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On a Wednesday afternoon in mid-April, the greatest bowler in the world, perhaps in the history of the sport, sat in a booth in a Bowlero in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a cold wind lashing outside, and pondered how it had all gone wrong. Jason Belmonte was a study in black—black parka, black Jordans, black beard—and his mood was no less dark. He was competing at the World Series of Bowling, one of the sport’s major championships, which features three different singles tournaments within a larger one: four chances to win a title on national television. Through 60 games over six days, Belmonte had failed to make any of the first three finals, each of which featured five bowlers. “I can’t remember another World Series where I didn’t make a top five,” he said. The breaks just hadn’t gone his way: “A pin would wobble, and it stood, whereas in other weeks it fell.”
Hope remained, however slim. He had snagged the 12th and final qualifying spot for the match-play round, to determine which five bowlers would make the last and most important show: the one that would crown the world champion. He would need a run of sustained brilliance, one verging on statistical impossibility, and could only hope that no one else would mount a similar charge.
For nearly every other bowling mortal, the idea of a comeback would have been an exercise in self-delusion. But Belmonte, 39, has never conformed to expectations. When he first alighted on the scene, Belmo, as he’s known to his fans, resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which he uses two fingers (and no thumb) on his right hand, palms the front of the ball with his left, and then, on his approach, which is marked by a distinctive shuffle step, rocks the ball back before launching it with a liquid, athletic whip, his delivery producing an eye-popping hook, his ball striking the pins like a mini mortar explosion. Not everyone welcomed his arrival. He’s been called a cheat, told to go back to his native Australia; a PBA Hall of Famer once called the two-hander a “cancer to an already diseased sport.”
But Belmonte never cowered in the face of the criticism, never deviated from his approach, and has now inspired a rising generation of bowlers to emulate his game. Today, a growing faction of two-handers headline the PBA Tour, some of them major winners, with even more rising in the youth ranks: kids who want to hook it like Belmo, who want to send the pins into concussion protocol, as the announcers might say on a Fox telecast. Even Walter Ray Williams, Jr., whose 47 career titles are the most in PBA Tour history, now dabbles in the two-hander on the senior tour.
How to convey Belmonte’s impact? “He’s exactly like Tiger Woods,” says PBA Commissioner Tom Clark. “The domination, the difference, the electricity, the controversy. People don’t like him because he’s too humble, or because he’s from Australia, or they think he’s arrogant because he’s better looking than they are, or something. They’ve got a million reasons why.”
Perhaps the main reason is that for much of recent memory, he’s simply been better. He’s won 15 major titles, four more than anyone else in history, and seven Player of the Year awards, tied for the most all-time. Even as the rest of the tour has narrowed the gap, challenging his supremacy, he’s found ways to maintain it.
If you’re not impressed, if you happen to think that because you can fire a 250 at your local Bowlero, you can compete on the PBA Tour, let’s make one thing clear. Your local lanes are oiled in a way that helps turn misses into strikes, and when coupled with recent advances in bowling ball technology, have produced an abundance of 300 games among amateurs. But the oil patterns on the tour, unlike those at your local house, are devilishly difficult: the comparison is akin to logging a hole in one at your local putt-putt course, the contours guiding the ball toward the hole, versus sinking a downhill double breaker at Augusta. In other words, there is no comparison.
At the World Series, to witness Belmonte up close was to get an education in his freakish skill. “Let’s see how far up the leaderboard I can climb,” he said that afternoon in the Bowlero, before vanishing into the wind-swept gloom. That night, he went to a pub with his ball rep and some fellow bowlers, threw darts, and called his shot: He would make the show.
His destiny was sealed shortly before his birth, when his parents, who knew almost nothing about the sport, opened a bowling center near their home in Orange, Australia, some 160 miles northwest of Sydney. As a toddler, unable to manage the 10-pound house balls with one hand, young Jason rolled them down the lanes with two. At age 7, he tried bowling one-handed for all of 10 minutes—“just sucked,” he once said—and never looked back.
