In February 2022, three bowling balls failed pre-broadcast hardness testing at the PBA Tournament of Champions. The Professional Bowlers Association banned the balls, never named the bowlers, and changed the rule a few weeks later. It's the same thing they did in 1973.
This is the full story of bowling's biggest cheating scandal — and how the PBA and the United States Bowling Congress have buried it twice.
In 1973, Don McCune won six PBA Tour titles in a single season using a Columbia White Dot bowling ball soaked overnight in methyl ethyl ketone. The chemistry was new. The institutional response set the template. Change the manufacturing rule. Don't name the bowler. Treat the equipment as the problem. McCune kept all six titles, the Player of the Year award, and went into both the PBA Hall of Fame and the USBC Hall of Fame.
Forty-nine years later, three Purple Hammer bowling balls — the 2016 and 2017 production runs from Ebonite International's Hopkinsville, Kentucky plant — failed the same hardness test on the live broadcast lanes at AMF Riviera in Fairlawn, Ohio. The USBC revoked every 2016 and 2017 Purple Hammer twenty-two days later. Nine days after that, the USBC excluded six Storm bowling ball models. The PBA continued to allow those same Storm balls in PBA-conducted competition. The split between the two governing bodies on equipment bans was now a matter of record.
In June 2023, PBA Director of Rules and Equipment Neil Stremmel published a thirteen-page hardness report and raised the manufacturing minimum to 78 Shore D. He did not name the three Tournament of Champions bowlers either.
In September 2025, the United States Bowling Congress put it in writing. The institution responsible for protecting bowling integrity admitted that its primary anti-tampering rule is structurally unenforceable without confessions from the athletes themselves.
This is bowling ball soaking, ball tampering, urethane chemistry, the Purple Hammer ban, and the 52-year institutional template that protected the bowlers and punished the equipment.
Chapters
- 0:00 — The Three Balls Pulled Aside in 2022
- 0:46 — Don McCune and the 1973 PBA Tour
- 2:15 — The Soaking Mechanism Spreads
- 4:15 — Earl Anthony at Oklahoma City
- 5:19 — The PBA Lets Don McCune Keep Everything
- 6:55 — The Purple Hammer Comes Out of Hopkinsville
- 8:24 — Three Balls. Three Bowlers. No Names.
- 10:44 — The 2025 USBC Governance Admission
- 14:04 — Fifty-Two Years of the Same Response
Sources
- USBC Sept 2025 Bowling Ball Hardness Governance Report
- PBA June 2023 Hardness Report by Neil Stremmel
- USBC March 21 2022 Purple Hammer Revocation
- Sports Illustrated — Now He's Throwing a Wet One, Too (Sept 17 1973)