Head of the class: a home remedy in the final match of the tour season ensured this doctor another title: best bowler on the senior circuit - Senior Pro Bowler Of The Year - Bob Glass - Statistical Data Included

TWO P.M. WAITING FOR A CALL from Bob Glass, just named BOWLING BIGGEST'S Senior Pro Bowler of the Year. Interview set up for a near-deadline story. 2:30 p.m. Still waiting. He probably has some terrible disease. Or worse: He's got laryngitis.

3:08 p.m. "Hi. This is Judy Glass. I'm sorry--here it comes--but we took a nap in the car and overslept. Bob will be here in a minute!"

Nothing like a little drama. You never know what to expect when you talk to a professional bowler who has a Ph.D in economics.

Glass had moved from 11th place to first in the PBA Seniors meet in Hammond, Ind., the previous night. As we talked, he didn't mention that in less than two hours he was going to bowl in the stepladder finals.

"Bob, are you always this relaxed before bowling for a lot of money?"

"No, far from it," Glass replied. "I don't sleep well during tournaments. At least not until I qualify for the stepladder. But we had to check out of our hotel at noon, so we decided to nap in the car. I'm relaxed now. Well, no, I'm nervous when I'm competing, but physically I'm ready. I'm always tense until I qualify for the stepladder. It's because I need the money."

We talked for about 45 minutes before Glass said, "Hey, uh, I need to get on the lanes and loosen up a little ..."

"Good grief!" I replied. "Go! I had no idea you were cutting it so close. Talk to you tomorrow! OK?"

A little later, after Charlie Tapp emerged from the group of four to challenge Glass for the Hammond Senior Open title at Olympia Lanes, it came down to the 10th frame. If Tapp could roll three strikes he would be sure of at least a tie. He got two, then left a solid 10-pin. A Tapp tap?

Then Glass, the nervous napper, got two strikes and also left the 10 on what spectators called a good hit. Glass won, 233-232, taking an $8,000 check and his fourth Senior title of the year. Tapp got $4,500.

That was the final Senior PBA tournament of the year, and that victory solidified Glass' hold as the world's best senior bowler. Glass, who celebrated his 54th birthday a couple of days before winning at Hammond, led the seniors in average with 223, the third year in a row he'd done so.

Glass' bowling saga didn't begin with the youngster setting pins in a bowling alley, as with most star bowlers a generation older. Instead, it started when he first saw bowling on television.

"My dad, Robert, went to college on the GI Bill after World War II, and we got our first TV set in 1952," Glass recalls. "I really got excited when I watched `Championship Bowling,' and I drove my mother nuts asking her to take me bowling. In the meantime, I'd stand up my Lincoln Logs and roll a robber ball at them. When I was six, Mom and Dad took me, and I remember saying, `This is a lot harder than I thought.'"

This idea would occur to Glass frequently in the years to come.

In his teens, Glass became friends with Kansas City's Mickey Higham and Bryan Goebel of Shawnee, Kan., both of whom would become PBA regulars. In the late 1960s, however, Glass was among the thousands of young people who were disenchanted by the Vietnam War and other factors. He attended the University of Kansas, got married, spent two years in the Army, drifted a while, and threw his bowling ball and shoes in the Kansas River.

"Bowling was just incidental," Glass says. "I was upset about many things. I doubt that I bowled even 20 games between 1969 and 1976. It was during this period that my wife called me `Archie Bunker with a library card.'"

Glass began to climb out of his hole in the mid-'70s, was divorced, and got a job in the computer center at KU. "I worked four-hour shifts with the computers and when I was through, I'd buy a Coke," he says. "Soon I figured out that if I'd put my Coke money aside I could get back into bowling. In a few months, I bought a Yellow Dot ball for $35 and a pair of shoes for $2.50. They were size 14 and there weren't many requests for them."

Glass was taking courses at KU, so he joined a scratch league at the student union. "The manager there used to enjoy embarrassing so-called `200 average' bowlers from the big city," Glass says. "So I showed up with a ponytail and jeans, my ball still in a box and my shoes hanging around my neck. The manager had sprayed so much oil on the alleys that nobody could get a hook, but I shot 626 the first night."

In 1979 the King Louie Center in Kansas City hosted a PBA tournament, and amateur bowlers competed for five spots in the field. Glass qualified. He didn't win any money, but he was the high amateur. He joined the PBA in 1979 and began entering regional events. In the meantime, Glass pursued his studies, first earning a bachelor's degree and later a master's in history.

"I didn't win a regional for a while," he recalls, "but I placed second and third a couple of times and took home enough money to make it worthwhile. Meanwhile, I was learning the game: how to change angles and speeds and control my emotions.

"I finally won a regional in 1988, another in '89, and two in '90. Bryan Goebel and I entered the PBA National Doubles those same years and always made the top 24."

In a regional final in Bloomington, Ill., Glass defeated a lefthander, Jim Hills. "The only thing unusual about that match was that Hills did everything right-handed except bowl," Glass says. "We called him `The Lefthander with the Right-Handed Brain.'"

But more memorable was Glass' first encounter with the great Earl Anthony. "That was in a national PBA meet in Waukegan, Ill., about 1980," Glass says. "What a shock that was! I was accustomed to lefties who mostly bowled from the left-hand corner and stayed there. But here was Anthony moving, adjusting, changing his hand positions, playing all the boards from outside left to the middle. It was like watching a left-handed Bo Burton!