The criticism assumed a plaintive tone at first. “It was, Come on, you’re a big boy now. It’s time to bowl properly,” Belmonte recalls. As a 10-year-old, when he was beating bowlers five and six years his senior, the accusations grew more hurtful, impugning his character: cheat. “There was frustration on why I wouldn’t convert, and that was where I felt a loneliness,” he says. “Because when you’re young you want to feel part of the community. And I didn’t. No one wanted to coach me. They all wanted to convert me. And so there was a point where it was like, I’m just going to do this myself.”
He was 16 when, at a tournament in Brisbane, he met Tim Mack, then one of the best amateur bowlers in the world. “So he stands in back of the approach and runs to the front and throws, carrying the ball with two hands, and all these pins go flying,” Mack recalls. “And I looked at my future wife and said, ‘What the hell is that? Clearly he can’t do that again.’ And he did it again. And I said, ‘Holy shit! I’ve never seen anything like that!’”
Mack helped Belmonte land a contract with Storm Bowling, a leading manufacturer of balls and apparel, and traveled with him to tournaments throughout Asia and Europe. In 2008, when Clark joined the PBA as its deputy commissioner, the tour was largely an American affair that required bowlers to earn the exempt status that would guarantee them entry into tournaments. Clark wanted to deepen the talent pool by bringing the best international talent stateside; Belmonte was his prized recruit. By giving Belmonte a one-time tournament exemption, Clark figured the young star would be drawn to the challenge of the PBA, like a gambler drawn to Vegas. “He had the best story, the best media potential, because of the way he bowled,” Clark recalls. “Even then, he drove a hard bargain. He’s a negotiator. I told him, ‘I can get you a commissioner’s exemption.’ He went, ‘I need two.’ There are people who still haven’t forgiven me for that.”
Nothing in the rule book makes the two-hander illegal, but the delivery does confer at least one advantage. Because two-handers don’t use their thumbs, it’s easier to impart spin, or revolutions, says Mark Baker, a renowned coach. And when coupled with the right velocity, those revs translate into power down lane, sending pins flying: messengers, as they’re called, when one of them rolls or bounces and takes out a still-standing pin to complete a strike or spare. Belmonte’s rev rate, which topped 600 per minute when he first joined the tour (most players averaged somewhere around 350-400 at the time), was otherworldly. The trade off, says Baker, is that it’s harder to generate velocity with the two-hander, to remain balanced and accurate in your delivery. (Belmonte’s technique is, technically, a one hander—his left hand leaves the ball a split second before he releases it with his right.) Metaphorically, Baker says, Belmonte is still playing the same instrument, just with different artistry: Jimi Hendrix on the guitar instead of Chuck Berry.
Belmonte wasn’t the first two-hander. A Texan named Chuck Lande won some regional PBA events in the ’80s and ’90s using two hands. And the tour already had a two-hander when Belmo first joined: a Finn named Osku Palermaa, who had made the finals of the U.S. Open in 2004. But as good as Palermaa was, he wasn’t Belmonte, a lightning bolt to the epicenter of the game, illuminating its possibilities. “I told these guys, ‘You have no idea what’s coming,’” Mack recalls. “And they’re like, ‘Yeah, so this is the PBA Tour. No one comes out here and dominates.’”
Belmonte finished 60th out of 63 players in his first tournament, held outside Buffalo in 2008. He wasn’t even sure if the style was sustainable. Perhaps his body would break down over time, because the two-hander imparted more stress. He called himself a “crash test dummy,” a walking kinesiology experiment. But in his eighth tournament, on Long Island in 2009, he recorded his first win, and the victories soon began piling up. He won his first major (five are held each year: the World Series, Players Championship, U.S. Open, Tournament of Champions, and Masters) at the Players in 2011. “I was doing something no one else could do,” he says. “And I could dominate.”
