This Sunday's second ESPN telecast (of four, click here for the schedule for the remaining two) of the inaugural Dick Weber PBA Playoffs was simply awesome, for more reasons than one.
In addition to the three great matches (the first one featuring Jack Jurek, Wes Malott and Bill O'Neill was kind of a blowout, but it did give the latter two guys a great chance to showcase their lighter sides, which we've rarely ever seen on television), we also saw a nice bit of controversy and confrontation between Brad Angelo and Jason Belmonte.
In
our promotion of the show, we alluded to this situation, hoping to generate fan interest and conversation heading into the show on Sunday. (It worked, by the way.) But now that the show has come and gone, what did we learn from it? For me it is that Brad Angelo is now my new favorite bowler on Tour!
Let's examine that statement for a moment. At first glance,
Angelo's career statistics, while proving he's been a consistent and solid pro for nearly a decade, clearly put him in the "journeyman" category, which, as we know is a word that hardly ever is synonymous with "superstar." In spite of that, it seems that whenever Angelo is on TV, he creates more buzz and more fan interest than any player since Pete Weber circa 2002.
Case in point: his appearances in the season's closing events each of the last two years. In the 2010 Marathon Open, he engaged
in a memorable duel with perennial PoY candidate Chris Barnes (this year included by the way...the following two weeks, Barnes must win in order to keep his slim hopes alive). On that show, Barnes raised the Italian Stallion's ire (Angelo is proudly Italian-American, even featuring imagery and symbolism of his ancestral homeland on his Gemini jerseys) by facetiously referring to a brooklyn strike Angelo had thrown earlier in the match. On his next turn, Angelo threw two solid strikes, exclaiming after each, some variation of the phrase, "THAT AIN'T BROOKLYN!" directly back at Barnes. Barnes had a chance to close Angelo out in the 10th, but left a 2-pin, allowing Angelo to claim the victory. Angelo would ultimately lose to eventual champion Pete Weber in the following match.
Fast forward to this season - last weekend's show to be exact - and Angelo was involved in yet another imbroglio, this time with Australian golden-boy Jason Belmonte. After stepping off the approach due to some inadvertent water bottle noise made by Belmo, Angelo regrouped, then heard yet another bottle noise at a point where he could no longer stop his shot. Angelo angrily and immediately chastised Belmonte for the offense on-air, for which the Australian two-hander later apologized both during and after the match, giving the audience a great dose of drama in an already great match that came down to the 10th frame. (Belmonte won and will now face Barnes on next Sunday's show).
So why does this make Angelo my new favorite bowler? First off, because he's honest and not afraid to stand up for himself no matter who is watching. In the Barnes incident, Chris called Brad out and Brad simply had the courage to put it right back on Chris by rising to the occasion and making some great shots under pressure.
With respect to last Sunday's show, the timing of the bottle noise definitely called into legitimate question the intent of the action, and Angelo was simply confronting the culprit in order to stand up for his rights as a competitor - which are simply, for minimal noise to be made by other players during his delivery. To his credit, Belmonte fully and credibly explained that it was an accident and apologized profusely, but it was Brad who took the brunt of the criticism in the court of public opinion.
However, as far as I'm aware, Brad never felt the need to blame or belittle his fellow competitor after-the-fact (
click here for a recent radio interview where Brad addresses the incident), or bemoan or hassle others (myself and the PBA included) for drawing attention to the thing that led to so much negative criticism (namely, the incident).
To me, this shows a great deal of character, as well as a flair for the dramatic - the latter of which is often sorely missing from the competition on Sunday's TV shows. So, if you are not currently a Brad Angelo fan, I would strongly encourage you to re-evaluate your position, if not for the sake of his fan club mailing list and highly successful bowling camps, then at least for the message it sends to his fellow players that what you want to see on TV is candid, in-your-face, bowling action, which when we get it, showcases our sport at it's very best and most dramatic.
See you (hopefully on TV a lot more) next season Brad Angelo! And for the rest of you, we'll see you this coming Sunday, same time, same channel.