The Los Angeles X didn’t make it. Nor did the Silver Lake (Calif.) Atom Splitters.
But the show must go on and ESPN will televise the Elias Cup bowling finals at 10 a.m. Sunday at Woodland Bowl in Indianapolis without the two L.A. teams.
The championship of the inaugural Professional Bowlers Assn. League will be contested among the four teams that finished highest during the five rounds of the league’s regular season.
The New York City WTT KingPins, owned by tennis Hall-of-Famer Billie Jean King, won the top stepladder berth for the Elias Cup finals by finishing with 45 points.
The KingPins are led by the venerable Pete Weber of St. Ann, Mo., who won the PBA Tournament of Champions last week by defeating X franchise player Jason Belmonte of Australia, 224-179, in the finals.
The championship allowed Weber to tie bowling legend Earl Anthony for most major PBA titles with 10.
Weber and teammates Tommy Jones, Scott Norton, Jack Jurek, John Szczerbinski and Kelly Kulick won two of the qualifying rounds at Thunderbowl Lanes in Allen Park, Mich.
Jerome Bettis’ Motown Muscle (Mike Fagan, Tom Smallwood, Mike Scroggins, Ronnie Russell, Jesse Buss and DJ Archer) qualified second for the Elias Cup finals with 38 points.
The BROOKLYN STyLES earned the No. 3 berth for the Elias Cup finals with 36 points and the Dallas Strikers nailed down the No. 4 berth with 28 points.
The STyLES and Strikers will meet in the first round Sunday.
The Baker team format will be used in the Elias Cup finals in which each member of a team will bowl two frames in a game. The two team finalists will bowl two games with total pins determining the champion.
The X (26 points), Atom Splitters (24), Philadelphia Hitmen (20) and Pittsburgh Jack Rabbits (10) failed to advance to Indianapolis.
But the X (Belmonte, Wes Malott, Andres Gomez, Parker Bohn III and Dave Wodka) won a moral victory by claiming the title of the fifth qualifying round with a down-to-the-wire 207-206 victory over the Atom Splitters in the semifinals before overwhelming the Strikers, 257-214, in the finals.
Silver Lake (Chris Barnes, Dom Barrett, Josh Blanchard, Stuart Williams and Nathan Bohr), an L.A. neighborhood east of Hollywood and northwest of downtown L.A., had a chance to advance to the Elias Cup finals by winning the fifth round.
But the X thwarted the Atom Splitters’ chances when Bohn smoked three strikes in the 10th frame and Barnes delivered only two in the bottom half of the frame.
Comments