MEMORABLE QUEENS


1983 A month prior to her marriage to David Sill, 20-year-old Aleta Rzepecki defeated Dana Miller, 214-188, at Showboat Lanes in Las Vegas to win her first Queens title. After going 7-1 in preliminary match play, Rzepecki outshot Patty Costello and Virginia Norton before topping Miller in the finale. The title match was billed as a grudge match between the Ladies Professional Bowlers Tour lefties, who had met in the title match of the Women’s U.S. Open a month earlier. Miller bested Rzepecki for the U.S. Open title. Sill went on to win a second Queens title in 1985, and became the women’s tour’s first million-dollar earner.


CROWNING MOMENT: Click on the Play button above to see Kelly Kulick cement her second Queens title by topping Tennelle Milligan in the 2010 finale. Kulick, who also won in 2007, is one of eight women to win multiple Queens crowns.


Kulick, the first woman to win a Professional Bowlers Association championship (the 2010 Tourna- ment of Champions), as well as a pair of U.S. Women’s Open titles, still lists her first Queens crown in 2007 as the most critical of her career. “At the end of my career,” she


said, “being in the Hall of Fame would be incredibly important and special to me. I’ve still yet to win a USBC event in team, singles or doubles, so the Queens is what puts me into consideration down the road.” Kulick certainly increased her


chances of someday entering the national Hall of Fame by winning the Queens title again in 2010, and will look for a third gem-encrusted tiara as the defending champion when the 2011 USBC Queens gets underway at The Oncenter in Syra- cuse, N.Y., on April 22. The Union Township, N.J., native hopes to be standing front and center when ESPN2 carries the finals live in high definition, Wednesday, April 27, at 7 p.m. Eastern. “I need that third tiara,” Kulick


recently joked, “because I have three nieces.” The competitiveness that the


1993 Retiring Hall of Famer Pat Costello, bowling in her final Ladies Professional Bowlers Tour event, averaged 217 in three step-ladder finals matches against Linda Kelly, Wendy Macpherson and Jeanne Naccaratto to reach the title match at the 1993 Queens at Don Carter Lanes in Baton Rouge, La. In the finale, Costello lost to Jan Schmidt, 201-163, preventing her from winning the only major missing from her 13-title resume.


2003 Fifteen years after winning her first Queens title, Wendy Macpherson defeated Kendra Gaines, 218-193, at the National Bowling Stadium in Reno, Nev., to capture her third diamond


Pat


Costello


tiara. (Macpherson won in 2000.) The win also was the 20th pro title for Macpherson, making her only the sixth woman bowler to hit the 20-title mark. Ironically, Macpherson failed to win a Queens crown in the ’90s, yet was named Bowler of the Decade.


19 USBOWLER APRIL 2011


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