Professional Bowlers Association

I never had the chance to meet Luci Bonneau, but I wish I had.  Luci lost her courageous battle with breast cancer in 1999 and now, for the 13th time, Luci’s memory and battle live on at Palace Lanes in Houston.

For the first time, bowling fans from around the world will be introduced to "The Luci”.

Xtra Frame, online Bowling Channel, is proud to present LIVE coverage of the Luci Bonneau Memorial Striking Against Breast Cancer Mixed Doubles benefitting the Stehlin Foundation for Breast Cancer Research at Palace Lanes in Houston, Texas July 20-22.  On the line is an $8,000 first prize and a Regional PBA title for members.

Watch ALL qualifying and match play LIVE on www.xtraframe.tv Saturday and Sunday.  Follow the scores, share photos, talk about the action on PBA Facebook and Twitter and in person with all of your bowling friends and fellow fans.

The action at Palace Lanes gets underway with a LIVE FREE Xtra Frame preview Friday July 20 starting at 7 p.m. ET.  Join Xtra Frame’s Mike J. Laneside, “The Bowling Guy” Jason Thomas and The Powerhouse Jackie Bowling for LIVE coverage of the sold-out Luci Bonneau Memorial Pro Am benefitting the Stehlin Foundation for Breast Cancer Research on PBA.com.

Visit the PBA Facebook Fan Page, or follow the PBA on Twitter @PBATour #TheLUCI this week for a link to the FREE LIVE preview show on PBA.com.  The festivities will include tips by PBA pros, player interviews and a preview of the Luci Bonneau Memorial Striking Against Breast Cancer Mixed Doubles.

The Luci Bonneau Memorial attracts some of the country’s most talented bowlers with an all-star tournament staff including tournament founder Donna Connors with Jim Welch of Sunset Station Strike Zone.

Among the 84 doubles teams scheduled to participate in the Luci will be defending champions and winners of 4 of the last 5 “Lucis”, Shannon Pluhowsky and Tommy Jones.  Also scheduled to compete: Lynda and Chris Barnes, Liz Johnson with PBA Player of the Year and 2012 ESPY winner Sean Rash, Colombians Clara Guerrero and Andres Gomez, Carol Norman and Wes Malott, 2012 U.S. Women’s Open winner Kelly Kulick and Mike Scroggins.

Watch the Luci ProAm LIVE on the Xtra Frame FREE preview on PBA.com, then subscribe to your online Bowling Channel for LIVE coverage of the Luci Bonneau Memorial Striking Against Breast Cancer Mixed Doubles Saturday and Sunday.

The Luci Bonneau Memorial Striking Against Breast Cancer Mixed Doubles will be webcast LIVE in its entirety on PBA.com’s online Bowling Channel, Xtra Frame, including Saturday’s qualifying rounds and Sunday’s match play competition. Saturday’s schedule includes eight-game qualifying rounds for Squads A and B at 10 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. ET, with the top 12 doubles teams advancing to round-robin match play Sunday at 10 a.m. ET.

If you can’t be there in person, you can help by spreading the word, watching the coverage on Xtra Frame or by donating, send a check to:

LB Striking Against Breast Cancer
% of Memorial City Bank
820 Gessner Road
Houston, Texas 77024

Bowling world, it is my pleasure to introduce you to “The Luci”.

For a schedule of upcoming Live Xtra Frame coverage in July and August, click here.

Now that the 2011-12 PBA Tour season is in the books, and we still have five full months until the start of next season at the World Series of Bowling this November let's take a look back and recall some of the great storylines from the season. Here are my picks for numbers 6-10, with the top five coming at you later this week...

#10 - Blanchard's Fall

While this story may not make newly selected PBA Rookie of the Year Josh Blanchard's list of moments he'd like to remember, the "fall heard 'round the world" garnered a great deal of media attention and gave the young up-and-coming star a fantastic opportunity to educate folks on some of the finer points (You use tight thumbholes? There's oil on the lanes? Pros have interchangeable slide shoes? I never knew!) of our sport. Blanchard handled the attention with great class and used the platform to make a name for himself as one of the Tour's sure-fire future stars. And he bounced back in the very next tournament with a top-four appearance in the season's first Xtra Frame Tour event in Fountain Valley.

#9 - Newell's Gutter Ball

Making his first career "TV" appearance (technically, it wasn't a TV appearance because it was an Xtra Frame only event, but to hear it from Newell, he was every bit as nervous) in the PBA Ricart Ford Open. After telling sideline reporter Jackie Bowling how nervous he was in spite of the fact that there were no ESPN cameras on hand, the man with the mohawk and "Captain America" belt dumped his first shot of the opening match against Dom Barrett straight into the gutter. After telling himself, "Well, it can't get any worse than this!" he calmed down and shot 740 for three games to defeat Barrett, Rhino Page and Ryan Ciminelli for his first career PBA Tour win.

