going through a Sergio Garcia-esque series of balks, fidgets, re-grips and generally unconfident-looking gestures) through the beak for a 3-6-9-10. He then needed at least three of them to force RR to mark. Now, while the 3-6-9-10 is one of the most difficult non-splits in the world to make, getting three is not all that difficult whatsoever. So what does Rash, who at one point in his TV career looked absolutely invincible, do? He whiffs the whole thing wide left! His final score of 170 allowed Russell to get just 8 pins for the title berth, which he got, very shakily, on a 3-10 leave to move on with 172.
If we were hoping things would improve in Match 2, we were indeed very wrong, as the horribly injured Amleto Monacelli (strained tendons in his throwing arm) stepped in to take on O’Neill. Things were so bad, in fact, that the producers decided to go all Cheetah Championship on us and present the match documentary-style to focus on Amleto’s gutsy performance and past career accomplishments.
Having been there at the taping myself, and seeing just what kind of pain Monacelli was going through, I think this was a good decision. No point in making a guy who busted his butt his entire Hall of Fame career and is still one of the fittest bowlers in the sport’s history look bad when all he could muster was 142. Yet the able-bodied O’Neill fared only a little better with a 170 (I’m guessing that Walter Ray Williams, Jr., who lost to O’Neill after failing to double in the 10th frame of game 7 in the Round of 8 to miss the show, was kicking himself over how easy #47 might have been had he gotten that pesky second strike).
Thank goodness the ladies showed up for their title match at this point. And the two men’s finalists were probably thanking god that they wouldn’t have to bowl Shannon Pluhowsky. All Shannon did was calmly step out on the lanes and throw an easy nine-strike 268 game to defeat Carolyn Dorin-Ballard’s 206.
CDB was obviously less than thrilled with the lane conditions, and I can’t say I blame her after seeing what junk reactions the men had too (although despite the order of the matches on TV, the ladies actually bowled first and then PBA Lane Maintenance dude extraordinaire Mark Sabbatine re-oiled for the gents). I do have to wonder what Carolyn might have had if she’d moved way right and played up the 2-3-4 boards…but hey, did anyone else double-take when they flashed her age in the bio? I mean, how great does she look for 45?!
Shannon’s win soothed the sting of her loss in the PBA Women’s World Championship (which came just the day before in actual WSOB time) and qualified her for the April PBA Women’s Series Showdown at the end of the season. She’ll also have another crack at a title in next week’s Scorpion Championship.
As we moved on to the men’s final, I couldn’t help thinking how much I love to watch title matches between guys who are both looking for their first win. And with as difficult as these lanes were, I thought we might get to see some real grind-it-out-to-a-bloody-pulp ugliness.
I sort of got what I was looking for, as the guys both struggled hard to keep the ball in play and fill frames. Russell blinked first with a miss of the 4-7 spare in the 5th frame (the ball hooked by the 4 and took out just the 7). He then shocked the crowd on hand (and the fans watching at home) by flagging the 10-pin in the 8th. These highly amateurish mistakes were obviously of great embarrassment to Ronnie, but I’m sure it did not slip the attention of the watchful bowling fan that, even though Russell switches to plastic for his spares, he still does put a decent amount of rotation on his spare shots. And when the lanes are hooking as much as these lanes were, even plastic will grab the lane and hook.
To Russell’s credit, he shook off the misses and cobbled together a game-ending string of strikes to force O’Neill to fill at least 19 pins in the 10th for his first win. O’Neill proved once and for all that he belongs in the elite company of bowlers who own PBA Tour titles by tossing two clutch strikes in the 10th and then letting out a huge fist pump that effectively released all the bottled-up tension and anticipation of that first Tour win. In essence, O’Neill told his former fellow members of the talented Tour non-winner club (Russell, Loschetter, Ciccone, et al), in the words of Sasha Baron Cohen’s hilarious Talladega Nights character as he blew by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, “Hakuna Matata bi***es.”
Other notes from this week’s telecast:
- Enjoyed Rob Stone’s feature from the back of the pinsetter…made me think of the CSI bowling episode and I was kind of wondering if someone was going to drop a severed head into the ball pit.
- Another good tip by Randy…the unhinge-hinge-unhinge armswing/release method is definitely the thing to do nowadays.
- I know I mentioned it already, but what would WRW have shot on these lanes? I bet in the 230-240 range…but you gotta make the show to win.
- Wishing a speedy recovery to Amleto! What a class act he is and it’s great to see a guy at his age keeping himself in such great shape and continuing to be competitive despite having absolutely nothing left to prove.
- Belmo was hanging out in the crowd rooting for his buddy Bill. The tables will be turned next week when Belmo goes for the Scorpion Championship title…Can’t wait!
Be sure to check back to pba.com Wednesday for a new episode of The Bowling Show, and a very Happy Thanksgiving to all! See you next week!