Late Start Can’t Stop Anthony

Everyone has heard the stories about how Birdie Parr first picked up a golf club when he was 3 and Slasher Puckster was skating before he could walk and Sly Young was breaking off curve balls when he was 5 and how they all went on to fame and fortune.

Their stories have become cliches. The cradle is on the other end of the road to the top.

Let me tell you about a different sort of man and a different sort of story. Let me tell you about a tulip who bloomed in September, a Valentine who arrived in June, a firecracker who went off in November.

Let me tell you about Earl Anthony, who started his professional athletic career at an age when so many others are ending. He joined the Professional Bowlers Assn. tour at an age when most “athletes” get their kicks by spending $2,500 to go to a fantasy camp of some sort.

Anthony was 31 .

He had to be crazy, of course. Not as crazy as Jim Palmer maybe, but crazy.

Why? Why turn pro at 31?

“All I wanted to do,” he explained, “was make a living in sports. I didn’t want to punch a time clock for the next 40 years.”

And Earl Anthony has done quite well, thank you. Now 52, he is competing this week in the Escondido Senior Open at Palomar Lanes. The others may be seniors, but that would understate Anthony’s standing in bowling history. In spite of that late start, the man became a legend.

He started his pro bowling career in 1970 and moved to the top of the money list by 1974. He stayed there in 1975 and 1976. And he had the staying power to top the money list in 1981, 1982 and 1983 as well. He was the first bowler to earn more than $1 million in purses and his 41 victories in national tour events are eight ahead of second place Mark Roth and 15 ahead of Dick Weber and Don Johnson.

Most people who start bowling so late in life have their biggest games on those predator bar machines and go by nicknames such as Bowinkle and Wimpy and Charlie Horse. A big night is not having to buy a drink.

So what took Earl Anthony so long?

In truth, he had no intention of making a living as a bowler. He played football, basketball, baseball and hockey as a youngster and seemed determined that baseball would be his livelihood. A strike would be on the corner, rather than in the 1-2 pocket.

He went to spring training with the Baltimore organization in 1959, hopefully destined for a summer of seasoning in Vancouver and then years of glory in the big leagues.

“I injured my leg,” he said, “and then I came back and tried to pitch too soon. I couldn’t get my arm up to here,” he continued, raising it over his shoulder, “but I could swing it down here.”

One potential career in sports was kaput, but bowling still had not occurred to him as an alternative. He went to work for a wholesale grocer in Tacoma. He was 21 and he still had not rolled a bowling ball down a lane.

Alas, he was asked to join his company team.

Does it have to be explained that he liked it?

Does it have to be explained that he was good at it?

“I averaged 165 the first year, 185 the next year, 204 the third year and then 217,” he said. “The year I averaged 217 I realized I really wasn’t a bowler. I realized I had a lot to learn. You never stop learning.”

To Anthony, learning and working belonged in the same sentence. One led to the other.

He bowled 300 games a week for the last four years before he turned professional, bowling for six to eight hours a day around his hours at the wholesale grocer. He would bowl at no pins at all, just rolling balls 100 at a time toward where the seven-pin would be and then 100 more at where the 10-pin would be. He practiced weekdays and played in tournaments on weekends.

“Even at 50 cents a game, it was expensive,” he said. “I did whatever I could around the bowling center for free games. I planted flowers, cleaned pins, whatever.”

Anthony was doing the things kids usually do in quest of a free line or two. As far as bowling was concerned, he was a teen-ager at 27 or 28. He wanted a sport and he found a sport and he mastered that sport.

Earl Anthony is now a fixture on the senior tour. It is not as extensive (nor as lucrative) as golf’s senior tour, but it gets nice exposure. This afternoon’s finals, for example, will be televised live on ESPN at 5. To millions of bowling fans, Anthony on a roll with six strikes is like Jack Nicklaus six-under-par. They have seen it before and they will tune in to see it again.

Speaking of golf, Earl Anthony took up that sport in 1983 and became close to a scratch player. Too bad he didn’t spend a little more time with it. He might have been the first player to win senior tournaments in both bowling and golf.

Of course, it probably isn’t too late.