Bowling’s Best Seat on Saturday TV
For thirty-six years, the Professional Bowlers Association owned one of the best seats in American sports television. The Pro Bowlers Tour aired on ABC on Saturday afternoons, and for long stretches of the 1960s and 1970s it pulled real national audiences — the kind of numbers that made bowling network programming, not a niche. Chris Schenkel called the action in a low, patient voice that a whole generation of Americans came to associate with Saturday afternoon, and the Firestone Tournament of Champions came out of Akron, Ohio, every spring to a crowd that made advertisers pay attention. If you turned on a television on a Saturday, professional bowling was simply there. Then, in 1997, ABC cancelled it, and the sport nearly disappeared from television for good.
This is a story about why — not the easy version where bowling faded because America got busy, but the uncomfortable one, where the sport spent its best years rewarding the exact bowlers who couldn’t save it, treated the one man who could as a novelty act, and only understood what it had thrown away after the cameras were gone. His name was Guppy Troup. His son is the reason you can already see the ending coming.
What the Sport Chose to Honor: Earl Anthony
Earl Anthony won forty-three PBA Tour titles — quiet, precise, relentless, a left-hander who bowled like an accountant balancing a ledger to the penny. He was the model of a champion, and the sport built its whole idea of greatness around men like him. The PBA Hall of Fame still runs on that idea: to get in on performance, a bowler needs ten titles, and Anthony had more than four times that. The Hall’s definition of merit is essentially a portrait of Earl Anthony.
But a sport that lives on television has a problem Earl Anthony couldn’t solve. You can’t sell forty-three Saturday broadcasts of a calm man making spares. Excellence is not the same thing as a show, and the money that kept the Pro Bowlers Tour on ABC came from the show — from people who didn’t bowl, tuning in because something on that broadcast was worth watching. Anthony won. He didn’t, by himself, sell tickets to strangers. Guppy Troup did.
Guppy Troup, the Showman It Filed Away
John Douglas Troup was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1950, and his family moved to South Carolina when he was three. He picked up the nickname as a kid on a junior team called the Guppies, and it never came off. He turned professional in 1976, ran through his sponsors, and bowled on his own savings until it broke open with his first PBA Tour title at the 1978 Kessler Open. The next year he rolled six perfect games in a single season, a PBA record at the time. Between 1980 and 1985 he won seven more titles, three of them in the 1982 season alone. At the 1984 U.S. Open, one of bowling’s majors, he made the championship match and bowled Mark Roth for the title on national television — and lost. The one time the ABC cameras had him in a major final, he came up a game short, and never got that close again.
That’s a real career: eight PBA Tour titles, forty-two regional titles, one of the most prolific regional players the sport has ever produced. But that isn’t why the cameras loved him. Watch a PBA telecast from the early 1980s and most of the field is in slacks and a collared shirt — quiet, professional, forgettable. Then there’s Guppy. The Pittsburgh Press called him the tour’s gaudiest dresser; the writer Frank Deford called him about the only pro bowler with a flamboyant public persona. The outfits were loud, the hair was louder, and after a big strike he threw a forward hip thrust the crowd came to wait for. It was a look built for a television camera, and it worked on exactly the people the sport needed most and could otherwise never reach — the ones who didn’t care about bowling at all until Guppy Troup gave them a reason to look up.
The Trap: Bowling Scored the Wrong Thing
Think about what a broadcast actually needs. Not the best bowling — that’s a technical achievement a casual viewer can’t fully see. What a broadcast needs is a reason to keep the channel there: a face to root for or against, a moment that feels like theater. Guppy Troup gave a Saturday audience all of that in a sport that mostly offered concentration and quiet. In television terms, he was the product working exactly the way it’s supposed to. The sport just kept its receipts in a currency that couldn’t see him.
Here’s the trap the PBA built for itself. It measured greatness in titles, and titles are what the grinders accumulate, and the grinders were the quiet ones. Drawing power doesn’t go in a column. There’s no line on a resume for the casual fan who tuned in because a man wore parachute pants and grinned into the camera. So the sport optimized for the number it could count — championship bowling — and quietly filed the thing that actually filled the Saturday audience under decoration. A television sport survives on eyeballs, and eyeballs come for people; but bowling’s internal status system rewarded a completely different thing, exclusively. It starved its own most valuable asset of status.
1997: ABC Cancels the Pro Bowlers Tour
For a while it could afford to. The network money was there, the audience was there, and bowling never had to think hard about which of its bowlers was carrying the broadcast. Then the ground gave way. In 1997, after thirty-six years on the air, ABC cancelled the Pro Bowlers Tour — and when the cameras packed up, the sport discovered the size of its mistake. It had spent decades minting quiet champions and treating its one genuine television draw as a curiosity, and now the thing it had never valued — star power — was the exact thing it needed and didn’t have. Bowling didn’t have a stable of characters the mainstream could name. It had trophies. Trophies don’t rate.
