In Search Of Excellence - Jason Belmonte: From Outcast To Bowling Prodigy | E75

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

My guest today is Jason Belmonte, the best bowler in the history of this sport. He has won a record number of 15 major championships and has been named PBA Player of the Year 7 times. He is also the second person in PBA history that has won the Super Slam, winning all 5 PBA major titles in the same year. 01:30 Off days during world tours- It is brutally hard to compete- Tournaments are exhausting for both mind and body- Days off are mostly for sleep and relaxation 04:17 The first event outside of Australia- At 16, he traveled to Malaysia on a mini tour- Bowling conditions in Asia- That was the catalyst for understanding     10:35 The preparation for tournaments- Tries to leave Australia as late as he can- Most people like to play in the middle part of the lane- Bowling in a new tournament is a puzzle that you need to solve- Japan bowling centers 17:36 Types of lane surfaces and bowling balls- Synthetic lanes are made of tough plastic    - Bowling balls are very similar to golf balls    - Jason carries 20 balls on his tours- Bowling balls weigh up to 16 pounds- Materials and designs vary depending on the goal 26:32 Jason’s childhood- His parents built the bowling center after he was born- He started bowling at 18 months- The ball was too heavy so he had his own way of bowling- That difference gave him the advantage 31:16 Norm Duke and the Beast- Norm Duke is one of Jason’s favorite bowlers- Norm Duke’s ball was called the Beast- Got the Beast from his parents- Met Norm and competed against him 34:50 The culture of bowling- The popularity of bowling shirts, shoes, and other apparel- Breaking the stereotype of the burger-eating and beer-drinking bowler 39:02 Focusing on a bowling career- As a kid, besides bowling, played rugby and cricket- Realized he had to commit to one- Quit his job at Blockbuster- Dad fired him, his safety net was gone 45:07 What did Jason do with his first prize money- The first thing he bought was a Nokia 5110- Invested the money into his career- Losing and not generating income- Became incredibly analytical of his gameSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

When I went to go bowl on tour, Norm was still competing and it was incredibly surreal for me to be competing next to my idol, to be competing next to someone who I saw a glimpse of on a tape in Australia for the first time years ago. If I was going to become great at any one, the time that I would have to dedicate it to it would mean that I would have to give up something to do that. When I was honest with myself, I came up with a few answers and I'm like, yeah, you're really not good at that. You need to like check your ego a little bit, leave the arrogance at the door, be okay with the idea that you're not great at this and become great at it. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers,

athletes, motivational speakers, and trailblazers of excellence with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan. I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to inspire and motivate all of us to achieve excellence in our lives. My guest today is Jason Belmonte, who is considered the best bowler in history. He has won a record 15 major championships, four more than anybody else in history, and has been named PBA Player of the Year seven times. He has had 27 career 300 games in PBA tour events and is the only second person in PBA history to have won the Super Slam winning all five PBA major titles in the same year. When you're on these your world

tours or wherever you are do you get to get out and go do fun things? Do you plan it and say I'm in Houston what is there to do and you just walk out and get out of the hotel room and go to a ball game, whether it's football or baseball or the museum. I mean, I've been traveling the world since I was 16. And so been over to over 50 countries. And those first trips were like, wow, I'm going to Indonesia for the first time. I'm going to Turkey for the first time. I'm going to the U.S. for the first time. I'm going to Turkey for the first time. I'm going to the US for the first time. And so there is this element of while I'm there,

I'd like to see a few things because I'm a kid. I've never seen these things before or wherever you go. But when you have been travelling the world since you were 16, I've kind of gone everywhere and i've gone everywhere a few times and so outside of yeah there's a specific ball game that you want to catch with a couple of mates or whatever um you know i'm definitely not looking up on on you know what to do in houston on a friday um to go and catch a museum i think i've done a a lot of that. But if something very specific pops up, I don't know, sometimes like even if there's a very interesting exhibit

at a museum that's only in town or, you know, it's only there for a period of time and I happen to be able to catch it, I'll definitely try to go and check it out. But, yeah, my off off days especially during the season my off days are so valuable just to to sleep and relax like and we might get into it but a regular tour event is is brutally hard to compete it's long days um the exhaustion of of the mind um of the body trying to perform at a very high level for such a long period of time over the course of five days.

