"Miss"ed the Memo.

Are you bowling fans ready??? No, no...I said..."Are...You...READY????"

Apparently, some aren't just yet. This is the 50Th anniversary of the PBA Tour, or should I say the Lumber Liquidators PBA Tour, and for all the tour's great history this season is revolving itself around one word: change.

Changes in so many things-title sponsor, formats, multiple lane conditions, doubles events, women bowling in seven events this from four last year, celebrity shootouts with basketball stars, as well as new bowlers for the bowling public to learn and to recognize. Yes, change appears to be all around with one grand exception. With all this change, will bowling finally establish itself as a profitable entity for not only players, but for the PBA Tour itself? To steal a line from the PBA.com's resident blogger Missy Bellinder, the 2008-09 season has yet to begun, and yet there is so much to talk about. Only her blog was about 200 words, this blog won't be. No, simply put, this 50Th anniversary season is arguably the most important season in its history...ever.

Not that we say this every year because we do. We like to think that the sport of bowling will slowly recapture the attention of American sports and be launched into the mainstream like tennis and golf and yes, auto racing have alongside the 'big four'. We, as bowlers want to walk around with our heads held up high and want to feel good about what we do as a profession or as a recreation, whichever title the reader holds. We want to be respected and to be seen as athletes that carry 15 or 16 pound bowling balls, throw them roughly 16-18 times a game, as little as 3 games a day and as many as 16 games in a day for the elite, adapt to ever changing lane conditions, use different hand positions, release points, axis rotations, foot speed, pace, etc. We all want this-fans of bowling want this, bowlers watching bowlers want this, professional bowlers want this. However, it will be up to the professional bowlers to live up to this mantle and to provide it on a weekly basis for the course of the 2008-09 season, as well as the Lumber Liquidators PBA Tour higher ups to deliver on the goods this season.

For one thing, those in charge of the tour did not give us fans and bowlers a good head start by changing the title sponsor from Denny's to Lumber Liquidators because 1) the title sponsor is now much longer to say and 2) I have to create a new nickname for the title sponsor. For the last two years, I jokingly said that the Denny's PBA Tour might as well been called the HDL Cholesterol PBA Tour, a slight to the mega-fat packed meals Denny's offers, which is what every athlete wants to be reflected in: heart attacks. This year and for the next few years, Lumber Liquidators now is the title sponsor, a large distributor of wood across America. Usually when you liquidating, you are packaging things in big quantities. Naturally, this led me to the PBA Tour title sponsor's new nickname: The Big Wood PBA Tour.

The Big Wood PBA Tour...now we're on to something! It is much shorter for fans to say, it still has the PBA Tour in it, the title sponsor nickname has bowling related words in there, plus the obvious change being that I think every bowler wants to be associated with having 'big wood' instead of 'hardened arteries'.

"Hey Jimmy, what are you watching on Sundays...bowling?"

"Not just bowling, Timmy. The Big Wood PBA Tour!"

Now that we have a new nickname for the PBA Tour, lets get into the new changes in formats this season. I have to say this as a bowling fan, but the mere thought that the Big Wood PBA Tour would make such radical changes that one would have thought they were running for office. Bowling fans literally now have several formats to relearn and to remember yet most of these changes are great for the enhancement of the bowler itself. The one that I would think most fans are going to watch would be the Ultimate Scoring Championship held in Taylor Lanes where there will be an honest chance at having perfection on TV which is still one of the great moments you can draw up on live television. There is just one problem with that last statement: the Ultimate Scoring Championship show will be in the can! That's right, it is recorded which takes a lot of the drama out of it. How strange would it be if an unknown amateur made it through the Pre-Tournament Qualifier (PTQ), got to the finals, then somehow were to win against the world's best players on the softest conditions the PBA exempt players have seen since...well, Tuesday night in their hometown bowling league. And it's recorded? Could you imagine a common man beating down Walter Ray Williams Jr. with his sour-puss face after leaving his 5th weak 10 of the match on live TV? Sadly, we will not be bestowed that honor but we will be rewarded with an even better event for the pros: The Plastic Ball Championship.