The detractors piled on. The loneliness he had felt as a child returned. As did the pain of having his character questioned, this time ratcheted to unimagined intensity. “His personality is not villainous,” says Bill O’Neill, one of his closest friends on tour. “He didn’t want to be hated, a Trae Young or Marcus Smart. He wanted to be Steph Curry, the guy everyone loves who changes the game.”
Belmonte realized he could feed off the criticism, like a shark circling a tour boat, devouring the freshly tossed chum. In 2012, in a television interview before the final of the Players Championship, his opponent, Mike Devaney, thought he could rattle Belmonte. “Doesn’t impress me,” Devaney said. “Not interested, don’t care. I throw it the right way. I put my thumb in there. The way I was taught. The way everyone should throw it. I’ll show him what’s up.”
This was like Stephen Ames dissing Tiger’s wayward driving—an exercise in self-immolation, as Devaney soon learned.
I want it to taste salty when they say my name, Belmonte remembers thinking. Because they have to say my name. Because I’m winning. Not because they want to say it.
On the morning of the match play round at the World Series, Belmonte faced an uphill climb of oxygen-depriving heights. He trailed fifth place by 324 pins, and had just 12 matches to make up the deficit. If the numbers appeared daunting, he took inspiration from the comeback he had just staged at the Tournament of Champions in March, his most recent major victory.
Bowlers often describe the qualifying rounds of a tournament as a marathon, and the televised finals—often just one match to decide things—as a sprint. But they may as well be different sports. Qualifying is mostly a solitary grind, in front of crowds that can be sparse or subdued—imagine playing an all-day jazz concert in the park, trying to maintain your virtuosity amid the gathering fatigue. The finals, meanwhile, are like a Megadeth show: an adrenaline-spiking thrill, with the potential for things to go very bad, very quickly.
That morning, as Belmonte went full grind, decimating the field in the process, he was a study in self-talk: head shakes at fortuitous strikes, the occasional fist pump. His bowling shoes were black and gold, his bowling shirt—a striped maroon number—emblazoned with BELMO on the back. Both featured his logo—a Jordan-esque silhouette of himself mid-two-handed bowl. He opened match play with a 278, and by lunchtime had cut the deficit in half. When play resumed, he continued his climb, compiling a 10-1 record. With a single match remaining, he stood in 6th. As the updated scores flashed on the monitors, the energy in the Bowlero began to shift, the crowd pulsing with the sense that something historic was afoot: After 71 games, everything had built to this.
Belmonte versus Nathan Bohr, a 42-year-old Texan occupying the fifth spot, to decide who would make the show. As he chatted with his ball rep, Bohr resembled a beachgoer trying to remain unfazed in the face of a tsunami warning. On the ninth frame Bohr left the dreaded 7-10 split—leaving the two pins in the back corners standing—and when Belmonte shut the door, he dropped one of his signature booms, his right index finger held aloft followed by a guttural detonation—his version of the Tiger fist pump. He’d averaged 250 over 12 games—video game numbers. The day before, Belmonte had said something prophetic: “I think a lot of the matches I’ve won in my career, in the last say, three to five years, I think I’ve already won before I even throw a ball down the lane.”
“There’s an aura that someone like Belmo has,” says Jeff Richgels, who has won more than 30 regional PBA titles and now runs the 11th Frame, a popular bowling website. “I don’t want to say he has a power over the other players. But as great as all those guys are, I’m sure they felt what he did.”
When Belmonte first joined the PBA, he reveled in his power game: Let’s break some pins, he remembers thinking. But as he watched some of the game’s finest up close, he realized something: “These guys had the ability to make the ball dance. They could make the ball dance to any tune the lane was asking for. And I couldn’t do that.”
He worked to decrease his rev rate, his velocity, the number of moving parts to his game. And he slowed his approach, eliminating a “kangaroo hop” designed to generate power, and delivering the ball from a position of greater stability and balance. “I noticed my ball was still striking with 20 percent less revolutions, and my ball was still sending messengers. But I was more consistently in the pocket. And I realized, I don’t need to break a pin every round.”