So those off days, you're not looking to go out into the Houston heat on a summer's day to go and check out, I don't know, the park. You're kind of just wanting to close the blinds, turn on the TV or stream something that you kind of want to just veg out to so you can kind of just decompress. But to say that I haven't done that is a lie. I've done a lot of stuff as I was going to these places for the first time. Plus, you know, when you're 17 years old, you can kind of live off,

you know, four hours, you can kind of live off four hours sleep and a bunch of exciting and hardcore days. So now I'm 39. Yeah, I want my sleep. What was the first event that you traveled to outside of Australia? How old were you and did your parents come with you as a chaperone? No, no. The first event I ever went to was actually the event I realized I could become a professional bowler and that I could make a living off the game. so I was 16 and I had four other mates from Australia who were a little older than I was they were a few years older than I was but they had organized this Singapore Malaysia mini tour

and they had said hey listen we're going to to go over to these two countries to play two tournaments. Did you want to come along? And I was like, yeah, that sounds pretty incredible. So I told the parents the plan and they were like, yeah, okay, get yourself to Sydney, get on the plane and away you go. And so they were really supportive. Mum and dad have never really travelled a whole lot. Mum's come to maybe two events internationally in my career.

Dad has come to two as well. They both came at the same time for one, and then the other two times they came individually to two different tournaments. Their time is so so they've been so busy with their their own business especially early in my career that getting them to come to a tournament is not only costly to leave australia but it's also like yeah they're leaving their business behind for a period of time which is a bit tricky so the parents just said at the time look we're really busy if you want to go do this, good luck, you know,

and give us a call when you get there. And I happened to bowl really well and I made a bunch of money. I bowled a perfect game in Malaysia and that paid me, at the time, it was the equivalent of like $30,000 Australian dollars for bowling the perfect game. And as a 16-year-old, you30,000 in literally none to $30,000 in the span of one game, it was incredible. I was just like, I'm rich.

I can buy anything in the whole world. That's how I felt. And so I came home and I thought, well, if I can do that in Asia, why don't I just keep doing that? Why don't I keep coming back to Asia, keep bowling these tournaments and keep making these big checks? So I quit my job at Blockbuster. I used to work there. And when I started to travel a little more, my dad fired me from the bowl, our family business, because I was traveling too much. So he fired me.

So then I was like, holy shit, like this bowling thing really needs to kind of pay off because I don't have a job anymore to fall back on. And luckily for me, I worked really hard at some stuff. Actually, I haven't told too many people this part of the story, but after I won all that money i actually reinvested it into my travel and thought okay now i've got a bunch of money um mom and dad you know they they weren't funding my my tour escapades so i was like i got a bunch of money i started to plan my asian tour and european tour kind of bowling experiences and and it was expensive and i remember i'd lost all of it

i i just i don't know how to describe it it's it's okay supposedly like you know it with a golf ball there depending on the altitude the ball will fly differently right so imagine going to a high altitude golf course unaware that bit at a higher altitude your ball flies further right and um you just didn't know and so you're you're hitting 100 yards out so you're thinking all right so it's a you know a nice little soft pitching wedge in or something like that and it just flies over the over the green every single time so in bowling it was the same type of experience for me the oil conditions the lane patterns that we were bowling on were wildly different to what i'd experienced in australia and so this bank account was just getting drained

because i was flying away so i had i had enough money for one more trip. And I remember talking to my dad and I said, listen, I got money for one more trip and then I don't think I can do this anymore. So I think I was kind of like, I don't know, poking him a little bit to say, is there a job for me when this one fails? Like can I come back to work with you because I need money? And, yeah, he said, things don't things don't work out of course you can come back to uh to the business so i said okay i got one more one more event in a month and so i spent that entire month been a little bit more creative in my practice sessions

and and learning how to recreate that asian um zone oil pattern and the scenarios and really working on things that I was suffering with when I went to Asia. So I really worked hard in that month. And I went back to Singapore and ended up coming second in a major championship there for, I think I ended up winning like 40 or $50,000. And so that kind of was the, I guess in my own head, it was like the catalyst of understanding you're not as good as you think you are and that there is so much more for you to learn. And any time that I experienced that type of like, I guess, yeah, you could say defeat or poor execution or just not having any clue what

I was doing. It became this challenge of mine to see how quick I could learn it, how quick I could understand it and, you know, how quickly I could get back and win. And so, yeah, that last trip was a pretty significant trip just because if I didn't do well, I don't know, maybe I would not be talking with you right now. I might seriously be back at the bowl or back home. Yeah, just doing that. Most people don't realize that the community bowl, the lanes are very different than on a professional bowl tournament.

