Bowling legend Earl Anthony was found dead at the bottom of a flight of steps at Ed Baur's house in New Berlin, Wis., on August 14, 2001. When Baur, who works for the American Bowling Congress, found him about 8:30 that morning, the first thing he thought about was Earl's heart.
"He may have had a heart attack and fallen down the stairs," lamented Baur.
The local coroner found through the autopsy tests before Anthony's cremation that he indeed had a heart attack but the precise time of it could not be determined. His death was officially caused by a traumatic blow to the head as a result of his fall down the steps. Considering Earl's eye-to-hand coordination as a professional athlete, it seems he could have stopped himself from the fall if he had not been inhibited by a heart attack.
Baur was Anthony's golf partner, and they joined each other often to play their favorite courses. Anthony, the former Air Force sergeant, was an early riser and awoke before Baur did. I golfed with them on occasion and knew the drill. Earl always wanted to start at 5:30 in the morning so he would have some privacy and would have the rest of the day free. Baur could sometimes talk Earl into starting later in the morning, which apparently occurred on this fateful day.
Earl always challenged himself to be the best he could be and better than anyone else at what he did at the time, and excesses were just par for the course of the day for Anthony. After spending one of my most rewarding and exhausting days with Earl, I once commented to him that we went through this day as though it was the last one on Earth, to which Earl responded, "That's my psyche, and it's the basis of my life and what I do. You need to go for all you can because you never know when it's over."
Anthony was well aware of his condition ever since he had a heart attack in 1977, which sidelined his career. He stopped his chain smoking after the heart attack but he privately still did it on occasion because the habit was so hard to break. He even had his own personalized lighter with his name on it when he chose to reminisce about sports along with a beverage.
Earl always impressed me by his stamina. It didn't matter if he turned in for some sleep early the night before or if he stayed up socializing in a card game into the wee hours of the morning, somehow Earl was always ready to go whether it was for a golf game early in the morning or bowling a block on the PBA Tour or analyzing the sport from the broadcast booth as a TV commentator. Earl was always ready for whatever mission or challenge he was to do on a particular day and his enthusiasm for life was admirable. He said that he needed to be at his best for the public because you never know who is watching you for the first time.
Selected by Bowling Magazine readers as the "Greatest Bowler in American Bowling Congress' first 100 years," Earl accomplished this feat by developing his own raw talent with a massive number of practice games. When other pros would bowl 50 games a week, Anthony at the peak of his career would bowl 200 games weekly.
When Anthony pitched in the minor leagues for Tacoma in the Baltimore Orioles organization near Kent, Washington, where he was born April 27, 1938, he threw so many pitches to develop his game that tendonitis occurred in his arm and, in addition to injuring his leg on a play he made during a game at first base, those injuries encouraged Anthony to take up professional bowling instead of baseball.
Earl and I directly experienced how the media snubs bowling when during one of his visits for the VA's BVL Fund in 1992 where Earl spent time coaching former veterans from VA hospitals on the finer points of bowling. I tried to book him for an appearance on a local TV talk show. I figured it would be simple to get Earl on the audience participation talk show, but when I spoke with the program's producer, I got another story.
First, the producer made the excuse that they did not cater to sports figures on their show and Earl was not a good fit on their program. When I responded that the talk show featured several athletes from other sports on a regular basis, she admitted that sports was indeed a key to their programming, but she said bowling didn't count because it wasn't a sport.
So thanks to the producer's rationale, Earl never appeared on the show. Perhaps she was turned off by Earl's nickname-"the Doomsday Stroking Machine"-which Earl became against his competition in the 1970s.
Anthony was hurt and disappointed by the snub at first, but he said that he had experienced similar rejections in other places previously for the same old reasons about bowling. It didn't matter that he was the best-known pro bowler because the media's discrimination against bowling and the concept of it as a sport still existed on a national level.
Anthony was an avid sports fan and enjoyed watching sports as much as playing them. Billiards was his favorite indoor sport after bowling, and golf was his favorite outdoor sport.
I asked Earl if he ever planned to join the Senior PGA Tour and compete with hall of famers in that sport such as Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer to which Earl replied, "No, those men have played golf a lot longer than me and not just at military bases. Although I enjoy the sport and play it well, I'm not good enough on a consistent level to compete with them on the Senior PGA Tour."
Earl and I stopped into a sports restaurant, which had several TV screens for sports events. His favorite teams were the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL and the Portland Trailblazers in the NBA. We sat down for dinner and looked everywhere for the Trailblazers on TV and we figured it would be on since they were in the playoffs and it was telecast on the TNT network.
Earl asked the waiter and then the manager what happened to the Trailblazers game. The manager said he was sorry but they did not subscribe to TNT on their satellite but they carried everything else. Anthony was furious and wondered how any sports bar would not carry TNT. His usual good-natured personality became explosive in spite of the apologies from the restaurant management, but Earl still managed to sign autographs for the restaurant staff after he cooled off.
"It's hard to believe that a restaurant like this would not have a national broadcast on TNT," Anthony said. "You can't win them all, and I should know because I've finished second on the tour more times than I won." Anthony finished second on the PBA Tour 42 times and he won 41 tournament titles. He also won seven victories on the PBA Senior Tour.
Wherever Earl went, autograph seekers were not far behind. One autograph hound was so enthusiastic about Anthony making a surprise visit to a local bowling center that he hyperventilated and nearly fainted after talking to Earl. "He's been my idol since I was a kid learning how to bowl," said the fainting fan. "Now I've talked to him and shook his hand and got his autograph. It's just too much."
The fanatic fan of Earl's seemed to make up for a day of frustration for Anthony. "It happens wherever I go but I'm glad the fans care," Anthony said.