As a new generation of wildly talented players has emerged, many of them two-handers with eye-popping rev rates, it’s only grown more challenging for Belmonte to maintain his supremacy. “As soon as I feel comfortable, there are 15 other guys who are just as comfortable as I am now,” he says. And because the top players have all-around games that allow them to attack the lane from multiple angles, they wreak havoc on the oil patterns, their rev rates and high-tech balls chewing them up. “Back in the day, everyone kind of fell into the same ideal line to the target,” Belmonte says. “Now it’s madness. And so that makes it trickier and harder because you’re also now dealing with more manipulations in your part of the lane. You’ve got to be smarter—that’s what these guys are forcing you to do.”
Should he decrease his rev rate or velocity? Loft the ball over the front part of the lane? Move a board left? Move even farther left and loft it over the gutter? It’s a constantly evolving puzzle, like a green at Augusta that gives a different stimpmeter reading for each new group. “You’re essentially becoming three or four different versions of yourself,” he says. “That’s what makes it, in my opinion, harder now to be great than it was yesterday.”
Add to that the question of which ball he should use. He travels with 15 or so, some polished, some sanded, some that hook more and with greater angle to the curve, some that hook less but earlier down lane. “A couple years ago, he didn’t really know anything about bowling ball layouts, or a pin here versus a pin there on the ball, what it did,” says his Storm ball rep, Shawn Ryan, who helps him decipher lane conditions. In 2021, they drilled a bunch of balls with different patterns and experimented, tracking how changes to Belmonte’s hand position changed his ball path. “When he figured out what he likes to see on the bowling ball, as far layout goes, it became easier,” Ryan continues. “‘I need the ball to flare a little more, I need there to be a little less flare, cleaner, more back end,’ stuff like that.” The following season, Belmonte won Player of the Year.
Last year, he installed a tracking system in his parent’s bowling center back in Australia that gives him immediate feedback on his ball’s path, speed, and rev rate, generating reams of data he can sift through to find areas for improvement. “When everything is going great,” he says, “I can predict those numbers very accurately. I can tell you what board I’m hitting, my speed. I can tell you my rev rate, and it’s scarily accurate.”
Belmonte’s cheeky sense of humor and slightly off-kilter personal brand have made him one of the biggest personalities on tour. He once made a Youtube video in which he diagnosed himself with singular chirophobia—fear of using one hand—and alluded to the perils of two-handed wanking. He sends messages from his fan account with the tagline “This email was typed using #2HANDS.”
He’s also one of the game’s foremost entrepreneurs. In no particular order, he has: bowled a 300 game wearing Google glasses; partnered with Nascar driver Aric Amirola to throw a 140 mile-per-hour strike out of the window of a race car at the Charlotte Motor Speedway; appeared in a Dude Perfect trick shot video; helped design a bowling video game; worked on his own NFT trading cards; partnered with fellow bowler (and musician) Keven Williams to create a catchy track that plays following his strikes on a telecast (“Every doubter and hater that’s speaking my name, I know they are not understanding me…”); and collaborated with a designer to customize a pair of Jordans Ones with his logo (he’s a bonafide sneakerhead who owns nearly 150 pairs), which he raffled off to support a mental health organization.
His YouTube channel, including tournament footage shot by a professional videographer, has endeared him to a younger generation. At the Players Championship, held the week after the World Series in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a 15-year-old from Allentown named Daniel Schiffert waited for a chance to meet his hero. “That’s a living legend right there,” said Schiffert, who was a one-hander before discovering Belmonte on YouTube, and in two years has progressed from a 130 to a 200 average in his league. After scoring an autograph and selfie, he scampered off like a Swiftie who had just scored a private audience with the queen herself.