So you talk about, you touched on it briefly, the slickness of the professional lanes. Is that harder or more difficult? And how do you prepare for, you talked about Malaysia, and it's a different altitude. How do you prepare for something that's 500 feet or 5,000 feet at sea level versus something that is at sea level where the air is different? Do you get there weeks before, five days before and say,

okay, I need to acclimate my body to make sure I have the same equilibrium as I do in a regular tournament? No, no. So for me, through my career career it's all been time sensitive it's um how late can i actually leave australia to get to this tournament and how early can i get back home now obviously early into my career um it wasn't so dramatic about leaving family, kids, wife, responsibilities. It was more about cost as a kid. It's like, all right, well, every day earlier I'm there, I'm in a hotel and that costs X amount of dollars.

And then the tournament fees and the airline fees and then all of the food and everything else that you're spending while you're there. So you're trying to mitigate that expenditure so you can come home with more profit. The only way that I've come to kind of realize how to recreate certain environments is you can never recreate exactly what it is ever but you can you can recreate the part of the lane in which you need to work on so a lane is 39 boards wide and we they're about just under an inch each board is just under an inch wide and so you look at this lane as your road. And there are parts of the road in which

you just naturally feel really comfortable playing. And for the most part, most people like to play in the middle part of the lane, right? It's the furthest part away from the edges where the gutters are. And so most people get really comfortable playing in the middle. But there are some oil patterns and some bowling centers in which the middle of the lane is just not conducive to scoring well. You have to play closer to the gutter and then your risk of throwing a gutter ball becomes a lot higher. And so you have to get very comfortable doing that.

And so when you travel to different parts of the world and ball on different oil patterns, you're essentially playing a different part of the road, a different part of the lane. And so you can come back home and say, wow, I'm really not comfortable playing this portion of the lane. I need to work on that. And so it feels comfortable that I don't have that hesitation that I'm going to throw the gutter ball at some point. So you can do that. You can build your game around the confidence on playing different parts of the lane, but there is zero. And I'm to this day, there is zero. There's nothing that can compare to experience and just living it, bowling on it, and then

going back to that place and saying, oh, I remember you. I remember this. I remember this oil pattern. Like I remember what I did that didn't work the last time. And so you build these strategies over experience. And sometimes it can be really challenging because, you know, it's a puzzle that we're trying to solve. You know, it's like where do I stand? What do I target at? How fast do I want to throw the ball? How much rotation do I want to put on it? What bowling ball do I want to choose to use?

When do I change that bowling ball in the middle of a tournament? And so you're putting together this puzzle and you've got these strategies and ideas and then they don't work. So then you go back the next time and you're like, all puzzle and you've got these strategies and ideas and then they don't work. So then you go back the next time and you're like, all right, chuck all that out. You create these new ones. That doesn't work. It can get really frustrating because you're like, there is a solve to this puzzle.

The reason I know there's a solve is someone wins and someone bowls really well. And so it's like they figured it out. Why haven't you figured it out? And that's where for me, the frustration gets to is I hate not knowing what I'm doing that isn't successful. And so that it almost becomes exciting for me to figure it out. It's like, oh my God, I just, that light bulb moment comes off, it comes comes on and and then you get to implement that new strategy that you've kind of come up with and it works and then you win and then there's a very satisfying moment where people watching uh on tv they see you win the championship and there's this

like oh well done he did really great but in your own mind you're like this was a long road this was five years of me coming to this part of the world or this bowling center and I've really struggled or I haven't won and I haven't been able to figure it out and now I have. And so for me, that satisfaction moment is like amplified because it's not just this week that I've done well, it's the fact that I've been able to overcome a series of attempts in which I haven't done well. And probably for me, the most obvious one of that is my time in

Japan. Japan, the bowling centers there are a little bit older. And so we have a type of wood on the lane that's a little older as well. And so every time I would go to Japan, I would really struggle. And it was like a 12 year, beat your head against the wall type of experience. Like every year for 12 years, coming with these high expectations, new strategies, thinking everything's going to be great. And it just kept kicking me down, kept kicking me down. And it was getting to the point where my competitors were saying, it's like the only place he can't win. Like we should go to Japan more often. Like we've got to go there more often and everywhere else he beats us. And so that alone, the fact that they had this one place hanging over my head, it bothered me.

And so I was like, well, there's got to be another way to do this. And so I ended up being incredibly creative and doing something that I would not normally ever really do. The ball choice that I used, my hand position that I used, the speed that I used, it felt super uncomfortable because it was really different to how I like to normally play the game. But it worked. And then I won. And that was a really satisfying,

really satisfying moment. This episode of In Search of Excellence is brought to you by Sandy.com. S-A-N-D-E-E.com. We're a Yelp for beaches and have created the world's most comprehensive beach resource by cataloging more than 100 categories of information for every beach in the world. More than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries.

