5 Bowlers Born In the Wrong Era

In 2010, an American woman bowled one televised 300 in Japan and took home a ten million yen bonus, about $121,000, the brick of cash under the scoreboard on the thumbnail. Her best full season at home paid $165,425. This video lines up five great bowlers whose money, rules, or equipment belonged to a different calendar than their talent, each one proved by a dated receipt.

Hank Marino held the national match game title in 1935, more than twenty years before the PBA bowled a tournament, and was in his late sixties when the tour formed. Mark Baker won four PBA titles, had back surgery in 1991, and came back to find reactive resin letting everybody do what he once could. Fuzzy Shimada was arrested at a bowling alley before he was interned at Heart Mountain, then turned away by the American Bowling Congress under its Caucasian-only rule, and he still finished top ten at the ABC Tournament five times.
The last two are about the checks. Marion Ladewig, a nine-time Female Bowler of the Year, was handed $4,000 for winning the World’s Invitational in December 1963; sixteen months later the PBA’s Tournament of Champions paid its winner $25,000. Wendy Macpherson, the women’s tour’s all-time money leader, saw her tour close in 2003, went to Japan where bowling still paid, and was ruled ineligible there in 2012. Her hometown job after that was high roller promotions director in Las Vegas.

If you want more of the bowling record read this way, with the dates and the checks lined up side by side, subscribe. Every video here pulls the documents on one buried story.