#8 - International Dominance at WSOB

When the Dream Team dominated the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, no one thought the rest of the world would ever catch up to the Americans in the sport of basketball. For a long time, critics and experts thought the same thing of American dominance in the sport of bowling. But with the arrival of a bevy of international stars to the PBA Tour in the past five years, the tide completely shifted in favor of international dominance at this year's World Series of Bowling. International players won every single animal pattern event on the schedule (Stuart Williams of England - Viper, Jason Belmonte of Australia - Chameleon, Dom Barrett of England - Scorpion, Belmonte - Shark) with Finland's Osku Palermaa claiming the PBA World Championship. The dominant performance of the Internationals declared, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the world now stands on equal footing with the Americans at every level of the sport of bowling.

#7 - Shafer's Heartbreak at the World Championship

And speaking of the PBA World Championship, an American who could have ended the run of the international players was Ryan Shafer, who was the heavy emotional favorite going into the final match of the season's first major. With 12 career TV appearances in the majors without a win, many hoped Shafer would shake off the bad luck and post a "W", especially after his emotional reaction to advancing to the final round. But it was not to be, as a late miss on a 3-6-10 leave would cost Shafer the match and his chance to erase all of those past heartbreaks. As always, Shafer handled the loss with class and marched on with another solid performance in the U.S. Open, where he finished 4th. Fans of Shafer can only hope that next time things will be different.

#6 - Belmonte's 300

With as much power as he packs in his two-handed delivery, and with the frequency with which he is making it to the TV finals these days, it was bound to happen eventually - a perfect game on TV for Jason Belmonte. During the second eliminator match of the Mike Aulby Division Finals of the PBA World Championship, Belmonte went on a tear on the Shark pattern (that he had chosen as the high qualifier on the telecast). With laser-like precision and devastating power, Belmonte labelled twelve straight strikes to shoot the 21st televised 300 game in PBA history, earning a $10,000 bonus for his efforts.

Well, there are the first five in our list of the top 10 storylines of the 2011-12 PBA Tour season. I'll be posting the top five later this week. In the meantime, what were some of your favorite stories from this past PBA Tour season?

The Etonic PBA Senior U.S. Open is now in its third and final day of qualifying before the majority of the field is sidelined, and several big-name players find themselves with quite a bit of work to do in order to stay alive in the tournament.

A veritable murderer's row of stars that includes Walter Ray Williams, Jr., Lennie Boresch, Jr., Kenny Parks, Mark Williams, Don Moser and reigning Senior Open champion and PBA Senior Tour Player of the Year Ron Mohr are outside of the top 24 and, in two surprising cases, behind the cashers cut line (top 55) with just six more games of qualifying remaining.

CLICK FOR COMPLETE DAY 2 STANDINGS

Mohr, who received his crystal PoY trophy in a pre-squad ceremony on Tuesday, is definitely the biggest surprise, struggling in round two to drop all the way to 105th position entering the final qualifying round. He needs to make up 116 pins on the cut line in order to stay alive, and he'll be bowling on the A squad, which is the second of three shifts that will be competing Wednesday.

Mark Williams, who won this tournament in 2010 (defeating Ron Mohr), is also outside the top 55 with a day to go, sitting in 75th place, and needing to make up 34 pins on the cut line. Williams is on the first squad out on Wednesday, which means he'll have to post his number "on the fresh."

With Joe Salvemini and Sammy Ventura tied for the lead, a number of marquee players are still in the mix, including Charlie Tapp (4th), Tom Baker (5th), Wayne Webb (6th), Brian Voss (13th), Hugh Miller (14th), Amleto Monacelli (15th), Eric Forkel (17th) and Mike Edwards - who making his PBA Senior Tour debut - in 24th.

The scoring pace slowed considerably on day 2, with the B squad players generally starting off playing deeper on the lanes (closer to the second arrow) than the A squad had (closer to first arrow) on day 1. In spite of that, there still seemed to be plenty of opportunities to score, as Rick Francis showed by shooting a big +277 block to jump from 79th all the way up to 11th. We'll have to watch closely to see where the C squad starts off in the morning, as the further right they play, the more likelihood there will be - since there are no re-oils between squads - for higher scores as the day goes on.

All of the action today will be covered live on Xtra Frame, and coverage will continue throughout the week through the conclusion of the event with the live stepladder finals Friday at 6:30pm ET. More than 25 hours of coverage remains, so to view the complete schedule, or to subscribe to Xtra Frame for just $7.99 per month, click here.

To put it simply, the Player of the Year award should be awarded to the player who bowled the best over the entire tour season. I believe that Sean Rash was that person this past season. You didn't see any other player on television more this past year, and titles aren't the only thing that should be counted towards determining who was the best bowler. Obviously the PBA members' votes showed that as well, because Norm Duke had more titles than two of the PoY finalists and didn't make the final three. All in all, it certainly appears as if the majority of the PBA members who voted, voted on the stats, and the player with the best ones for the 2011-12 PBA Tour season was Sean Rash.