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It's the same size. It's pumped up to the same air pressure. In baseball, there's one ball. And in football also, there's natural grass and then what we call fake turf. And they used to play on a very thin turf where people would really get hurt because there was no cushion when people would fall. Is all the wood the same in a professional bowling tour? What is the wood? Is there one particular wood? And as well, you mentioned you can change your ball.

Are there various bowling balls? Are there rules in terms of the pound? It's one size, but what are the limitations on the ball what's the variance and what ball do you use or do you change up your ball uh for each tournament depending on some of the factors you just mentioned yeah uh really good question so we'll touch on the first one uh first um every bowling center i've ever been in has been different. Over the course of the game's evolution, we have developed new lane surfaces.

So the original versions are, if you can imagine, the old wood lanes where it was a type of wood. It's probably the most true sound a ball can make going down the lane. Like it's that real deep kind of rolling on the wood. It's a beautiful sound. But the problem with wood lanes is, you know, wood is a material that can damage. You've got these heavy bowling balls that crash onto the lane, causing dinting, splitting.

And so the maintenance of a wood lane was often, and it was expensive, and it was annoying. And so the industry developed a synthetic lane, a lane that was made of this incredibly durable and tough plastic. They made it look like wood lanes as best as they could, but the synthetic lane had a lot of differences to the wood lane. When you put oil on a wood lane, especially an older surface wood lane, there would be cracks that would open up in the lane.

I've bowled on some lanes in some parts of the world where there are like actual like potholes, there's holes in the lane. I've bowled on some lanes in some parts of the world where there are actual potholes, there's holes in the lanes. And so you're trying to navigate through those holes in the lanes as well. Where synthetic, you never get that. You don't get the hole in the lane. You don't get the board splitting open. And so it made for a more consistently smooth surface. And from the proprietor's perspective, you didn't have to maintain them like you did with wood lanes. You didn't have to have the fear that a bowling ball is going to dint them or crack them open or whatever. And so it was a huge advancement into the lane surface. But, um, as soon as you put down a plastic lane instead of a traditional wood lane, the way

the oil sits on top of that lane and the way that that correlates with the ball going down it, it changes the ball motion dramatically. And so now bowlers had to learn how to bowl on synthetic and wood. And that was an interesting time, I think, for a lot of players who had been so great on traditional wood lanes and now having to redefine their game a little bit to play on a synthetic lane. So that was that advancement. With bowling balls, it's very similar to golf. Very, very similar.

There are so many similarities. It's pretty wild. But we have bowling balls that are designed to do specific things. As a golf club is designed in a golfer's bag, a sand wedge is great for the sand or when you need to chip it high and short distances. And then your driver is meant to go just straight and long as far as it can. We have bowling balls that are designed to hook a lot. Some don't hook at all. Some hook early, some hook late, some are shiny, some are dull. And I can't say there's an infinite amount of combinations because obviously there's not, but there is a lot of combinations to a bowling ball. So choosing your arsenal, choosing your equipment has become incredibly important in today's game. Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, we didn't have that

evolution in technology in the bowling ball. Most people carried one bowling ball. This was it. This was my one and this is what everyone used. And so the game was very simple. Then when technology gets involved, it complicates it a little bit. And when you complicate it a little bit, it means you've got to be a little smarter. You have to learn that part of the game. Why do I use ball A instead of ball B? And at any given time on the pro tour i'll have maybe 20 bowling balls um for me to be ready to use sometimes more and that can also be

really overwhelming because you're looking at 20 bowling balls on the ground going which is the one that i want to use right now and and you and you know, the winner, the winner of the tournament is going to choose the right one for him or her. So you have to get it right. And it's, it's pretty daunting, especially when you throw it and it's wrong. You're like, crap, that didn't work. Now I've got to make that up somewhere. I have to choose the right ball, but not only do I have to choose the right ball. Now I have to execute at an even higher percentage for the rest of the day because I started using the wrong ball and that's that's a really tricky part of the game. But is there a specific weight that a ball has to be and is the composite of the ball the same in baseball you need to have a wood bat because if you have a metal bat you're going to

have 20 home runs per game and when you're using the wrong ball during a game can you change your ball during the middle of the game or are you stuck with that ball for the rest of the game yeah i was going to answer those two questions but i forgot them after i did my rant so i'm glad you brought them back you brought them back up. So a bowling ball cannot weigh any more than 16 pounds. That's the most that a bowling ball can weigh. As technology has evolved, you actually don't want to use the 16 pound bowling balls. Most of the, in the high 90% of competitors on tour are using 15 pounds. You drop that extra pound because you're looking for just a little bit

