This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, May, 2022
This month, in The One Board’s continued unofficial official unscheduled scheduled series on what makes bowling better than all other sports, we’ll get into one of the most unique aspects of competitive bowling that no other sport can approach: guaranteed second-place money.
When you lead a bowling tournament through qualifying or match play or whatever the penultimate round is, you have led the tournament, yes, but you’ve also done something no other sport holds in such regard: you’ve guaranteed second-place money. That is, you qualified first for the stepladder finals, so even if you lose your match, you will win the second-place prize check. Obviously, you want to win and receive the title, the trophy and the first-place prize check, but you already know you’re getting, at minimum, second-place money.
If you win your one game for the title, all is right with the world. If you lose, you can lament having to “win the tournament twice” while also acknowledging any times in the past you’ve won a tournament from lower than the top seed, hoping that it all evens out.
Related: all multi-time PBA and PWBA Tour champions can tell you how many times they’ve won from anywhere other than the No. 1 spot and they can also tell you how many times they’ve lost as the top seed. Often, but not always, these two figures are close.
Where else in the world of sports is talk of second-place money so prevalent? We’ve never heard a hockey player upon advancing out of the conference finals say, “Oh, good, we made it to the Stanley Cup Finals. We guaranteed second place.”
This isn’t a perfect comparison because, while NHL players do get monetary bonuses based on how well they do in the playoffs, they also make enough money during the season that they’re not worried about the difference between the runner-up bonus money and the lost-in-the-semifinals bonus money.
Consider Wimbledon. Is any tennis player excited about guaranteeing the second-place plate, which is smaller than the championship trophy, and then having to pose for a humiliating photo with the victor, each with his respective trophy? One hopes not.
A sport isn’t a sport if the athletes aren’t trying to win. No one is playing for second place. There’s a difference between bowling for second place and bowling for second-place money.Bowlers are simply resigned to the fact that the stepladder finals are not indicative of the tournament as a whole, so guaranteeing second-place money is also a way for a top seed to say, “I’ve done all I can do and I did it well.” This is similar to how a player can control everything about his or her shot until the ball is on the lane, at which point it can leave a stone 9 on a great shot or crumble the rack after going through the face.
If we want to prevent “having to win the tournament twice,” we can eliminate the stepladder. Let the players bowl a thousand games and hand the trophy to the leader at the end. Sure, that would be more fair (not fair, just more fair, and even more fair still if we give them 1,001 games), but we already know that doesn’t work on TV as that is why the stepladder was invented in the first place; rather, the guaranteed second place. No TV means less sponsorship money which means lower prize funds meaning chasing fairness gets the top prize into the right person’s hands, but the top prize may no longer be as large as the current guaranteed second-place money.
In the moment, bowlers compete to guarantee second-place money. However, after the tournament ends and forevermore, a player doesn’t reminisce about guaranteeing second-place money. He simply says, “I led.” And that’s indisputable, as is this: bowling is better than all other sports.