It is Tournament of Champions week! My favorite week as a bowler and now my favorite week as a coach/fan! Why not the U.S. Open you ask? Because that week is such a grind, it never really becomes fun - the lanes are just too tough - and as a fan I do want to see some strikes!

But being here at the T of C as the tournament got underway on Monday, I could actually feel the excitement starting to build as the Champions field narrowed down to 21. Tuesday is the start of the Elite field qualifying and, after 20 games, the top 25 will join this year’s 11 winners for Thursday’s Round of 36.

As I watched the many stars who will be bowling later this week practice for the tournament, I couldn’t help but notice the differences in how they get ready for this event compared to how we did in my generation. First and easiest are the shoes - I had a pair of Linds, period! If the approaches were a little tacky, cigarette ashes always did the trick. If they were a little slick, either a wet towel or a lick of the hand to add some moisture to the sole. Today, Chris Barnes has a bag of heels and slide soles - with some even cut in half for about 30 different combinations! The advantage goes to today’s player.

Second is the arsenal, and for us this was easy. For me it was one dull Columbia Black U Dot, three shiny ones, a Wine U dot, and a Slate U dot: that’s six balls total with room to drill two more to fill out my four Don Johnson double totes (yes, totes, we actually carried them over our shoulders!) Today’s player HAS to have three to five times as many balls. Nobody is good enough to get by with just six because the lanes just change too fast and too much! The advantage on this one goes to my era because I could carry my entire arsenal on my shoulders into any airport, tip the sky cap $20 and never pay for extra bags!

Now the biggest difference - the lane conditions. Not how hard or easy they were, but actually what they were going to be. I bowled 280 events in my career and never had a clue what the “shot“ was going to be until I bowled the practice session - and even that was no guarantee on what they would be the next day. Did we ask about the lane conditions? You bet, but the only answer I ever received was, “Let your ball be your guide.” Here in 2012, Sunday was the official practice session, and most players had a game plan. And then after watching the Champions qualifying round on Monday, the same group was rethinking their game plans. In our day we usually changed our game plan around frame 15 of the first round. It was actually an advantage to have absolutely nothing in practice rather than have a good shot, (we didn’t know about having a “good look” like the bowlers of today are always talking about, but we did have Brian Voss!) Bottom line, the game has changed - like everything else in life – and, in fact, our game has changed so much that I’ve written a book to help bowlers of all skill levels make sense out of the best ways to sift through all the information and help to improve their own bowling games with that very title: The Game Changer!

All I can say about writing a book is, “WOW, what an undertaking!”  I’d been talking about doing an instructional book for years but that’s about it - lots of talking, no writing - and now I know why, it’s not EASY! Lucky for me I found the right partner in Jason Thomas to help me write it. He started by attending one of my camps to see my coaching style in person, and then videoed over 20 hours of answering questions on my coaching system. This was 16 months ago. After all this I thought he’d write for a few months and then hand me a completed book, right? Wrong!!!! That was version 1 - the final version is #6 - that’s right, I made him rewrite it six times - and we’re still friends!
 
Why so many rewrites you ask? Because you only get one chance to write your first book and it was very important to me to get it just right. What is the goal of the book? Well, the question I thought the book had to answer in order to be a success was, “How can I help a bowler in Minnesota (or anywhere in the world, for that matter) to improve without ever seeing his game?” I also wanted to write something that wouldn’t bore the reader or get bogged down in technicalities. I wanted to the reader to feel like he was getting a lesson from me through the book, and then be able to refer back to the book to continue his/her improvement until that person reached whatever goal they set out for themselves in the sport of bowling.
 
We also had the help of one Mr. Chris Barnes, who provided great advice throughout the process and even wrote an excellent foreword that explains why he never really understood the reasons for his own bowling success until we started working together and I shared my coaching system with him.
 
But ultimately, I wrote this book for all the bowlers I’ve worked with and the ones who would love to work with me but – due to geography, time or expense - just can’t get out to see me for help. In the end, I think the finished product will make the bowlers I’ve given lessons to feel like I am preaching the exact same things we’ve always worked on during our lessons and, given the results I’ve been able to achieve with thousands of clients (not to mention several of the best bowlers in the world),  will give a much larger audience of bowlers seeking to improve their games a chance to get something out of my coaching philosophies as well.
 
Mark Baker is one of the most sought-after bowling coaches in the world and works with several of the PBA’s top players, including Chris Barnes, Mika Koivuniemi, Tommy Jones, Jason Couch, Bill O’Neill and Mike Fagan. Copies of his new book, The Game Changer are currently available to order here.