of deflection to create better pin action. Inside the bowling ball though, and even the surface of the bowling ball, what that material is made of does vary. We have a weight block inside um that weight block is either symmetrical or asymmetrical and the reason why these designs of a weight block are created is to generate a a type of ball motion you know if you want a bowling ball to hook a lot then you need this weight block on the inside to be able to pull the ball a certain way again think of it like a golf ball and that if a uh you know if titleless is looking for extra spin it's it's investing in its r and d on right how

do i get a golf ball to spin more or how do i get it to fly further into the air what are the the air dynamics of the dimples on the ball what do I got to do to make this ball go that little bit further on the course? And bowling is no different. It's how do we get a bowling ball to strike more? But how do I get a bowling ball that hooks a lot to strike more? How do I get a bowling ball that hooks a little bit strike more? And so technology in that is it's it blows your mind but it also becomes very overwhelming when you're a competitor because now you're you're trying to understand what it all means because like a golfer using the wrong club at the wrong time can be incredibly detrimental to your entire tournament. It's the same with bowling. If I'm using the wrong

ball, I'm just not going to win. It doesn't matter how well I execute. If it's the wrong ball for the oil pattern and the part of the lane that I'm trying to play, I'm just not going to get the maximum amount of strikes that someone with the right ball playing the right part of the lane is going to get. And so, yeah, you typically, you have to work with your sponsors on understanding those technological advancements better so you can choose the right ball at the right times. And it's complicated. Let's go back to the very beginning of your life. When you were 18 months old, your mom, Marissa, and dad, Aldo, bought a bowling alley called the Orange 10 Pin

Bowl. You were a toddler. You're still in diapers. You're still having poopies every now and then. And at some point, you picked up a ball and you couldn't roll it with one hand because it's clearly too heavy. Can you tell us about a technique you learned at that age because you had to learn it and how you did something different than almost every bowler before you had done and what was that like? Yeah well mom and dad actually built the bowling center a couple of weeks after I was born. It was this business idea that was born from a question when family from Sydney came to this small little country town called orange um it was pouring down rain and someone had said hey there's nothing to do it's raining let's go bowling and my parents were like oh we don't have a place here to do that and so the very next day

they said why why don't we build one you know the town would use it and um it sounds like you know our family really enjoy it and so the very next day they started researching what the game was and how much to invest in it and uh and they decided to do it which was incredibly brave because yeah they knew nothing about the game never bowled a ball in their life and yet they invested all of their money uh they asked my dad's parents to invest all of their money to go into this business that they knew nothing about. And so looking back, the fact they knew nothing about the game was a blessing in disguise for me because that meant they weren't coaches, they weren't bowlers, they didn't know the correct or traditional way

of playing the game. They just, it was business to them. And so the earliest photo we have of me bowling is when I was 18 months old. And my mother would tell me that I was very stubborn. I had to do it by myself. No one was allowed to help me. I got to pick the ball up. And just as you alluded to before, it was just too heavy to bowl traditionally, like everybody else who was older than me. And so I would hold this ball with two hands and waddle to the foul line and throw it out into the lane and then turn around and do it all day long, every day while my parents worked. And then as I was getting older, the ball was still a little too heavy for me to throw it with a traditional style, but I could do it a little better my way. Like I could actually create

a bit more speed now. And the one thing that I could do as a little boy that no one else in this small town of bowlers could do was I could hook the ball. Everyone else bowled super straight and I was hooking the ball. And to me, that was the coolest thing in the world. It made me different and I loved it. And so nothing was going to stop me from doing that. As you get a little bit older and now you're strong enough to hold the ball with one hand and you've got boys and girls your own age who are traditionally bowling and you get older kids who are bowling. That's kind of when it started with the pressures, I guess,

which I really don't understand why, but the pressure of it's time to conform. It's time to change what you have been doing and bowl like everybody else. And, and I just wouldn't do it. Um, for two main reasons. I loved the way that I did it, but more importantly, I would look at the scoreboards and I would be beating everybody. And so I couldn't understand why I would change. Uh that mentality of if I'm enjoying it and it's serving me well, why am I conforming to what everybody else is doing? And that's kind of

how I've lived my life really since then in every aspect. But I just had this ability to do something a little bit different and that little bit different gave me an advantage it gave me more strikes it gave me more hook it allowed me to do things to a bowling ball that you know no one else in my town could do which again that's the advantage that I had and you know winning against kids that were six, seven years older than I was as a 10-year-old or as a 13-year-old beating all the adults in town, it made no sense to me why I would ever, ever change. And luckily, I didn't because it's served me well through my career. Tell us about Norm Duke and the beast. Norm Duke. He is a Hall of Famer. One of my

favorite bowlers of all time. Probably consider's how old it is. I can't even remember the three letters the tapes were called. That VCR tape was actually sent to us by two Americans that came to live in my small town. The husband was in the mining industry and we had a gold mine outside of where I lived. And so he would tell us all about the PBA tour. And we had never heard of it before. There was no internet. We didn't have it on TV. And so I'm listening to him tell these stories of all of these bowlers. And anytime the the name norm duke was was mentioned it seemed to be a really engaging story and so they went back home to the u.s and they would periodically send these tapes over from the pba tour that they had recorded and allowed us to view.

