Random Bowling Professionals Generator

So the tool gave you a bowler

You wanted a professional bowler and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It covers the men's and women's games and reaches back to the sport's television heyday, so a pull might be a modern champion, a legend of the lanes, or a fine professional from outside America who came to beat the Americans at their own game.

The tool is the simple part. Ten-pin bowling deserves a proper explanation, because everybody has bowled and almost nobody realises that the professionals are playing a completely different sport on what looks like exactly the same lane.

A perfect game is twelve strikes

Start with the scoring, because it is the part that makes bowling addictive. A game is ten frames. A strike knocks down all ten pins with the first ball, and its value is not ten but ten plus whatever you get with your next two balls, which means strikes feed on each other. String them together and your score accelerates. Strike in all ten frames, then twice more in the tenth, twelve consecutive strikes in all, and you score 300. That is a perfect game.

Amateurs treat a 300 as the achievement of a lifetime, and rightly. Professionals throw them regularly, which tells you something. One bowler on this list, Parker Bohn III, has rolled well over a hundred perfect games in competition. And yet the pressure of the last two balls of a 300 has made grown professionals shake on live television, because everyone in the building knows exactly what is happening and there is nowhere to hide.

The invisible thing that decides everything

Now the secret, and once you know it you cannot watch bowling the same way again. The lane is not bare wood. Before play, it is coated with oil, and the oil is not spread evenly. It is laid down in a pattern, thicker in the middle, thinner at the edges, running a specific distance down the lane, and it is completely invisible from the seats and almost invisible from the approach.

That pattern decides everything. A ball skids where there is oil and grips and hooks where there is not, so the pattern determines where you must throw and how the ball will curve. Different tournaments use different patterns deliberately, and they have names. The US Open uses a flat pattern, oil spread evenly with no margin for error, and scores drop by twenty or thirty pins because power counts for nothing and precision counts for everything. Other events use patterns nicknamed after animals, the Cheetah, the Shark, the Chameleon, each demanding a different game. And the oil moves as the balls travel through it, so the lane you played in the first game has changed by the third. Professional bowling is a sport about reading something you cannot see, and adapting before your opponent does. Every name on this list can do it.

Forty-seven titles, and a man who threw horseshoes

The most successful bowler in the history of the professional tour is Walter Ray Williams Jr, with forty-seven titles, more than anyone, won across four decades, the last of them after he turned fifty. He is also, and this is not a joke, a nine-time world champion at horseshoe pitching, which may make him the finest thrower of heavy objects at distant targets that the human race has produced.

Behind him stands Earl Anthony, the bespectacled left-hander who dominated the 1970s with forty-three titles and ten majors, and who many still consider the greater player because he did it in fewer attempts. Then there are Pete Weber, all fire and celebration, Norm Duke, Mark Roth, and Dick Weber before them. And a bowler who belongs in any account of the sport: Kelly Kulick, who in 2010 won the Tournament of Champions outright, beating the men, the first woman to win a PBA Tour title in open competition. She is on this list. Draw her and you have drawn a genuinely historic name.

The two-handed revolution

Bowling has been quietly transformed in the last twenty years, and by one man. Jason Belmonte, an Australian who grew up in his parents' bowling centre, learned as a toddler to heave the ball with both hands because he was too small to lift it with one, and he simply never stopped. The two-handed delivery generates enormous revolutions on the ball, which makes it hook viciously and hit the pins with a ferocity a conventional release cannot match.

He was mocked for it. Purists said it was not real bowling. He then won a record fifteen major championships, more than anyone in history, tied the record for player of the year awards, and watched an entire generation of juniors copy him. Walk into any bowling centre now and you will see teenagers throwing two-handed. Even Walter Ray Williams, at sixty, tried it and shot a 300 game with it. Draw Belmonte from this tool and you have pulled the man who changed how the sport is played.

What a random bowler is good for

• League night and lane assignments. Handing out bowlers to a group, a draft, or a friendly pool.
• Quiz and trivia prep. A random bowler is a strong question. Most people cannot name one professional, which is a small tragedy.
• Discovering the actual sport. Draw a name and go watch a stepladder final. The oil pattern explanation alone will change how you bowl.
• Dream matches. Pull two bowlers from different eras and argue it, Anthony against Williams, one-handed against two.
• Fantasy and assignments. Picking a bowler to follow through a season.

Bowling questions

Who has won the most PBA titles?

Walter Ray Williams Jr, with forty-seven, won across four decades. Earl Anthony is second with forty-three. Jason Belmonte holds the record for major championships, with fifteen.

What is a perfect game in bowling?

A score of 300, achieved by rolling twelve consecutive strikes. Because a strike's value includes the next two balls, stringing strikes together makes the score accelerate, and 300 is the maximum possible.

Why do bowling lanes have oil?

Oil is applied in an invisible pattern that controls how the ball skids and hooks. Different tournaments use different patterns, which is the central strategic challenge of professional bowling, and the oil shifts during play as balls travel through it.

Can I pull several bowlers, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. Professional Bowlers Association. pba.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, bowling. britannica.com