Eddie Elias Built the PBA. Who Did He Work For?

Eddie Elias never bowled a competitive game. He founded the PBA in 1958, built its ABC television deal, and ran the agency for its stars. One man held all of pro bowling at once.

In 1958, at the American Bowling Congress tournament in Syracuse, Elias, an Akron attorney and radio broadcaster who had never rolled a competitive game, convinced 33 of the sport’s top professionals to put up fifty dollars each. That sixteen hundred and fifty dollars incorporated the Professional Bowlers Association, and it handed a scattered trade its first real season, schedule, and prize structure. The Elias in this story is no relation to the Elias Sports Bureau, the baseball-statistics firm Al Munro Elias founded in New York in 1913 and the name most people reach for first.

What made Elias singular was not the association alone. He also ran Eddie Elias Enterprises, the agency that represented the tour’s own stars, and in 1962 he put professional bowling on ABC. The Pro Bowlers Tour aired Saturday afternoons as the lead-in to Wide World of Sports, with Chris Schenkel calling it from the first broadcast to the last, a run of 36 years. In 1965 he created the Firestone Tournament of Champions in his hometown of Akron, a $100,000 event whose first winner, Billy Hardwick, took home $25,000. A tour that opened on under fifty thousand dollars for a whole season was paying out more than seven million a year by the early 1980s.

The flaw was built into the design. The same man was the league, the agent, and the network relationship at once, and none of it lived anywhere but in his head. When Eddie Elias died in Naples, Florida on November 15, 1998, the sport lost the only person who knew how the machine ran. The ABC run had already ended in 1997, and by March 2000 the PBA was close enough to bankrupt that three former Microsoft executives, Chris Peters, Rob Glaser, and Mike Slade, bought it for roughly five million dollars. In 2013 the PBA named its league championship the Elias Cup. This is the rise and fall of the man who built professional bowling and never bowled a frame.

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1:43 The First Season Under $50,000

2:10 Not the Elias Sports Bureau

2:55 Eddie Elias Enterprises: The Agent

4:03 1962: Onto ABC With Chris Schenkel

5:13 The Firestone Tournament of Champions

6:27 League, Agent, and Network in One Man

7:59 The Buried Detail

8:18 1998: The One Man Is Gone

9:09 Forty Years of Judgment, Unwritten

9:53 The ABC Run Had Already Ended

10:27 2000: The Microsoft Executives Buy In

12:12 The Rise Was the Fall

Eddie Elias, USBC Hall of Fame biography (PBA founder, 1958; first season under $50,000; over $7 million by the early 1980s): https://bowl.com/usbc-hall-of-fame/hall-of-famers/eddie-elias

Firestone struck gold with the Tournament of Champions, Modern Tire Dealer, Sept. 1, 2002 (the 1965 Akron event, $100,000 purse, Billy Hardwick’s $25,000 first prize): https://www.moderntiredealer.com/industry-news/retail/article/11531408/tire-industry-bowling-had-more-in-common-than-just-spares-firestone-struck-gold-with-the-tournament-of-champions-2002-09-01

Peters quit Microsoft to go bowling, ESPN, March 21, 2000 (the group that bought the PBA in 2000): http://www.espn.com/moresports/news/2000/0321/438715.html

High-Tech Investors Buy PBA, San Francisco Chronicle, 2000 (Chris Peters, Rob Glaser and Mike Slade purchase the tour): https://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/HIGH-TECH-INVESTORS-BUY-PBA-Ex-Microsoft-exec-2767475.php

Al Munro Elias, Baseball-Reference Bullpen (the Elias Sports Bureau, founded 1913, the different Elias, ruled out): https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Al_Munro_Elias

Edward George “Eddie” Elias (1928-1998), Find a Grave (died November 15, 1998, Naples, Florida): https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/170048637/edward_george-elias

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