On August 13, 2012, the Professional Bowlers Association killed its Senior Tour with a press release. Ron Moore won the final championship on a paywall. The follow-up release contained one word that admitted everything: “back.”
Bill Beach won the inaugural PBA Senior Tour title in New Orleans in 1981, in front of an audience that watched bowling on ABC on Saturday afternoons. Thirty-one years later, Ron Moore of Eagle River, Alaska defeated Harry Sullins 243-181 at Spare Time Lanes in Decatur, Illinois — the final championship match in the tour’s history. There were no broadcast cameras. The match streamed only on Extra Frame, the PBA’s own subscription service.
The press release Commissioner Tom Clark issued from Decatur that Monday called the word “senior” outdated and announced the PBA50 Tour. It did not mention that the tournament being played was not on television. A separate release a week later quietly added that one event in the new 2013 schedule would air on ESPN — and used the word “back.”
This is the story of how an entire professional tour collapsed off network television between 1991 and 2012, how the PBA absorbed it, renamed it, and rebuilt the historical record around the new name. The \$200,000-per-show ABC rights fees that became \$50,000 the following year. The 1997 final broadcast won by Walter Ray Williams Jr. The 2000 sale to three former Microsoft executives for five million dollars. Mark Gerberich’s 2017 Hall of Fame speech, where he laid out the revenue numbers nobody else had. The 2019 acquisition by what is now Lucky Strike Entertainment Corporation. The same playbook that ran on the PWBA four years earlier.
A reader looking at the All-Time PBA50/Senior Tour Titles list today cannot see the moment in 2012 when the Senior Tour stopped being a Senior Tour. That’s the point.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Spare Time Lanes, August 13, 2012
- 1:17 — The 1981 Founding and Bill Beach
- 3:13 — The ABC Revenue Cliff
- 5:43 — The Microsoft Sale and Steve Miller
- 9:51 — The Final Senior Tour on a Paywall
- 12:24 — The Word “Back”
- 13:41 — Eleven Events, One Televised Finale
- 15:27 — The Playbook: Lucky Strike and the PWBA