According to Baker, who earned four PBA titles before becoming a coach, more and more juniors are adopting the two-hander because it’s cool, because it’s easier initially to hook the ball. (The first two-hander he coached, Wesley Low, became, at 15, the youngest regional PBA Tour winner in history.) Far from being a “cancer to an already diseased sport,” the two-hander could be just the opposite: “I think it may have well saved the sport,” Baker says, “because it brought in so many more players.”
At the dawn of the millennium, the PBA Tour had faced bankruptcy, the sport itself becoming shorthand for the crack-up of American society thanks to Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone. But there are now reasons for optimism beyond the junior ranks. Bowlero purchased the tour in 2019, went public on the New York Stock Exchange two years later, and has increased prize purses slightly. And according to the PBA, ratings on Fox Sports are up 20 percent this year compared to last.
Still, Belmonte has never achieved mainstream recognition. His career earnings on the PBA Tour total just over $2.5 million—respectable, yes, but less than Jon Rahm collected for winning the Masters earlier this year, and only about a fifth of the career total of Ronnie O’Sullivan, history’s most successful snooker player. Belmonte’s celebrity is situational: He can order his doppio with sugar at Starbucks incognito, but when he enters a Bowlero, he may as well be Chris Evans at Comic Con.
Even as he’s assumed the role of elder statesman, Belmonte remains a polarizing figure on tour. “It’s love-hate,” says E.J. Tackett, one of his main rivals, who falls into the former category. “It’s either, I get along with him perfect. Or, I absolutely despise him. There’s not much middle ground.” In 2011, Sean Rash, one of the top bowlers on tour, charged that Belmonte was crinkling his plastic water bottle as a distraction during his approach (Rash’s outburst will be forever enshrined in bowling lore: “Take that you bottle bitch!”) Belmonte maintains there was no malicious intent, but the fall out endures.
Once obsessed with converting the haters, Belmonte has concluded it’s a Sisyphean task. “That has changed my mental health on tour,” he says. “You do realize there are a lot of people in your corner. It’s been very lonely, but when you actually stop and pause, you realize there’s an abundance of love there.”
Spending nearly half the year away from his family—that remains a challenge. “Week one and two, I’m mentally fresh,” Belmonte says. “Week three, someone falls and has a sore knee: I wish I could give you a hug. And the stories turn into, You know, dad, I had a fight at school with someone, one of my friends, and you’re just away. It just builds and builds and builds. And you feel incredibly alone. Coming to the last few weeks, it’s a very heavy and emotional time. Because you’re like, Hang in there, you’re almost home. And so you’re battling these demons.”
You wouldn’t know it, for the most part. “He’s the best focused player ever,” says Clark. “There’s no way anyone else could laser in and do the things he has done. It’s incredible.”
At the World Series final, held at 11 am on a Sunday, fans carried buckets of beer into the stands, which flanked the two lanes, as an emcee further juiced the crowd. The soundtrack was vintage Milwaukee: “The Bears Still Suck,” “Roll out the Barrel.” The format was a ladder bracket, meaning that Belmonte, who had climbed to the fourth seed, needed to win three matches to reach the final. There awaited the top-seeded Tackett, who’d secured a bye.
Belmonte did his part, capping things off with a strike against second-seeded Anthony Simonsen, a victory he celebrated by unleashing a boom so intense the announcers likened it to a sonic boom. And so, after 75 games, it was Belmo versus Tackett, the world title in the balance.
Tackett, 30, attended college as a golfer before dropping out and joining the PBA Tour. A wiry dude with a tight buzz and glasses, he channels the intensity of a drill sergeant on the lanes, producing ungodly rev rates for a one-hander—a “unicorn,” as Richgels describes him. But he had arrived in Wauwatosa with a 0-3 lifetime record against Belmonte in major finals. That morning, Tackett had told his ball rep that he expected to face Belmo. “I was mentally prepared, I think maybe better than I have been in the past,” he later said.
The match was tight, edgy. After five frames, Belmonte held a slight lead. Which was when the whole affair became less about bowling, and more about guts—two heavyweights finding their range. Bowling on television is a bit of sporting theater, as much about pressuring your opponent to crack, about dominating their spirit in the moment of truth, as it is about logging strikes.