And so we ended up having, well, we had to buy a new VCR player because the versions of the US and Australia were slightly different. So we had to buy an American VCR player. And then we put the first tape in, and the very first show that was on there was Norm Duke. And he was using this bowling ball called the Beast. It was this purple ball with pink writing and he was just hooking the whole lane with this purple beast. And my eyes as a, I think I was like 13 or 14 at the time, like my eyes were just glued to Norm. And he won the tournament using this ball. And I remember just turning to my parents saying, I need a beast. If there's anything that I can do for you to make me get this beast,

I will do it, whatever it is. And, yeah, I think it was for Christmas that year. Under the Tree was a beast, and I tell, so the funny part of all this is when I went to go bowl on tour, Norm was still competing, and it was incredibly surreal for me to be competing next to my idol, to be competing next to someone who I saw a glimpse of on a tape in Australia for the first time years ago. And I remember telling him that story.

He actually beat me in the competition and I shook his hand and I said, you know, it's actually for some reason I don't feel so bad today losing to you. Let me tell you why. And I told him the story. And, you know, Norm is, he's such a, he's a beautiful human being. Um, you know, he had a tear in his eye and he gave me a big hug and, um, he told me how, how much of an honor it was to have that story related to him. And, um, you know, we've been very good friends, uh, ever since. And he's now retired, which is sad

because I miss seeing him compete but i'm happy he's retired because he was so bloody good it's nice not have to try to beat the guy anymore when i was younger five six seven actually it wasn't five or six when i was younger 10 to 12 maybe 13 i liked to bowl There were a few bowling leagues in Detroit, suburbs of Detroit, where I was from. And I wasn't very good, but bowling was on TV from time to time. And Earl Anthony was the best bowler in the world at that time. And I remember while I was in this league, just watching on TV. And he would spin the ball. He was a right-hander.

The right leg would kick out beneath his left leg. And I remember that ball just spinning 180 and just cranking through these pins. And I thought, wow, that's super cool. And what I thought back in the time, I said, what are all these funny shirts people are wearing? These are kind of nerdy and they're very different. And we had our own shirts in that league as well. These are really kind of thin shirts. They're not what I would call a sports shirt. And the

interesting thing about the shirts is they became a fashion trend and people are now buying expensive bowling shirts at some of the finest cool clothing stores in the world. Yeah, we've definitely seen a lot of those trends through what bowling was. In fact, there was a period of time where even bowling shoes were inspired in lines of shoes to the point where, you know, I live in a small little town, right? So you

kind of get that feeling like you almost know everyone. And a few times, you know, I'd go to the pub and I'd look around and I would see my bowling center shoes. They stole them. Like people would go bowling and not bring the shoes back just to wear them to the pub. And, you know, I'd see them and I'd be like, you know, Dave, bring my shoes back to the bowl. Like don't steal my shoes and wear them to the pub. So there was like some pretty funny times in which the fashion of bowling has definitely come in and out. And you're right, like the concept of that kind of retro bowling outfit

is definitely making its way back again. It's weird. I mean, bowling is probably one of the hardest things we've been trying to do in bowling is to break the stereotype of what a bowler is. You know, that idea of the 70s and 80s, burger eating, beer drinking type of athlete, that doesn't exist anymore. You know, when I go out and play on tour, it's a very young tour. It's a very fit tour and you have to be the way that the tournaments are played now um it's it's brutally taxing on your body and i think what we

have seen in this generation of pro bowlers is we've looked to the past and we've seen careers cut short due to that stereotype, that heavier set gentleman, that bowler that just didn't think about stretching even, right? As simple as stretching. They just wouldn't even do that. It was just a very different time to be alive. And so the tour today is just not that at all. And when I do meet people and they say oh do you get a do you get to have a beer in between frames and I'm like no no it's it's against our rules to start with but um no it's it's very fit our tour um you you have to be and so you try to educate that but that stereotype that Homer Simpson um even the Fred Flintstone type stereotype is so difficult to break because it

