Perfect Pins: The PBA's First 900 Series

On April twenty first, twenty thirteen, Joe Scarborough, a fifty year old self employed electrician contractor out of Charlotte, North Carolina, becomes the very first person to join the nine hundred series at a PBA event, meaning he bowled three straight perfect games. Here's the story behind this amazing feat. Today on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Reese, your guide to a rapid deep dive into sports history. The Professional Bowlers Association, better known as the PBA, has been rounds in the nineteen fifties when a group of over thirty bowlers got together pulled in their money to try to sanction events, and has grown steadily ever since and currently has over three thousand members, and they've broken up the tour into different kinds of divisions. The PBA Tour is the major tour they run. These are the ones you normally see on television and they usually run events from January to September. Then there are PBA Regional Events, which allows amateurs to qualify and consists of seven regions in the central, East, Midwest, Northwest, South, Southwest and West, allowing competitors to compete in tournaments and event for a chance to make the PBA Tour, and then you have the PBA fifty and sixty Tour, which are essentially the Senior Tours, but split up into two divisions featuring over fifty for the PBA fifty and over sixty for the PBA sixty, and these are for older members. Then you also have the PBA World Bowling Tour, which are events held outside North America. There's also a Women's Regional Tour, a Women's Series, and a PBA Junior Tour has started for bowlers under the age of eighteen, where they were scholarships to winners. We've all probably been bowling, and we know that the three hundred is a perfect game, meaning you got a strike knocking down all ten pins with is one bowl in each frame, and if you do that throughout an entire game, you're gonna bowl. You're gonna bowl twelve balls, and you need twelve straight strikes to get a perfect game. And it's not an easy task even for professional bowlers, as there have only been thirty five televised perfect bowling games, and only two of those were on the Senior Tour where Joe Scarborough did his and the odds for a PBA bowler to bowl a three hundred is four hundred and six to one, while the average bowler is eleven thy five hundred to one, so it's much better odds for a PBA bowler, but still is very difficult now. To be joining the PBA Tour, you first have to win a regional tournament and you have to become a member of the PBA, which means which is actually a paid membership and for every competition you actually have to pay an entry fee to join, which goes into the part of the prize fund. For each tournament, you actually have to qualify to become a member, meaning your average bowling score has to be two hundred better in the last twelve months with a minimum of thirty six games played as part of a sanctioned bowling league. When Boscorre bowl was an avid bowler, he was actually had success. He was actually a PBA member from nineteen eighty one to two thousand and one and actually was able to bowl on the PBA Major Tour twice, but stepped away from the game for a little bit to focus on families in his career, but as he turned older, he wanted to get back into it, so he joined the senior Tour. This was his second of it ever at the PBA fifty Sun Bowl, where in the opening rounds he bowled three back to back games and getting part of the nine hundred series, making him the first ever to do so on a PBA tour. Now, there have been others to do so in league settings. Back in July nineteen eighty two, Glenn Allison did so, becoming the first ever to do it in an league sanction event, and over thirty nine other bowlers have done so since, and Scarborough said he was very surprised, although he wasn't nervous. He was just pretending he was practicing back at home and blocked out the crowd and the focus on every shot. And after these first three games he moved to the other end of the bowling alley where he actually then struggled for the rest of the tournament. And he had actually had fourteen previous three hundred games and his best three game series was only was eight hundred and thirty eight, demolishing that with his new nine hundred score, and he used a different ball than he normally used as when he was practicing. He bolt six straight strikes with a new ball, he decided to keep it and was able to have this historic event, but his streak ended after thirty seven street strikes and win on his next three games were all under two hundred and knocked him out of not only the lead, but he finished all the way in twelfth place. And they keep score at these events with how many pins you add up by the total of the end of the whole tournament, and he finished with one nine hundred and twenty one pins, seventy seven behind the leader, a PBA Hall of Famer Mark Williams, who had a total of one thousand, nine hundred and ninety eight pins knocked down. So even if you have one of the greatest runs in PBA history, it doesn't mean you're gonna win. You have to continue your streak for the chance to win. And though Joe was just an avid bowler, he put his time and effort into something he loved and it got him to the pinnacle of what he wanted to do. His name will always be synomymous with the nine hundred series, as he was the first to do so. Despite not winning, many people will always forget that. It's what you did at the top that people always remember, so Joe will always be remembered for that nine hundred series, not the fact that he finished twelfth in that tournament. So always strive for your highest peaks, even if you don't know what the ending's going to be, because if you can hit the highest of heights, you can be remembered forever. And we always love to be remembered here at Daily Sports History. So go tell a friend share this episode so they can remember us as well, and come back tomorrow for more Daily Sports History