The Plastic Ball Championship deserves its own paragraph because it is truly unique in that is brings back the word 'talent' to the tour players. With the enhancements in modern technology the one thing that keeps getting overlooked in bowling circles are the bowling balls themselves. With the ability to drill and mold a bowling ball to meet a lane conditions specifications, most of the exempt players always have an option from week to week regardless of actual mechanics or physical conditioning. Now it is time to see what player truly has the best talent. Sounds like a great idea, with two notable exceptions one from personal standpoint and one from a whiny pro standpoint. First and personally, the PBA will not recognize this event in the PBA Point standings, yet it will count as a title and an exemption for the following season. So the Big Wood PBA Tour basically pulled a 'boner' on this one. How could this event not be counted toward the point standings and to a lesser extent, the PBA Player of the Year race? Now this has not been totally clarified on the website nor by the PBA itself, but if they don't add the winner of this tournament numbers onto the POY points list, it is an absolute disgrace. In a sport where bowlers and bowling is trying to establish credibility, you make what would be a fun tournament and a big late season tournament into something that is completely worthless. You would hate to think that the winner of this event didn't win POY by 2 or 3 points because this tournament didn't count toward that. The other issue to bring up is probably a pro issue, mainly right handers. You can almost hear Chris Barnes with his glass of Hater-Ade saying that with plastic balls with their higher hardness scale will push oil down the lane, forcing major carry down while lefties will have a greater advantage based on there being fewer lefthanders and therefore, less carry down. To Chris Barnes, the 2007-08 Player of the Year we remind you, and to any other righties who would like to whine about this, don't bowl...don't embarrass yourself...don't even bother attending the event. This event might be the most intriguing event to bowl in as a pro and the first thing one can think about is just how much bitching some players will do about it. That is the ultimate disgrace.

As I pull myself off the soapbox, the one thing that still is bringing up controversy is how the Chris Shenkel Player of the Year race will unfold. Last year, the 2007-08 season implemented a points race based on a player's performance on television determining the POY, which was a radical change from the past 48 years in which the PBA membership voted on it. Sometimes bowling can be a popularity contest and the 2006-07 season may have provided the impetus to the mess. Doug Kent won the 06-07 POY and his resume would certainly hold valid for it: 2 titles, both of which were major championships and a runner up finish to Pete Weber, who did win his record 4th US Open that season to polish his resume. Norm Duke however led the tour with 3 titles, he made 4 shows, went unbeaten until he got to the season ending Tournament of Champions on TV all season, and led the tour in average. He also bowled on and off with a broken toe for 8 weeks and the first week he was healthy was the US Open where he finished 5th, then won the next week and finished 3rd at the TOC to give himself 3 top 5's in the last 5 weeks all the while bowling with an injury for most of the second half of the year, and in arguably the tour's two marquee majors he averaged finishing 4th, yet still had the numbers to win Player of the Year and finished third in voting behind Kent and Wes Malott, who led the 06-07 tour in TV appearances and points yet won only once. Some would argue that Duke bowled with the broken toe as gutty, while others (some PBA players) saw it as Duke bowling with the toe injury as a payday. After all, all Duke had to do was bowl one game each week with the bum foot to cash a check as his honor of being an exempt player. It easily caused a moral issue with most players and they saw an opportunity to strip Duke of a rightful POY award.

The 07-08 season saw the change to points and a strange thing happened: Chris Barnes finally won the POY award he had been chasing for the last 8 years because he made 9 shows, won twice, and outlasted Walter Ray Williams Jr. who only made 8 shows and won twice in what was nothing short of a sensational season for Williams. The one show was the difference in points, yet neither player won a major title in the season. Walter Ray made two majors finals appearances, Barnes made one and had arguably the greatest collapse in televised tour history losing to Micheal Haugen Jr. in the TOC. The saga again really revolved around Norm Duke and his season. Duke bowled all season hurt and sick and was close to actually losing his exemption, until he got to the World Championship and beat Walter Ray along the way to win the major title. Duke then came from the #4 seed at the US Open and beat the reigning POY Kent, Chris Loschetter, then Mika Koivuniemi to win the US Open. It was Duke's first US Open, which historically made him the 5th player to win bowling's triple crown (US Open, TOC, World/National Championship) and the 2nd bowler in history to win bowling's Grand Slam (Triple Crown plus Masters), yet for all this history and for pretty much duplicating Kent's season a year before and with much more dire circumstances on the line then what Kent was dealing with, Duke again was denied the Player of the Year because is was based off points and not voting. That isn't to say that Duke would have won POY by votes but history has shown that these historic events usually garner POY. For example, this is the 3rd time in the last 6 seasons that a bowler has won two majors in a season and the previous two (Williams and Kent) won the award; Duke did not. Of all the things the Big Wood PBA Tour changed, this one still will breed the most controversy only because majors should be weighed much higher than regular events and now, every regular event doesn't count the same.

For all the changes the tour has made in its history, this season of change will surely be remembered for how the PBA is trying to evolve with its fan base and trying to make its players (past and present) more legitimate as athletes by putting them in spots where success could lead to great things, however its great prize at season's end is still wrapped in a shroud of doubt. The PBA is trying to honor its past this season and yet still cannot seem to figure out how its future will be played out; what they hope for is a savior and that memo you cannot "miss".