has been ingrained into the culture of bowling for so long. Now, don't get me wrong. If you and I want to go and have a casual roll on a Friday night with our mates, yeah, get the burgers going and get the beer flowing. But on the pro tour, it is very, very different. Are you looking for your next great gift to surprise a friend, colleague, or loved one? Bliss Beaches makes the perfect gift. This best-selling bright and beautiful coffee table book by Randall Kaplan features stunning drone photography

from exotic beach locations around the world. It's the perfect housewarming gift, a great addition to any home or office, and a fun and creative alternative to bringing a bottle of wine to somebody's house for dinner. Bliss Beaches is available for purchase on Amazon, where it has glowing reviews and a five-star rating. Get your next amazing gift and order a copy of Bliss Beaches by clicking the link in our show notes. We're going to get back to the physical demands of the pro tours and professional bowling,

which I think most people do not know what that's like. But let's go back to when you were a kid and what were you like? You played rugby, you tried a whole bunch of different sports. And at some point you said to yourself, all right, I can't play rugby because I'm going to get hurt or I could get hurt. And you realized you were a good bowler. So take us through that as a kid. And was there some moment in your life where you said to yourself, I think I can do this professionally. And as part of that, talk about what you did, where you worked and how your dad fired you one day. Yeah. So growing up, Australian culture is very sport orientated and I love my sport. I just love it. If I can catch it, throw it, kick it, hit it, I enjoy doing it. And so growing up, bowling was something that I did

because my parents owned the bowling center and I loved it. But outside of the bowling center, there was rugby and cricket and soccer and squash and tennis. There was a lot of different games that I was playing and I ended up becoming quite good at rugby and quite good at cricket. And so those two sports along with bowling were always the three sports kind of jockey in four position on what I wanted to do that day. And so as I was getting older there was a realization that I was really good at all three but I was not great at any one and if I was going to become great at any one the time that I would have to dedicate it to it would mean that I would have to give up something to do that

and I didn't really know which one it was going to be. I really didn't. I think I had the ability to do all three at a very high level if I dedicated myself to it. So it wasn't until I was 16 and I traveled to Malaysia for the very first time. It was my first overseas trip as a bowler. And I bowled a perfect game in Malaysia and I won the equivalent at the time, I think it was $30,000 Australian dollars. And so I became overnight rich in my mind. I felt like I could have bought a Ferrari with $30,000. That's how rich I felt. And I came home and that was this realization of, wow,

I've got so much money because of bowling, like rugby and cricket or any other game that I wanted to play. I didn't see that. I didn't see at that time, at that age that I could make that kind of money. And so I decided to focus on my on my bowling career furthermore as you said like if you dedicate yourself to one but you still want to do the other ones like rugby is a pretty dangerous game and so if I was gonna if I was gonna really become as good as I could be as a bowler it's like well you also have to factor in the idea of yeah you know getting hit in the head a few times you know or something like that. And that's something that I didn't want to have to deal with.

So I did. I just canceled everything else, focused on my bowling. After that trip as well, I actually had two jobs. I had two working jobs. I used to work for Blockbuster, which younger listeners may not remember either. It was the original place or one of the original places to watch movies where you would hire and rent a movie, a hard physical tape or a disc. And I used to work for my dad at the bowling center. And so I came home, $30,000 richer,

quit my job at Blockbuster, thought, don't need that anymore. I'm rich. And then it wasn't that much longer that all of my international traveling was causing stress on the family business because I was missing those shifts. I'm supposed to be working there. And mom and dad had to cover my shifts. And so I got the, I came into work one day and my dad called me into the office and he always used to call me into the office and we would talk nonsense or we'd talk business or we'd talk something. But he would never close the door. The door would always be open to the office until this one fateful morning I walked into the office and he said, can you close the door behind you?

I was like, oh, this is no good. He's never wanted to close the door before. And so he sat me down and he, you know, he said how proud he was of me trying to compete as a bowler and doing all this travel, but he's going to have to let me go. He goes, I'm going to have to let you go, son. Yeah. You just, you're killing me. You're killing me with all this time you're taking away. I got to do your shifts. Mom's got to do your shifts. We're already working a lot. We need to hire somebody that can fill those shoes.

