Earl Anthony won 43 Professional Bowlers Association titles. Twelve million people watched him bowl every Saturday for a decade. No major American network talk show ever booked him. Not once.
He was the first professional bowler to earn six figures in a single season — at a time when most of the sports world was still debating whether bowling was athletic. Six PBA Player of the Year awards. A hundred and forty-four televised championship finals, a record nobody has touched. He bowled 25 career perfect games. Not one aired on American television. In 1992, journalist Richard Kolb tried to get Anthony on a local TV talk show. Bowling didn’t count as a sport, the producer said. Anthony’s response: it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that. It wasn’t personal. It was structural.
The ABC broadcast that made him the most-watched professional bowler of his era also sealed him inside it. Saturday afternoon gave him millions of viewers and a ceiling he couldn’t break through. Every other media outlet had quietly agreed bowling wasn’t serious — and the face of a sport is only as visible as the room that sport is playing in.
In 2008, a PBA expert panel named Anthony the greatest bowler of the last 50 years. He’d been dead seven years by then. The United States Bowling Congress built an automated ball-testing robot and named it EARL. A 43-foot oil pattern now carries his name at the PBA World Championship. A robot got a press release. An oil pattern got a plaque. None of it crossed the sports desk.
Chapters
- 0:00 — The Most Watched Nobody in Sports
- 1:25 — Baseball Signing Bonus to Forklift Operator
- 2:25 — First PBA Title and the Left-Handed Advantage
- 4:03 — Square Earl vs. Mark Roth
- 5:07 — Six Player of the Year Awards
- 7:04 — Twenty-Five Perfect Games. None on TV.
- 8:59 — The Structural Problem
- 10:40 — Death and the Posthumous Verdict
Sources
- Wikipedia — Earl Anthony
- Richard Kolb (NCA USBCA) — Earl Anthony profile
- Bowl.com — USBC Hall of Fame: Earl Anthony
- Encyclopedia.com — Earl Anthony