“It’s the Highland Park Businessmen
League,” he explains. “Just a regular handicap league. I used to bowl in this league a few years ago, and this is my first year back with these guys. I kind of bounce around leagues a little and bowl wherever from year to year. We always have a great time.” But league night was pretty far from
his mind Feb. 13 when Hess defeated top seed Jack Jurek of Lackawanna, N.Y., 225-214, to win his first career PBA Tour title. And there was no easy road get- ting there, either. He also had to face the legendary Walter Ray Williams Jr. in an earlier round before going on to defeat PBA Tournament of Champions winner Mika Koivuniemi, 254-219, in the step- ladder finals for the right to bowl Jurek. “I knew Mika was going to bowl an
awesome game,” Hess says. “So I just kept telling myself that this is just an- other match. It’s not me against Mika, it’s me against 10 pins.” That mental control paid off and
even served him better in the final match, where he trailed most of the way. Jurek opened up the championship
match strong, striking on six of his first seven shots and taking a 22-pin lead after seven frames, but then Jurek left back-to-back splits for open frames in the eighth and ninth. “All I was thinking was to keep the
pressure on him,” said Hess, whose only open in the title match came in the first frame when he failed to convert a 4-9 split. “That’s why we bowl 10 frames. I caught my bad break early in the game
and was able to come back from it.” If you watched the show or saw
the photos, you know the exhilaration Hess felt at the end. The excitement was almost too much to contain, and Hess confesses a regret. “I celebrated prematurely,” he says.
“When I threw the strike in the 10th, that kind of sealed it, but it didn’t actu- ally shut out Jack completely. “But Jack did the classiest thing I’ve
ever seen when he came up to me and said, ‘Congratulations. Compose your- self and go make one more shot.’ I don’t know too many other people who would have done that. He’s a class guy all the way around and if that doesn’t seal his win for the Nagy Sportsmanship Award this year, I don’t know what would. He’s got my vote for sure.” The 41-year-old Hess is one of those
guys that seemingly comes out of no- where to suddenly having the biggest spotlight in bowling shining directly on him. That’s the sort of thing a Masters win can do. The trademark qualifying and double-
elimination match-play format and rela- tively open field mean that almost any- thing can happen during the tournament, and almost any bowler who gets on a hot streak can make a decent run. It can be the stuff of fairytales if everything goes right. That’s pretty much how it went for
Hess. He’s certainly no complete un- known, what with those six regional ti- tles and even a previous TV appearance in 2009 at the PBA’s Don and Paula
19 USBOWLER MARCH 2011
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