And so you're done. And it was the weirdest because I had to see him for lunch. I had lunch with him as well. So he fired me and mom was like, oh, how'd it go today? I'm like, well, dad dad fired me how do you think it went and it was quite a funny moment looking back at it but I was annoyed because like working at the bowl was part of of how I was funding my international career and early on in my international career I was really struggling bowling in different parts of the world different oil patterns different lane surfaces i i had no experience and so like working for me was a way that i can continue to

fund it and when that was cut off um it meant if anything now that i think about it and look back it was like you're jumping into the deep and it was like you cut the rope, the safety net, it's gone. You have to make this successful or you can't do it anymore. And so I think I really kind of went up a gear or two in my preparation for these tournaments overseas and it paid off because it worked. That preparation made me a better player. Most of us remember our first paycheck that we got in life. I, at 16 years old, had a summer cold calling job where I sat in front of a phone book and I dialed for a company called Mural Stone Construction Company. And I would say, hi, I'm Randy Kaplan

from Mural Stone. I'm Randy Kaplan from Mural Stone Construction. Do you need home improvements like aluminum siding, new concrete work, etc., etc.? And I remember I got one sale that entire summer, and I think I made something like $800, which is all the money in the world for me. You win this tournament, you get around $30,000. Tell us how you invested that money and what it was there for. And you got to talk about your Jordans that you bought as well and what exact model and color they were when you're 16 years old and buying those cool kicks. Well, the very first thing I remember buying was a mobile phone. That was the very first thing that

I bought. And taking that phone to school was the ultimate flex. That was he has his own phone. Like they were really expensive back in the day. It was a Nokia 5110 was the actual model of the phone. And if you Google what a Nokia 5110 looks like, they were big. Yeah, they were a brick. And they were tough. You could throw it like a brick and they were they were tough you could throw it like a brick and it wouldn't break like they were really tough back then it had this little screen but you could play a couple of games on them that i thought were like revolutionary um and so so

that was the very first thing that i remember buying and it also allowed me the freedom to just the little things, you know, kind of, I don't know, like the flex of the money was, you know, your friend wanted a drink at the cafeteria, you know, and you're like, yeah, I got it for you, man. I got that. Yeah. Let me give you a dollar. Like I got that, you know, and you soon realize some of these people may not actually care about you. They just, they want that drink or something. So you kind of started to pull back a little bit pretty quickly on that. But the real investment of that money was into my own career,

was that became a travel fund for me. Looking at tournaments through Asia and through Europe, I knew that, well, the arrogance of me was I did it for one of the first time I ever traveled overseas. So in my head, it was, every single time you're going to travel now, you're going to bring home $30,000 every single time. And it just wasn't like that. It was quite the opposite. I started traveling to new places, different places. The oil patterns were different. The lane surfaces were different.

I had no idea what I was doing. I was not making money. I was losing all of my money. I was losing the expense to get there, the entry fees, the hotels, the food, any tourist stuff that I wanted to do as a kid when I'm over there. And these trips started to become super, super expensive. And I wasn't, I wasn't generating income. And I remember thinking, what am I, what's going on?

Like I've nearly run out of money. And I looked at my bank account. I had enough for one last trip. And I remember talking to my dad. I think I was, I was kind of hoping, I was eluding to the idea of me coming back to work if my final trip didn't do so well. And dad really kindly said, look, of course, if you need a job when you get back from this one, there's always going to be one here for you. And when I had that conversation with him to the time of the tournament, it was

about a month in between. And so I thought, right, I have a month before I spend the last of my money. What do I need to do to be great? And I started to, for the very first time, become incredibly analytical of my game rather than emotional, rather than just complaining that I didn't do well. I started really asking the question, why? And when I was honest with myself, I came up with a few answers and I'm like, yeah, you're really not good at that. Maybe you need to like check your ego a little bit, leave the arrogance at the door, be okay with the idea that you're not great at this and become great at it. And so I spent that

month doing what I thought was the right thing. And when I went back to the next tournament, after spending all that money, I ended up coming second in the tournament. And I think it was for like maybe $50,000. And so that was like, that was the true catalyst of understanding what it's going to take, how difficult it really was, but that I had that ability to overcome, you know, the worst of the worst experiences to still figure it all out. And, uh, and I'm forever grateful for being on my last trip that last dime you know and and pouring everything i had into it for a month before going and then having that success as the reward um that's how i've gone into my career from from that day forth is anytime i've failed i've taken a very analytical approach as to why and worked incredibly hard on fixing it.

And it's done me really well over my career. G'day, I'm Jason Belmonti and I was on In Search of Excellence hosted by Randall Kaplan. And in my experience of doing podcasts, it's always very critical when the host knows what they're talking about. And I thought Randall did a great job in researching me, researching my career as a tenpin bowler. And so the conversation felt very natural. I didn't feel like I was trying to educate someone who had never heard of me or heard of the game that I'm involved in. So very much a fan of Randall and his work and definitely knows what he's doing.

Thanks for listening to part one of my amazing conversation with Jason Belmonte, the greatest bowler in history. Be sure to tune in next week for part two of my incredible conversation with Jason. you