On the ninth frame, as Belmonte clung to a slight lead, his delivery hooked early, leaving the three-six-ten pins. The announcers had wondered when Belmonte would switch from his Storm Pitch Black, a urethane ball, to reactive resin, which tends to travel farther down the lane before hooking, and now it appeared he’d waited too long. He cleaned up the spare with a back-up ball, a shot that hooked left to right, and rebounded with three consecutive strikes, punctuating the second with a Let’s go. “Belmo showed some emotion I’ve never seen before,” Tackett later said. “I’ve never heard those two words out of his mouth, not like that. Ever.”
Then it was Tackett’s tournament to win: two strikes for the championship; a strike and a spare for the tie. He delivered the first strike. On the second, the moment the ball left his hand, you could tell he liked it. The fist pump was some double skyward number, the scream primal. “One of the greatest performances in the history of our sport,” Clark called it, before handing the $100,000 winner’s check to Tackett’s wife.
In a back room in the Bowlero, home to a makeshift media center, the two men met again. “I wanted them to play Nellie’s ‘Here Comes the Boom,’” Tackett joked, still jacked on endorphins.
“If you’re gonna throw it out there, you gotta expect it to come back at you,” Belmonte replied. A hug and a backslap later, he took his turn behind the microphone. “This story would have been pretty epic had I just made that move on the right lane in the ninth frame,” he said. “I knew it was going to hook. I was hoping it was going to last one more frame for me, and it just went a bit early.”
A week later, Belmonte expressed no belated appreciation for the comeback that nearly was—the memory, for him, would always be associated with defeat, and defeat is not something he abides. In early May, he crashed out of the Players Championship in the qualifying rounds. But later that month, he avenged the loss by taking home the Super Slam, a contest between all the major champions in 2023, winning a WWE belt, $100,000, and the chance to fly home finally and reunite with his family.
Belmonte, who turns 40 in July, is feeling his mortality more intimately now. For his mid-life splurge he opted not for a red Porsche or a motorbike but a series of tattoos on his right arm. Four rings around his wrist represent his children; a counter tallies his majors (number 15 yet to be inked); a globe depicts his world travels; and a crown refers to his wife Kimberly’s nickname for him: king. He plans to get the entire arm done, the next installment some homage to the passage of time.
More than ever he’s intent on chasing history, securing his legacy. His ambitions: 20 majors, another player of the year award, a second U.S. Open, because then he would own two super slams—two wins at every slam. A third U.S. Open, and he’ll have won the super slam three times over—“a huge, ridiculous, crazy goal, and I love it,” he said.
He wants to be remembered not as that dude who bowled two-handed, but for his record of dominance. With Tackett holding similar ambitions (his goal: 16 majors, one more than Belmo currently has), Simonsen in the midst of his own historic run (five majors at age 26), and a new generation emerging—including Kevin McCune, a college catcher and now a third-generation PBA Tour bowler whose velocity suggests murderous intent—the showdowns stand to be legendary.
How to sum up his year in 2023? For Belmonte, not his best. His celebrated command sometimes deserted him; he left spares standing he normally dispatches with ease. And yet he had a run that would be the envy of nearly every other bowler on tour. “Yeah, I had an off year. I won a major. I came in second [in another]. I won the Super Slam. I bowled a 300 on television,” he told me, clearly luxuriating in all the hardware he’d collected despite his misfires.
There’s no telling how long he has left in the game, how long his late-stage brilliance will endure. But in his unwavering self-belief you could glimpse his greatness, and only conclude that some of his best bowling is still to come. “Let’s see what I’m actually capable of,” he said, a playful optimism in his voice, “when I get back to feeling like I have the ball on a string.”
Eric Wills has written about sports and design for Smithsonian, The Washington Post, GQ, and The American Scholar. He was formerly a senior editor at Architect magazine.