Where most pro bowlers circulate in public with anonymity, Anthony was the most high profile of any bowler and was frequently recognized by the general public. If Earl walked in to visit a bowling center, if he stayed more than five minutes in any one location, a line of bowlers would form to wish him well or to have him autograph a bowling pin or anything else that was handy. Sometimes fans would follow him out the door as though Earl was the pied piper of bowling.
Anthony began his career on the PBA National Tour after leaving baseball by winning his first title in his native region of Seattle in 1970 for $26,200.
Earl won another tournament the following year in New York and won five more PBA titles in 1972-73. The streak that made him the face that personified the PBA Tour in the 1970s was the stretch from 1974-76 when Anthony won an average of six tournaments per year, including the 1974 Firestone Tournament of Champions.
As a member of the Ebonite Staff, Anthony had a signature series of bowling balls known as the Magnums, and they were all numbered with a new ball coming to pro shops nationwide every three months. Sales of the Magnum, starting with the XL5 in 1974, which was a hard rubber ball, and ending with the urethane Magnum 12 in 1984, skyrocketed to a record number and dwarfed the sales of the Ebonite Don Carter series. Carter was Anthony's idol, and he wanted to be at least as memorable as the star of the 1950s and '60s during his career in the 1970s and '80s. Millions of bowlers wanted to bowl like Earl and use his equipment long before Michael Jordan came along.
The left-handed Anthony wrote several instructional bowling books and pointed out specific problems and solutions left-handed bowlers had compared to right-handers.
Just when it looked as though Anthony was going to dominate the PBA Tour for years to come, he had a heart attack in 1977 that took him three months from which to recover. But later that same year, he won his most successful stop in Waukegan, Ill.
"Coming back from my heart attack and winning in Waukegan in 1977 along with the ABC Masters and winning the Masters again in 1984 after I retired from the PBA Tour were my most memorable career victories," Anthony said.
Earl won the Tournament of Champions for one of his two victories in 1978 and he had only one victory each year in 1979 and 1980, and it looked at that time as though his heart attack ended his tour domination. He rallied to win four tournaments in 1981, including the National Championship and earning a career best $164,735. He became the first pro bowler to win $1 million on the PBA Tour the following year with three titles, and he added two more, including the National Championship in Toledo as he retired from the PBA National Tour in 1983.
Anthony was persuaded to come back on Tour with the Seniors in 1988 and responded by winning the PBA Senior Championship in Canton, Ohio, the former home of the PBA and Earl won the Senior Championship again in 1990 along with victories in Houston and Las Vegas.
Earl was also a bowling proprietor and co-owned Dublin Bowl in Dublin, Calif., with his partner Ted Hoffman. Earl was scheduled to make the award presentations in his Junior Fall Classic Scholarship Tournament, where he guaranteed school scholarships to the winner in each division. The tournament is still scheduled for October 20-21, and Ted Hoffman will make the presentations on Earl's behalf.
When Earl wasn't competing on the tour as a bowler, he wanted to emulate his colleagues Chris Schenkel and Bo Burton as a commentator for the PBA Tour. When NBC was persuaded to telecast the Fall Tour in 1989, Earl joined his golf buddy Jay Randolph behind the mike. Earl wanted to do something significant to showcase the tour better than the ABC Saturday afternoon telecasts, so he insisted that the championship match of the top five finals be broadcast without commercial interruption. The NBC producers agreed, and Earl began another aspect of his bowling career as the master of analysis of the PBA bowlers on tour. Anthony's popularity and expertise of insight along with Randolph's notoriety from pro golf combined to bring viewers a special twist to the PBA Fall Tour until NBC decided to cancel the bowling coverage at the end of 1992 mainly because their affiliates were not picking up the tour on a regular basis and were bumping the telecasts with their own local programming.
ABC-TV picked up the PBA Fall Tour the following year on its schedule, and the commentary went to Chris and Bo with commercial interruption in the title match.
Earl returned with Randolph on the Prime Sports TV cable network to commentate the new venture of the American Bowling Congress known as the Brunswick World Team Challenge, where amateurs and pros competed together in team competition.
Ed Baur was the public relations director of the BWTC and was delighted to have the high profile Anthony as commentator of this new venture and have Earl and Jay as his regular golf partners as they toured with the bowling telecasts of the team competition finals weekly nationwide.
When Fox purchased the Prime Network as part of their cable network expansion in 1997 to compete with ESPN for the national sports dollar, the network execs decided to dump Anthony, Randolph, Baur, and the World Team Bowling Challenge for sports they thought would be more lucrative.
Earl jumped to ESPN as the color analyst with commentator and former pro bowler Mike Durbin from the mid-1990s through 1998 after its sister network, ABC, dumped the PBA Tour from Saturday afternoons for the first time in 36 years.
Kegel Training Center director and head coach Richard Shockley said that if Earl Anthony and former LPBT bowling commentator Denny Schreiner had ever teamed up as a pair that they would have been the best bowling broadcasters together on TV.
Earl took a five-year break from the Senior Tour until winning in Naples, Fla., for his lone title of 1996, and he ended his career on the PBA Senior Tour in 1997 to return to the broadcast booth. But this time it was to broadcast the Brunswick World Team Challenge on the Prime Sports Network (currently Fox Sports Net).
When Anthony left the PBA Senior Tour, he actually wanted to give other seniors a chance at winning some tourneys and prize money since he was the all-time leader in both at the time.
"I'd like to give the other seniors a chance to win instead of overshadowing them. Teata Semiz deserves to win some tournaments, so I'll let him take over for me."
Earl was often charitable and recently volunteered his time working with the American Red Cross.
Most observers believe Earl was the best professional bowler to have ever lived. Now we will all see what life will be like for the world of bowling and the world in general without Earl in the 21st century. He was a man for people of all ages, and now he belongs to the ages.