The sport bounced to cable, to smaller windows, to a fraction of the audience it once commanded. For years, the biggest names in bowling were names only bowlers knew — and that wasn’t because the bowling got worse. The bowling got better than it had ever been. The usual story about bowling’s decline says the leagues emptied and America found other things to do on a weeknight. Maybe. But a sport doesn’t stay on national television because people bowl; it stays on because people watch other people bowl, and that requires someone worth watching. Bowling had that person. It just never understood that he was the asset and the trophies were the decoration.
The FOX Revival Runs on Personality
Guppy Troup kept bowling through all of it. He shifted to part-time after his son was born in 1991, kept turning up on whatever telecast the shrinking tour could put together, and won Rookie of the Year on the PBA’s over-fifty tour in 2000. He kept entering regional events into his sixties, running his regional count to forty-two. The crowd never stopped watching him. The sport just never learned to score what the crowd was watching for.
Then bowling got a second chance, and this time it paid attention. When the sport clawed back onto a national stage, it came back on FOX — and a different animal. PBA on FOX is built on personalities: faces, characters a broadcast can cut to, rivalries the announcers can sell. There are streaming series built around tour life, bowlers with signature looks and signature celebrations, everything engineered to give a casual viewer a reason to care about a person before they care about a score. Everything the PBA now does on purpose, Guppy Troup did on instinct, alone, forty years early — and got nothing for it but a reputation as the guy in the loud pants.
Kyle Troup Cashes the Act
And the face of that new sport is Guppy Troup’s son. Kyle Troup grew up inside the act. He learned to throw a bowling ball as a small child, and because he was too small to do it any other way, he used both hands — a self-taught two-handed release that became the most powerful part of his game and generates the revolutions the modern lane rewards. He’s won twelve PBA Tour titles and two major championships. But the titles are not why he’s the centerpiece of the tour. He wears a throwback afro the size of a bowling ball and shows up in Partridge-Family-bus pants in colors nobody else would touch. They call him Afro Fish, the Pro with the Fro, the Bob Ross of Bowling. It is, to the detail, his father’s act, inherited and turned up, dropped into an era that finally knows what it’s worth.
Look at what the act is worth in the new economy. Under Bowlero, the bowling-center operator that now owns the tour, prize money climbed to numbers Guppy never bowled for. In Guppy’s day, a first-place check ran twenty or thirty thousand dollars. Kyle won two hundred fifty thousand in a single weekend at the 2021 Players Championship and set the PBA single-season earnings record that same year. He runs his own channel where hundreds of thousands of people watch him break down the two-handed release, and sells his own merchandise under his own name. In 2024 he was one of the faces the PBA put on FOX alongside Jason Belmonte, EJ Tackett, and Anthony Simonsen; the tour even ran the father and son together as a doubles team on a PBA on FOX event, the original and the sequel on the same televised lane. The persona economy is the business now — and it runs on the one trait the sport spent his father’s whole career refusing to count.
The Hall of Fame, Forty Years Late
In 2026, the PBA put Guppy Troup in its Hall of Fame. The same Hall whose titles math had left him outside for most of his life finally opened the door, and the sport honored the showmanship it had spent his whole career treating as decoration — in the same era it markets his son’s identical act as the face of the tour. The trait that got Guppy laughed at in 1982 is the trait his son turned into a seven-figure career by 2021. Nothing about the act changed between those two dates. What changed is that bowling ran out of every other option and finally admitted, out loud, that the man in the loud pants had been holding the answer the whole time.
Guppy Troup built the act when the sport couldn’t imagine paying for it. Kyle Troup cashed it when the sport couldn’t survive without it. The PBA had the best seat in Saturday television, and it spent that seat honoring the men who couldn’t keep it, while the one who could stood right there in loud pants, filed under novelty. It took losing the network, the audience, and thirty-six years of the biggest stage the sport will ever have for the PBA to understand what it had been looking at the whole time. The show was never the sideshow. The show was the sport.
Chapters
- 0:00 Bowling’s Best Seat on Saturday TV
- 2:15 Earl Anthony and What the Sport Honored
- 4:00 Guppy Troup, the Showman It Filed Away
- 7:00 The Trap: Bowling Scored the Wrong Thing
- 9:00 1997: ABC Cancels the Pro Bowlers Tour
- 11:15 The FOX Revival Runs on Personality
Sources
- Guppy Troup – PBA Hall of Fame (2026)
- Guppy Troup HOF vote history – 11thFrame
- Kyle Troup – PBA profile
- PBA all-time Tour champions
- International Bowling Museum & Hall of Fame