The Highest-Paid Athlete in America Was a Bowler
In 1964, the highest-paid athlete in America was not a baseball player, not a football star, not a golfer, not a heavyweight champion. He bowled for a living. The Professional Bowlers Association had spent six years turning him into the most recognized face in American sport, and in 1964, Ebonite International—a bowling ball manufacturer out of Tullahoma, Tennessee—paid him one million dollars to put his name on a ball. His name was Don Carter. One million dollars. 1964.
For context: Arnold Palmer was the biggest name in golf that year. He had turned professional in 1954 and signed with Wilson Sporting Goods on a deal his own manager later called, undoubtedly, among the worst any athlete of his caliber had ever signed. In 1962, Wilson sold one million four hundred thousand dollars in Palmer merchandise. Palmer’s share came to twenty-three thousand five hundred and eighty-five dollars. The clubs required his name. The contract required him to return them if his tour results disappointed. Carter’s deal was forty times larger than what Palmer actually took home.
Joe Namath did not appear in a Schick razor commercial until 1968. Ebonite paid Carter one hundred times what Schick paid Namath. Richard Petty, the most famous name in American auto racing, did not sign his first million-dollar endorsement deal until 1971—seven years after the bowler. The sport that produced the first million-dollar athlete in American history was bowling.
From St. Louis Pinsetter to Mr. Bowling
Donald James Carter grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and learned the game as a pinsetter—setting pins by hand in a St. Louis alley as a teenager. He was good enough at baseball to sign a minor league contract with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1946. Then he came home and went back to bowling.
By the early 1950s, Carter was the most dominant competitive bowler alive. In eight BPAA All-Star tournaments between 1952 and 1960, he won four times and never finished below fourth. Five World Invitational titles in six years, one American Bowling Congress Masters, six Bowler of the Year awards. The record did not just tell you he was good. It told you why Ebonite would pay one million dollars to borrow his name.
Carter bowled with what observers called an unorthodox style—though unorthodox undersells it. Deep knee bend at the line, cocked elbow, a release that looked more like pushing the ball than throwing it. Coaches who did not know better told younger bowlers not to copy him. The players who watched carefully noticed something different: Carter’s delivery eliminated ball speed variance at the point of release. His bent-knee finish was not bad form. It was precision engineering—and it was the physical argument Ebonite was about to spend one million dollars on.
Eddie Elias, the PBA, and Television’s Golden Age
Eddie Elias, a sports agent and attorney from Akron, Ohio, gathered 33 of the top professional bowlers in the country at the American Bowling Congress national tournament in Syracuse in March of 1958, and asked each of them to contribute $50 to fund a new organization. Carter was one of the 33. The Professional Bowlers Association was founded that day. The PBA’s inaugural season ran in 1959 with three tournaments. Carter won.
Television had already begun changing what Carter’s name was worth. Jackpot Bowling aired on NBC. Make That Spare and Championship Bowling brought professional bowling into American living rooms every week during the sport’s televised golden age, when Saturday afternoon tournament broadcasts pulled millions of viewers. Carter appeared on all three programs. By 1959, he was grossing more than $100,000 a year through tournaments, exhibitions, television match play, and endorsements for Miller, Viceroy, Palmolive, Rapid Shave, and Wonder Bread. He was not just bowling. He was selling.
The PBA’s structure made Carter’s endorsement value calculable in a way other sports had not yet managed. The tour ran tournaments in cities where every viewer was also a league bowler. The audience was not watching a sport they could not access. They were watching the best version of themselves. Ebonite could count those viewers, run the numbers on what a name at the pro shop counter was worth, and arrive at a figure nobody in golf or football had yet reached.
What a Name Was Worth: The Ebonite Deal
The question Ebonite was trying to answer in 1964 was not whether Carter was famous. He had been voted greatest bowler of all time in a bowling magazine poll, named Bowler of the Year six times. The question was what a name like that was worth on a product sitting on the shelf at the local pro shop, in front of the millions of league bowlers who watched him on Saturday afternoon and wanted to bowl like him.
Ebonite’s answer was one million dollars. Structured as a multi-year deal, Carter would endorse the Don Carter Gyro Balance ball—a rubber ball with a customizable internal core and adjustable finger hole placement tied directly to the mechanical consistency Carter had spent twenty years building. The ball was not incidental to the deal. It was the product argument. The deal was widely reported as the largest single endorsement contract in the history of American sport: by one account, two hundred times what Arnold Palmer was earning from Wilson Sporting Goods, one hundred times what Joe Namath received from Schick.
No baseball player had anything close. No basketball player had anything close. The model Mark McCormack was building around Palmer—the athlete as brand template that would eventually produce Michael Jordan’s lifetime Nike contract and LeBron James’s billion-dollar deal—had already produced its first proof of concept. Not in golf. Not in football. In bowling.
The Blueprint for Jordan and LeBron
Mark McCormack had struck his famous handshake deal with Arnold Palmer in 1960, four years before Carter signed with Ebonite. McCormack’s model—the Yale-trained attorney who founded IMG and turned Palmer into a brand—was new enough that nobody had fully tested what it could produce. Palmer was still working out what his own name was worth. The American Bowling Congress had been running professional tournaments since the turn of the century, and Carter had spent a decade figuring out exactly what his name could sell.
McCormack spent 1964 building the infrastructure that would eventually produce contracts far larger than Carter’s. IMG went on to represent the biggest names in sports and define what modern athlete marketing looks like. But in 1964, while McCormack was still proving his model with Palmer’s $23,000, the athlete-as-brand concept had already been demonstrated in full. The proof wore bowling shoes.
Carter retired from competitive PBA play in 1972. His knees gave out. He moved to Miami, ran a chain of bowling alleys, and was inducted into the PBA Hall of Fame in 1975 as a charter member of the first class. The endorsement model he proved—a named athlete attached to a signature product in a sport with mass participation—became the template for every major athlete brand deal that followed. Jordan’s Air Jordans. LeBron’s lifetime Nike contract. The structure is the same. The first version ran on rubber and sold at the pro shop counter.
In the summer of 1964, while Arnold Palmer’s contract was requiring him to hand back his clubs if his tour results disappointed, Don Carter signed his name to a one-million-dollar deal and changed what an athlete’s endorsement was worth. Palmer caught up eventually. Everyone did. Carter was first.
Chapters
- 0:00 The Highest Paid Athlete in America
- 0:26 What Arnold Palmer Actually Took Home
- 1:01 The Marketing Industry That Did Not Exist Yet
- 1:54 From St. Louis Pinsetter to Mr. Bowling
- 3:05 Eddie Elias Founds the PBA
- 3:31 Bowling’s Televised Golden Age
- 4:04 What a Name Was Worth
- 5:06 The Blueprint for Jordan and LeBron
- 6:17 Carter Was First