The Major That Died Healthy
The Professional Bowlers Association once ran the richest, most prestigious event in the sport: the Firestone Tournament of Champions. For nearly three decades it was the major every professional wanted, bowled in the same building, in the same town, paid for by the same company. Most people assume bowling’s crown jewel died the way the sport supposedly died — the audience drifted away and the money followed. That isn’t what happened. The purse was the biggest in bowling and getting bigger; the event was healthy. The Tournament of Champions died because a tire company changed its headquarters address.
Why the PBA Started in Akron
The PBA was founded in 1958 by a lawyer named Eddie Elias who had never bowled a competitive frame in his life — an Akron attorney and sports agent who saw a touring class of professionals with no league of their own. Thirty-three charter members put in fifty dollars each: $1,650 total to start a professional tour that would one day be bought and sold for millions. Elias built it in Akron for a reason. Akron called itself two things at once: the Rubber Capital of the World, because Firestone, Goodyear, and General Tire were all headquartered inside the same city limits, and the Bowling Capital, because those same tire companies ran industrial bowling leagues for thousands of factory workers. Rubber and bowling grew up in the same town, on the same floors, paid for by the same payroll.
Firestone Puts Its Name on It, 1965
So when Firestone went looking for a sports property to put its name on, bowling was already next door. The Tournament of Champions had a one-off start in 1962 in Indianapolis, went dark for three years, and Firestone brought it back in 1965 as an annual event in Akron, at Firestone Bowlarama, before it moved to Riviera Lanes in nearby Fairlawn the following year. Billy Hardwick won that first Firestone edition and took home a $25,000 check out of a $100,000 purse — enormous numbers for bowling in 1965. By putting its name in the title on national television, Firestone became the first company to hold titled-event sponsorship on a nationally televised bowling event, and one of the earliest in any televised sport. The thing every modern sport now runs on, a corporate name welded to the event itself, was already happening in Ohio with a tire company and a bowling major.
The Crown, and 28 Years at Riviera Lanes
The lanes earned that money. The Tournament of Champions became the title the greats measured themselves by — Mike Durbin won it three times, in 1972, 1982, and 1984. And it had a home: the tournament settled into Riviera Lanes in Fairlawn and stayed there for twenty-eight straight years, from 1966 through 1994. PBA people came to call those the most historic pair of lanes in bowling, the spiritual home of the whole tour, sitting in the same county as the sport’s birthplace and the sponsor’s headquarters all at once. For twenty-eight years you knew exactly where bowling’s biggest event would be. Then, for the better part of two decades, you did not. The address mattered. The address was the whole thing.
Mike Connor: “Tires and Bowling, Hand in Glove”
The man who put the deal together and ran it for three decades was Mike Connor, who spent thirty-four years at Firestone and retired as its Vice President of Marketing Services. He ran Firestone’s whole sports-marketing portfolio — tires at the Indianapolis 500, PGA golf at Firestone Country Club, and the bowling major in Akron — and bowling was the piece he kept closest. He called it an opportunity for Firestone to attach its name to a sports attraction that could grow to be something. It grew. Tires and bowling, he said, fit hand in glove. The sponsor and the sport were not strangers doing business. They were the same town, the same people, the same handshake, year after year — which is exactly why what happened next did so much damage.
Bridgestone Buys Firestone, and the HQ Leaves for Nashville
In March 1988, the Japanese tire manufacturer Bridgestone bought Firestone for $2.6 billion, one of the largest foreign takeovers of an American company at the time. Bridgestone now owned the name, the factories, and the sports-marketing budget that paid for a bowling tournament in Ohio — and folding the companies together was brutally expensive, with the North American operation reportedly losing more than a million dollars a day by the end of the decade. When a parent is bleeding at that rate, every budget line gets a second look, and a bowling tournament five hundred miles away is exactly the kind of line that gets looked at. Firestone’s headquarters had already begun drifting: CEO John Nevin moved the offices from Akron to Chicago in 1987, and by 1991 Bridgestone had moved the headquarters of its American tire business to Nashville, Tennessee, where it remains today. Nashville is not a rubber city. It had no industrial bowling leagues, no Akron relationships, no reason for an Ohio bowling event to be Firestone’s problem anymore.
