Release response - The Fans Speak Out - Letter to the Editor

Bowling Digest, June, 2002 by Joe Moro

This letter is in response to Bill Spigner's "Bowling Clinic" in the April 2002 issue. First of all, we wish to thank Bill Spigner for using the reader's question that asks, "What do you think of the Pro Release wrist device?" To Bill Spigner's credit, he does say things like, "The Pro Release is an excellent wrist device." He explains how a bowler can get positive results by achieving different ball roll characteristics from the multi-positioning capabilities of the Pro Release. He also gives a complementary example of a Senior PBA member who uses the Pro Release to improve his release versatility. After that, it appears that the answer to the reader's question was used to insert an advertisement for our competitor.

Since the question was about the Pro Release (the reader used the brand name Pro Release in his question), a Pro Release should have been used in the adjoining descriptive photos. Instead, a competitor's product was used for illustration. Consequently, our competitor has now received free advertising using our reputation and good name. Our Pro Release was easily and readily available for the photos and should have been used.

More importantly, Bill Spigner is misleading in his statements about the Senior PBA Tour. He states that our competitor's product is "one of the most popular devices on the Senior Tour" and that it is currently being used by former Senior Bowler of the Year Pete Couture. That may be true, but Couture and all other PBA members have no choice in which multi-positioning wrist support they can use since Pro Release and Cobra Products have not paid the PBA product registration fee this year. If we don't pay this fee, a PBA member cannot use our Pro Release or a Cobra product in a PBA tournament. Why didn't we pay this fee? The PBA has effectively doubled the fee for this year! We are a small company, and the PBA has made it too expensive for us to "register" our product.

Regarding Pete Couture: The fact is, several years ago Pete phoned us shortly before he was about to become eligible for the Senior Tour to ask if we would be paying the PBA product registration fee so that he could use the Pro Release. He said about the Pro Release, and I quote, "I am about to become eligible for the PBA Senior Tour, and if I have this wrist device, I will win." And win he did! Pete bowled great. He became a regular on Senior PBA telecasts, and he won Senior PBA Player of the Year honors while winning more tournaments and money in that year than any Senior Tour player had before. He was also the high average Senior PBA player that year. During all of this, whether it helped his success or not, Pete Couture was wearing a Pro Release. We have the PBA product registration records and the video tapes to prove it! According to the same records, columnist Bill Spigner was a regular user of the Pro Release while competing on the Senior Tour.

What is the most popular wrist device on the PBA Senior Tour? A few years ago, when we could afford the then more reasonable PBA registration fee, we visited Senior PBA Tour stops and always felt that there were so many senior players using the Pro Release that maybe it should have been called the "Pro Release Senior Tour." There were Senior PBA tournaments where over 50% of the top 24 finalists were wearing, yes, the Pro Release, not our competitor's product. We have the PBA product registration records to prove it.

We are a small American company, selling a high-quality product that is totally made in America, using American-made materials. We are helping to create jobs in America. The Robby's Revs, which is used in the descriptive photos and hailed as the wrist device Pete Couture uses now, is actually made in Korea. While imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, we are not happy that there have been several Asian rip-offs of our pioneering design. We are saddened by the fact that large American corporations would choose to distribute such copies.

In conclusion, statements made in Bill Spigner's answer to the reader may be accurate, but at the same time, they are misleading. We wanted to set the record straight with a few facts of our own. A special thank you to BOWLING DIGEST for printing our response.

Joe Moro
Designer of the Pro Release