Belmonte Shoots 300 while advancing to PBA World Championship Finals

January 9, 2012 by Aaron
Filed under: bowling news, PBA

Jason Belmonte fired the 21st nationally televised 300 game during the PBA World Championship semifinal rounds. The 300 game earned Belmo a $10,000 bonus and helped him advance to the finals of this event. Belmonte defeated Brian Kretzer, Mike Fagan, and Josh Blanchard to advance out of the Mike Aulby division of the PBA World Championship.

Unfortunately, Belmonte’s 300 wasn’t the biggest “news” to come from the show this week. ESPN chose to magnify Josh Blanchard’s “incident” during the first match. Blanchard had his ball stick on his thumb as he approached the foul line. Because of this, it carried him across, where he slipped on the lane. Throughout the day, ESPN has revisited this event several times, on shows such as Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn, and even SportsCenter. Am I alone where I think that this is ridiculous of ESPN? You have a guy do something that requires and extreme amount of talent, something that’s only been done 20 other times, meanwhile you focus on the poor aspects of the game. ESPN’s representation of our sport has amazed me. They treat our sport like we’re just a bunch of fat drunks, while they promote other “sports” like poker. While I’ve seen the Blanchard clip (embarrassingly titled “Epic Bowling Fail”) repeated over and over again on their network, I have yet to see one clip of Jason Belmonte’s 300 game. As far as I’m concerned, I think it’s about time the PBA packs its bags and finds a new network that will respect our sport, give it the coverage it deserves, and look to do more promotion of the sport than just sucking every dollar it can out of what it thinks their viewers need to see.

That’s just my 2 cents. If you have any other thoughts, I would love to hear them.