“It Became a Budgeting Decision”
The document at the center of the story isn’t a contract. It’s an interview Mike Connor gave to the trade publication Modern Tire Dealer in 2002, looking back on the end of the sponsorship. There was no conspiracy in what he said. There was something worse for bowling: a budget line. After the Nashville move, he said, Firestone no longer had a strong presence in Akron. Then he named the mechanism — the company was getting back into sponsoring auto racing, and there were only so many dollars to go around. In his exact words, it became a budgeting decision. That sentence is the whole story. The sport’s most prestigious major was not killed by a competitor, a scandal, or a collapse in interest. It was killed by a spreadsheet, and the line item got reallocated to tires on a racetrack the year the company stopped living in Akron.
Connor Walks Into the PBA’s Top Job; the Last Firestone TOC
There was a strange symmetry in what happened next. The Firestone executive who had run the sponsorship from the inside walked out of the tire business and directly into bowling’s top job: in 1992, the same year the headquarters left Akron, Mike Connor became the second commissioner in PBA history, running the sport through 1995. The man who knew exactly how dependent the tournament had been on one company was now in charge of a tour that had just lost it. The last Firestone-sponsored Tournament of Champions was held in April 1993. George Branham III won it, beating Parker Bohn III, and the win mattered beyond the trophy — Branham was the first African American ever to win the Tournament of Champions, a record that stood alone for thirty-three years, until a twenty-two-year-old rookie named Alex Horton became only the second, at Riviera Lanes in April 2026, for a top prize of $100,000. By the early 1990s the event’s prize money had swelled toward a reported $300,000 at the top end. The money was getting bigger, not smaller. The tournament did not go out a failure. It went out at full height.
General Tire, One Year, Same Disease
What came next is the proof that the problem was never really about Firestone. It was that bowling had never owned its own crown jewel. General Tire, another old Akron name, took over the sponsorship for 1994 and announced it would back the tournament for three years. Norm Duke won that first year, beating Eric Forkel 217-194, in the last edition held at Riviera Lanes before the tournament left town for more than a decade. But the three-year promise evaporated — the arrangement lasted exactly one tournament. By 1995, General Tire was gone too, and the reason is the whole thesis stated twice: General Tire’s parent, Continental, moved its operations to Charlotte, North Carolina. A second tire sponsor, a second corporate relocation, the same severed tie. The replacement died of the identical disease as the original. That is not coincidence. That is structure.
Rented Ground: The Pattern That Never Got Fixed
The Tournament of Champions looked like an institution — the history, the venue, the television slot, the prestige. But it had no independent financial spine. Its prestige was rented. It belonged, in the end, to whoever was willing to write the check, and the people writing the check answered to a balance sheet in another state. The sport had built its grandest stage on a single company’s street address and never noticed until the address changed. That is not a problem bowling ever solved. It repeated it. Twenty-seven years after Bridgestone’s accounting decision quietly ended the tournament, the entire PBA was bought by the bowling-center operator Bowlero, now Lucky Strike Entertainment, a publicly traded company answering to Wall Street. The crown jewel of 1992 had depended on one corporation’s presence in one town; the whole sport, by 2019, depended on one corporation’s strategy and one landlord’s rent. Same disease, different decade — a sport that keeps renting the ground it stands on and keeps being surprised when the owner decides to do something else with it.
Chapters
- 0:00 The Major That Died Healthy
- 0:55 Why the PBA Started in Akron
- 2:25 Firestone Puts Its Name on It, 1965
- 4:00 The Crown: Mike Durbin Wins It Three Times
- 5:05 Riviera Lanes – 28 Years in One House
- 6:15 Mike Connor: “Tires and Bowling, Hand in Glove”
- 8:05 Bridgestone Buys Firestone, 1988
- 9:25 The Headquarters Leaves for Nashville
- 11:45 “It Became a Budgeting Decision”
- 13:00 Connor Walks Into the PBA’s Top Job
- 13:55 The Last Firestone TOC, 1993
Sources
- Mike Connor interview on the end of the Firestone sponsorship – Modern Tire Dealer (2002)
- Firestone Tire & Rubber Company (Akron founding -> Nashville HQ)
- Bridgestone’s 1988 acquisition of Firestone ($2.6B)
- PBA Tournament of Champions (Firestone era, venues, champions)
- Bowlero / Lucky Strike Entertainment acquisition of the PBA (SEC filings)