Before Belmonte: Bowling's Greatest Two-Handed COVER-UP

Everyone credits Jason Belmonte with bringing two-handed bowling to the PBA. But a bowler from Rowlett, Texas was throwing it on tour years before him — until one PBA ruling killed his ball. So who really invented two-handed bowling? Not Belmonte, and not the twenty-year-old Finn who lit up the 2004 U.S. Open on television. His name was Chuck Lande. He had five PBA Regional Tour titles thrown with a two-handed, no-thumb release, and he was competing on the PBA circuit while Osku Palermaa was still a child — nineteen years before Palermaa's TV debut in Anaheim, twenty-two before Belmonte won at AMF Babylon Bowl. Lande's ball had no thumb hole. In its place was a weight hole — standard, legal equipment. At a national tour stop at Forum Bowl in Grand Prairie, Texas, PBA tournament director Harry Golden came down to the approach and told him that because of the way he bowled, he could not have a weight hole. Put the thumb in it, or the ball's off the stage. There was no written ban on two-handed bowling — the PBA never needed one. It had a tournament director, an equipment spec, and a pro shop. Lande re-drilled a conventional ball two hours before his first game and never threw his two-handed shot at a PBA national event again. This is the forgotten history behind the sport's modern identity: the first two-handed PBA bowler (and Mike DeGroot, who won a regional a year earlier still), the "weight hole" mechanism that erased them without a paper trail, thumbless pioneers John Gengler and Mike Miller, the Jeff Richgels reporting at 11thframe.com that recovered the record, the deleted scene from FloBowling's "Two Hands On The Future," and the Dick Fosbury parallel. Jason Belmonte now holds 32 PBA titles and a record 15 majors throwing the delivery a Texan was rolling on the same tour in 1987. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Ball Harry Golden Wouldn't Allow 1:15 Chuck Lande's No-Thumb, Two-Handed Release 2:30 The Origin Story the PBA Sells: Palermaa and Belmonte 3:50 Belmonte's 32 Titles and the Two-Handed Era 5:00 When the PBA Was a One-Handed Sport 6:00 The Weight Hole: A Ruling That Was Never a Ban 8:15 The Bowlers Erased Before Him: Gengler, Miller, DeGroot 10:25 A Deleted Scene and the Fosbury Parallel SOURCES Jeff Richgels reporting — 11thframe.com (recovered the Lande and DeGroot record): https://www.11thframe.com FloBowling — "Two Hands On The Future" (Lande's account appears in the deleted scenes): https://www.flobowling.com Professional Bowlers Association (Lande's member page; Belmonte's title record): https://www.pba.com United States Bowling Congress (the 2020 rule eliminating balance holes): https://www.bowl.com Pin Action is the bowling documentary channel — the characters, scandals, corporate wars, and forgotten history nobody else documents. New episode every week. The stories bowling forgot it had. #Bowling #PBA #BowlingHistory