"I qualified for match play, so I faced Anthony in one game. He was playing the 12th and 13th boards that day. He was puzzled for a while, then went off the sheet with five strikes for 228. I wasn't close. What a fine man and a fine bowler he was."

Most of today's southpaws who are able to stay around long are technicians, Glass points out. That list includes bowlers like Dave Davis, a PBA and ABC Hall-of-Famer with 18 titles on the regular PBA tour and four senior championships.

"Dave sure knows how to adjust," Glass says. "In the tournament in Hammond, where he finished fourth, he couldn't keep his ball from hooking too early in the final match play round until he let his ring finger rest outside the hole. Then he started scoring. I'll bet he bowled five or six games that way. And Dave is 59 years old."

Glass became a rarity among professional bowlers in 1991 by completing his work for a Ph.D. in economics at Kansas. He didn't join the faculty, but instead was hired by the university's Institute for Public Policy and Business Research.

"That sounds pretty exotic, I guess," Glass says, "but we did practical things at the Institute. A neighbor state of Kansas, for instance, was claiming that 39% of its workers were `underemployed.' That is an attractive situation, if tree, because it means that this state has thousands of workers who are capable of doing higher-level jobs than they now have.

"Kansas reported a much lower percentage and the governor was curious, so we looked into it. What we often found when we did some interviews was that a lot of `underemployed' people were just workers who thought they were underpaid. The federal government was impressed enough to have me come to Washington for a week to talk about it."

Glass, by the way, says that bowlers with Ph.D.s are not so rare now on the senior tour. "There are a number of retired or partially retired physicians, lawyers, and engineers who bowl well when they have the time."

It was in 1988 that Glass met Judy Olsak, from Chicago, a member of the honorary Phi Beta Kappa society, who earlier had dropped out of college. She enrolled at Kansas with a couple of years of athletic eligibility remaining. Judy, a 200-average bowler, qualified at age 34 for the KU team.

"We met in a pro-am tournament in Chicago," Glass recalls. "Soon I found myself going to watch Judy bowling for the KU team! We got married in 1991. And Judy is completing the research for her Ph.D."

Mrs. Glass was in the stands on the final day of the tournament in Hammond, as Bob bounded from 11th place to first in the morning and then got ready for the stepladder round. Another interested spectator was Ray DeSanto, the ball driller for the PBA seniors, who travels with the tour and gives technical advice when asked.

"I had struggled the first two days," Glass says. "Not bowling badly, but never able to develop any consistency. Frankly, I was just about resigned to picking up some kind of prize check and getting out of town. I was consoling myself with thoughts like, `Well, it was a good year ... You can't win 'em all ... I'll give it my best shot, but nothing seems to be working.' The usual cliches."

When Glass arrived at the lanes well before the 8 a.m. start on Friday, however, he was met by DeSanto, who had drilled several Track balls for him that week. There was a Hex that hadn't quite worked this time, and an Assassin, then a Heat II ...

"Bob, I had a wild idea in the middle of the night that might do it," the PBA craftsman said. "I could take another Assassin and drill the finger holes in a `barbell weight' pattern. What it amounts to is that you turn the ball upside down, so the weight block is on the bottom. It looks funny, but I think it will give you the power you need."

Glass studied the plan a few moments and gave it a what-have-I-got-to-lose shrug. DeSanto went to work.

"I knew that I had been lucky to even be in 11th place," Glass says. "In my last previous block, I won the last three games by a total of 11 pins--215-214, 214-213, and 205-196. I knew I probably would slide further down the list, the way the other guys were scoring."

Among the bowlers who had ignited was Tapp, a 6'4" righthander from Kalamazoo, Mich., who had reached the age minimum of 50 just last summer. Tapp, a four-time winner on the PBA regular tour, jumped from 21st to third.

But Glass, adapting quickly to his new weapon, was even hotter. "For the 16 match games Friday morning, I averaged 245," Glass says. "I won 13, lost two, and tied Ron Winger with 267."

That gave Glass the No. 1 position for the stepladder round (there was no TV). Dave Davis outscored Mike Henry, 249-212, in the opener. Tapp defeated Davis, 269-235, and Mike Puillin, 225-222, to move him into the title match with Glass.

Glass, by the way, didn't use his "upside-down ball" for the final game. Knowing the lane conditions would be different at night, he switched to a more conventional version of the Assassin and outscored Tapp by a single pin.

An hour later, with the winner's check in his pocket, he and Judy were back in their car, headed for Chicago.

SENIOR HAMMOND OPEN

October 26, 2001
Olympia Lanes, Hammond, Ind.

Name              Avg./Games   Winnings

1. Bob Glass         233/1      $8,000
2. Charlie Tapp      242/3       4,500
3. Mike Pullin       222/1       3,500
4. Dave Davis        242/2       3,000
5. Mike Henry        212/1       2,500

            Championship Finals

Match 1   Davis def. Henry   249-212
Match 2   Tapp def. Davis    269-235
Match 3   Tapp def. Pullin   225-222

Final     Glass def. Tapp    233-232

COPYRIGHT 2002 Century Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group