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25 Guarantees* for 2025

*Based on entries

The One Board’s annual year-start countup typically prognosticates, with stunning accuracy despite sardonic motivations, what is to come in the year ahead, but this year we’ll be a bit more wishful, hoping for a year of convoluted milestones that allow some to be achieved, some to be ludicrously short and others to be set up to be achieved in 2026.

  1. For real: there are several big milestones available for PBA Tour players this season.
  2. January reliably begins with players amicably parting ways with the best equipment in the world so they can sign new contracts with the best equipment in the world.
  3. Concurrently, Team USA Trials are held with fans anxiously awaiting the competition to end so someone can decipher the rules and tell us all who made the team.
  4. The U.S. Open title match features Jason Belmonte vs. Kris Prather.
  5. A win for Belmonte would make him the second player to achieve the Triple Crown twice (Pete Weber) and the first to complete the Grand Slam and Super Slam twice.
  6. A win for Prather would make him the 10th Triple Crown winner.
  7. Prather wins, which not only puts Prather in elite company but guarantees a huge 2026 for Belmonte.
  8. The PBA World Championship has both Tommy Jones and François Lavoie looking to become the 11th Triple Crown winner, but also Bill O’Neill and Anthony Simonsen and Kyle Troup trying to capture the World Championship to leave them each one Tournament of Champions win away from their own Triple Crown.
  9. Existing Triple Crown winner EJ Tackett leads the World Championship but finishes second to Kyle Troup.
  10. The USBC Masters is suddenly more important for Troup’s attempted milestones, as a win here, plus his previous World Championship win, would mean an eventual Tournament of Champions title would give Troup the Triple Crown, Grand Slam and Super Slam.
  11. Chris Barnes makes a deep run in the Masters as he seeks the Grand Slam for the 13th straight year, but is eliminated by Ryan Barnes for the happiest possible sadness in front of 87 vlog cameras.
  12. Tackett beats Troup for the Masters title, continuing their penchant for trading wins against each other.
  13. Tackett’s Masters title makes him the fourth Grand Slam winner ever, joining Mike Aulby, Norm Duke and Belmonte. Troup will have to wait at least another year for a Grand Slam or Super Slam, but his Triple Crown hopes are still alive.
  14. Tackett also wins the PBA Players Championship, which is convenient for us as he is the only one for whom that event would complete any of these collections of titles.
  15. Helpful reminder amid this chaos: the Triple Crown is the Tournament of Champions, the World Championship and the U.S. Open. The Grand Slam adds the Masters to the Triple Crown. The Super Slam adds the Players Championship to the Grand Slam.
  16. Tackett is now the third player with a Super Slam (Aulby, Belmonte) and will certainly win his third straight Player of the Year award… or will he?
  17. The Tournament of Champions is particularly large for two players: Troup and Simonsen, both of whom are in contention for the Player of the Year title. Troup, who already won the World Championship, can complete the Triple Crown and Simonsen can set himself up for a Triple Crown, Grand Slam and Super Slam in 2026. Plus, every major Simonsen wins is a new record as the youngest to win however many.
  18. O’Neill earns the top seed to remind everyone he, too, can set himself up for a 2026 milestone.
  19. Simonsen and Troup meet in the semifinals. Tackett finishes fourth, which will be important for competition points in the Player of the Year race.
  20. Troup wins the Tournament of Champions, completing the Triple Crown.
  21. That makes four title-collection milestones in 2025: Prather’s Triple Crown, Tackett’s Grand Slam, Tackett’s Super Slam, Troup’s Triple Crown.
  22. “It’ll be interesting to see” who wins the Player of the Year vote with two two-time major winners plus Simonsen, who amid all this, wins 13 titles.
  23. None of these players are named to a bowling magazine’s all-American team, reliably adhering to the unwritten rule banning Americans.
  24. Although this is possibly the greatest season for compelling competition and incredible milestones in PBA Tour history, one thing remains certain:
  25. Need more games.

Happy new year, bowling fans.

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The One Board 101

What? We’re counting columns now? Didn’t we, as recently as July of last year, write about how we should stop counting televised 300 games and yet here we are counting brief missives on the delightful absurdities of the great game of bowling for the second consecutive month?

Yes. As with all conversations surrounding bowling, all we care about is our own game. We will recount every shot, every excuse (be it humidity or urethane or the field starting too far left or the ever-impressive “on me”), every bad break and every unfortunate failure to double, only pausing when you interrupt to tell us the same about your game, allowing us to store up our next sentence as we await you to take a breath long enough for us to resume detailing how we had difficulty finding our towel during frame six of game four of round two and how that should’ve negatively impacted our routine but miraculously led to us striking out for 257 that put us inside the cut until we hit a bad pair (never mind that it is actually the highest-scoring pair for the field as a whole) in the next game and shot 170 which really put us in jeopardy until the last game of the block in which we needed a double in the 10th to sneak into cashers round but stoned 8 on the best shot anyone threw during the entire event and it’s not fair but we don’t have time to dwell because there’s a sweeper three hours away we need to go fleece.

In college, as so many bowlers know, an introductory course is labeled 101. The basics. The prerequisite for anything else you need to study to earn your degree in between bowling practices and competing in 65 different national championships in the same season. And what better time to introduce The One Board to people than with its 101st edition?

Logically, it makes sense. The One Board only ran for eight years and one surprise month in a print publication, which is not quite enough time for anybody to find it and read it. Now located on the internet, many bewildered humans, intrusive ads and devious bots are bound to stumble upon this trove of bowling ruminating, so perhaps we should explain what it is we do here. Dare we be more honest and forthcoming than ever?

Maybe.

The One Board, which has somehow won multiple awards, celebrates bowling’s endearing farcicalities, skewering the seemingly illogical and outrageous, all from a place of reverence. We Trust The Process, take it one column at a time and believe strongly in the mantra of NEED MORE GAMES but we are deathly afraid to mention ball hardness. Well, no, we are not afraid to mention ball hardness, but that’s a longer story for another time filled with wild speculation, another hallmark of bowling we lovingly embrace.

We jest. We opine. We digress. We speak with the royal we, not because we think we’re royalty, but because we’re all in this thing together. We all know bowling deserves the respect other sports get and we also know bowling shuns many of the things that give those other sports respect and make other pro athletes rich (to name three examples: charging money to enter the building; encouraging fans to eat, drink and be merry; requiring fewer than 10 hours of endurance to watch competition that concludes with no sporting resolution but does invite us to come back tomorrow for 10 more hours).

And yet, as we’ve exposited several times before, there is no sport better than bowling. We’re all here for it. As the great “Weird Al” Yankovic once told this very writer for a story in a print publication, “Most of the things I lampoon and parody are things I actually love,” including bowling among those loved things.

That’s why The One Board exists. Bowling can simultaneously be revered and satirized. And, upon the extinction of qualifying, bowling can be loved.

Next month, we can stop counting.