Streaking Back to the Tour - Del Ballard Jr., professional bowler

Bowling Digest, June, 2001 by Paul Kreins

Del Ballard Jr.'s roller-coaster career has demonstrated one thing: You can't keep a good man down

IN PROFESSIONAL SPORTS, THERE is a fine line between stardom and obscurity, between a great year and a bad one, between winning and losing. Sometimes athletes experience the entire spectrum more than once during their careers. Del Ballard Jr.'s PBA journey has been like that--a perpetual fide on the roller coaster, with stomach-wrenching drops coming as quickly as his rapid ascents.

Ballard rode his first wave of success in 1987, when he won the $100,000 first prize in professional bowling's richest event, the $500,000 BPAA U.S. Open. It was his first national title, and it was a "major" to boot. Later that year he won another major title, the Brunswick World Open, and finished second to Pete Weber with earnings of $163,939.

Ballard's rise to the top of the bowling world was not unexpected. He joined the PBA fresh out high school and dominated the local and regional bowling scene, capturing 15 PBA regional titles. He went on the PBA tour full time in 1984 and earned a respectable $33,108 (47th on the money list). Two years later, he finished 14th on the money list ($66,948) without winning a title.

But the roller coaster was just pulling out of the gate. Following his breakout year of 1987, Ballard finished 1988 with PBA earnings of only $21,915. Had it not been for his ABC Masters title--a major title, but a non-PBA event--the year would have been a total disaster. But true to form, in 1989 he won the Showboat Invitational, the Quaker State Open, and the Firestone Tournament of Champions, bowling's crown jewel. His earnings of $193,688 ranked behind those of only Mike Aulby and Amleto Monacelli that year.

The up-and-down pattern continued, but with less severity. Ballard failed to win in 1990 but still earned $86,030 (15th on the money list). He was back in the winner's circle in 1991 with four titles and $146,150 in earnings.

He would have won five times in `91 had it not been for the most famous gutter ball of all time. Some called it the shot that was heard around the world. Bowling against Weber in the title match of the Fair Lanes Open, Ballard needed two strikes and seven pins in the 10th frame to win the tournament. After calmly throwing two perfect shots for strikes, the victory was all but his until he rushed his final shot and the ball skated into the right gutter, giving Weber the title, 213-207. But Ballard showed how big his heart was by rebounding two weeks later to win in New York.

"I became overconfident, and it took a bad year to snap me out of it," Ballard says, explaining the vicissitudes of his career. "Whenever you're overconfident, you may not do the same things you would normally do. You just expect them to happen instead of working as hard as you did before. You just take for granted that you're going to bowl well."

No longer taking his success lightly, Ballard put together two more good years. In 1992 he won titles a continent apart, in the Long Island Open and the Oregon Open. The following year he won his 12th title, which happened to be his second U.S. Open.

Ballard, now 37, was born and raised in Richardson, Texas, near Dallas. Today, he lives in nearby North Richland Hills. His parents met in a bowling center and were avid league bowlers. Ballard went bowling for the first time when he was two years old, joined a league at age five, and came up through the Dallas-area YABA.

He describes himself as the fifth-best junior bowler in Dallas at the time. When all the better bowlers joined adult programs, he says he became No. 1 by default--and at a price. "Junior bowling was not fun anymore," he says. He lost his motivation and quickly followed his friends into the adult ranks.

Driven by a desire to beat the best, Ballard joined the PBA and began competing in regionals, where he dominated so thoroughly that he practically made a living by bowling weekend events. In 1983 alone, he won more than $13,000 in such competition. That same year, he picked up $8,000 for a second-place finish at a national tour stop in Austin. His transition to full-time duty on the PBA tour was smooth and effortless, his success almost a given.

Ballard quickly showed a propensity for winning the big events. In fact, the only major he has failed to win is the PBA National Championship, and should he ever do so, he'll complete bowling's Triple Crown and Grand Slam in one fell swoop.

"All [the majors] are long-format tournaments, and I loved long-format tournaments," Ballard says, adding that the 56-game format gave him more time to get loose. "Once you found something, you could take advantage of it. In the shorter format, if you fiddle around trying to find something, you're wasting games."

Many bowling experts and top bowlers feel the longer formats give the better players more time to recover from a bad game and allow the cream to rise to the top. "I don't really look at it like that," Ballard says modestly. "It's just that you have more time to figure it out."