Rudy Kasimakis, the Long Island action bowler they called Rudy Revs, beat PBA champions for a year’s pay in a night. His official record says 194 events, zero titles. This is why that file is wrong.
For fifteen years he was the most feared money bowler in America, and almost none of it happened where a camera could see. At Deer Park Bowl, the room the regulars called the Cage, he earned the name Revs for a hand that spun a sixteen-pound ball harder than almost anyone alive. Norm Duke said he made it look like a piece of popcorn.
Then comes the part almost nobody knows. In the late nineties the PBA’s own commissioner, Mark Gerberich, sat down with Revs at an Applebee’s in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and recruited the hustler the sport had spent decades erasing, because the clean televised tour could not draw a crowd without him.