On February 5, 2023, EJ Tackett completed bowling’s Triple Crown and it got remembered as a first. The PBA had already published the real count on its own website that same afternoon: ninth, not first.
The Triple Crown is not a trophy category. Nobody enters it and nobody defends it. It is three specific majors — the PBA World Championship, the Tournament of Champions and the U.S. Open — collected at any point in a career, in any order, with any amount of time in between. There is no ring, no banner, no ceremony on the night the third leg falls. It exists as a count and nothing else, which means it exists only for as long as somebody is doing the counting. That is exactly what makes it rare, and exactly what makes its own ledger easy to misplace.