Unlike most professional bowlers, Jason Belmonte uses both hands when bowling the ball. He plays in the United States and in fifteen years has won 31 tournament titles and honors, and is the seventh most successful player ever in the history of the sport. He’s Australian, a bit eccentric and he’s used to getting a lot of flak for his style, which, though perhaps ugly, is regulation.
But Belmonte is also becoming increasingly famous outside the world of bowling and according to some older players he is one of the people responsible for the renewed interest in this sport, after the main US competition in 2008 had risked bankruptcy. Now he is much admired especially by the younger ones, who want to start playing like him using both hands to throw, he recently told a long article on his story published in the American magazine GQ.
Belmonte is 39 years old and was born in Australia. To date, he has won 31 tournaments organized by the Professional Bowlers Association, the premier organization for professional ten-pin bowling in the United States. Of these, 15 are major titles, i.e. the five major tournaments that the PBA organizes each year. He is the player who has won the most ever in bowling history (second is at 10). He started bowling with two hands when he was a kid because his parents’ bowling alley balls were too heavy, now he just prefers it that way. Over the years, his bizarre but somewhat advantageous style of play has won him seven PBA Player of the Year titles.
The finger holes in bowling balls are arranged like the points of a triangle. The upper two are close together and narrower, the lower one is wider and is used for the thumb. Belmonte always leaves it empty, while he slips his middle and ring fingers into the other two. Then holding the ball at waist level he wraps it with his left hand. He starts the run-up, with a backwards momentum of his arms he loads the shot and points his left foot just before the line that delimits the start of the track. She projects her torso and arms forward. The left hand only holds the ball until halfway through the movement while the right continues until he lets go. 68% of the time he throws, the pins all fall and Belmonte scores one strike. He usually cheers by raising his right forefinger and shouting “Boom!”
Technically, Jason Belmonte’s throwing style is not two-handed. In the end, it is the right hand that throws the ball: the left accompanies it and supports it only until halfway through the throw. It is a technique that produces trajectories different from those of the bowler pros who use only one hand: their shots on average make 350 to 400 revolutions – the revolutions the ball makes as it slides down the track after being thrown – every minute. Those of Belmonte on average 500. A higher rotation speed helps to make the pins fly away faster when they come into contact with the ball and therefore to make all the others fall, also producing that noise that enthusiasts like so much. The disadvantage of the Belmonte technique is that it does not allow for the same precision as when using only one hand.
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At the age of seven Belmonte started playing and tried to use only one hand to throw the ball, but after a ten-minute attempt he thought that “it just sucked”. Although he was already very good as a kid, his style of play made him feel like an alien, he said. Few players used two hands to throw at this time, and none of them had ever gone beyond a few wins in minor tournaments. For a while, Belmonte didn’t find coaches willing to work with him: they all wanted him to “correct” his style and align himself with the others, but he wasn’t willing to do it. He decided to continue on his own, all the while suffering more and more unfounded accusations of cheating. His criticisms and insults were a constant throughout his life, but he learned how to ignore them also thanks to the support of his fans.
When in 2008 Belmonte began playing in the United States the Professional Bowlers Association was in danger of failing. The public was less and less interested and the consequences of that year’s financial crisis were still very serious. Belmonte was introduced to the PBA by a US bowling legend, Tim Mack, who saw him play in Australia and mentored him. Mack argued in front of his fellow players that Belmonte would come along and change things. Part of the PBA establishment scoffed at him because they didn’t think it was even possible by now.
The year after his entry into the PBA Belmonte began to win, he immediately became very famous and that part of professionals who didn’t believe it was possible to change bowling had to change his mind. Many began to criticize him: throwing the ball with both hands, which is legal, according to them it wasn’t. Some invited him “to stick his thumb in that hole” which he has always left empty, while once a bowler registered professional Hall of Fame of the PBA publicly claimed that Belmonte’s technique was “cancer” for bowling.
For many Belmonte was instead the salvation of sport. Since 2008, the bowling situation has in fact changed a lot: there is more interest, especially from young people, many of whom are approaching the game by experimenting with the use of both hands just like him. Besides being easier (which is the same reason he started doing it himself), it became fashionable. His figure has become a reference model and his style of play recognizable even outside his sport, also thanks to the continuous appearances in contexts unrelated to bowling that have helped him to gather more and more fans. Many people who had never had anything to do with bowling have now become passionate about “Belmo” and his sport.
Belmonte’s two-handed throwing technique, however, is only the most evident of the many innovations in bowling; another concerns the oil that is sprinkled on the tracks to preserve them. During Professional Bowlers Association competitions, the oil is distributed much more evenly than at public lanes. In this way it is impossible to create irregularities that direct the ball towards the pins, a result that instead we deliberately try to obtain when we oil commercial lanes, to make the game easier and more enjoyable.
In the past, therefore, the players all threw more or less in the same way, always following the same trajectory with the ball, thus building an advantage during the competition by creating a trace in the oil. But since in recent years some of them have begun to change inclination, trajectory and shooting angle, moving away more and more from the classic style, the launches have begun to be less and less equal to each other, leaving in the oil very different trajectories. These changes are complicating the implementation of more “classic” strategies, making professional bowling more and more competitive.
Today there are also new techniques for choosing the bullets, which do not change only according to the weight (which can be at most 7.26 kg, i.e. 16 pounds), but also according to the coating and the degree of polishing of the surface. The training of professionals, on the other hand, has become simpler above all thanks to sensors mounted on the tracks which, using special software, allow trajectory, rotation speed and launch speed to be calculated in real time and which allow you to refine shooting techniques more quickly and precise.
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In 2019, the Professional Bowlers Association was purchased by Bowlero, a company that owns more than 320 bowling alleys worldwide and has been publicly traded since 2021. In recent years Bowlero has decided to raise the economic value of the prize money offered for professional PBA competitions: it has never been a lot of money, but it is an indicator of greater interest from the public. Jason Belmonte’s official profile on the PBA website claims that he earned $1,815,000 in tournaments organized by the association alone.
Belmonte has had a fairly popular YouTube channel for many years and is involved in various projects. Once, for example, he sold a pair of customized Jordan 1s and donated the proceeds to charity, another time he collaborated with the US youtuber group “Dude Perfect” by making a video in which he strike in a complicated and bizarre way (the video has 100 million views). Back when Google Glass was new, he scored 300 points in a bowling game wearing a pair. On his website it is possible to buy his official merchandise, which also includes a tank top on which a series of figures arranged in a row are printed that portray him throwing the ball with his technique, and under the wording “revolution”. It costs $25.
2023-08-31 12:49:52
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