PBA Xtra
BJI INTERVIEW WITH RANDY PEDERSEN
A perfect miss: One of the PBA’s most gut-wrenching fi nishes was at the 1995 PBA Touring Players Championship, when Pedersen, needing a strike (plus six) to clinch the title against Ernie Schlegel, threw a perfect shot, only to leave a solid 8 pin.
opening the tournament with a 144 in the fi rst game of qualifying. “I went into that event just trying
not to make a fool of myself, and then, when I started with a 144, I was like ‘Well, too late for that,’” Pedersen says. Now the only fools are those who
doubted him. “I didn’t think this would ever hap- pened again,” he tweeted after the win. Pedersen may well have convinced himself it never would happen again, but that was before he made the two- hour drive from his native Clermont, Fla., to Deland, Fla., where a Dr. Holman took a good look at his left knee, the one a previous doctor had left bone-
on-bone after a second surgery, and had one word for him: robots. Pedersen barely could walk on that
knee by then, so he was up for any- thing. Even robots. “It’s basically considered a partial
replacement,” he says of a surgical pro- cedure that involved robotic arms, an- tennas, and various other devices that made the experience seem like some- thing straight out of some sci-fi novel. And it all might have felt like fi ction,
too, if only the results were not so real. A year later, that pain in his knee he thought he would live with for the rest of his life was totally gone. He picked up a ball again and averaged 234 in league at Clermont Bowl, punctuated
He’s still got it: Bowling in his fi rst PBA event in six years, Pedersen surprised the fi eld by winning the PBA50 Dayton Classic in Dayton, Ohio.
by a couple perfectos and an 800 series. Pedersen was not about to call it a
comeback. Then he took Irwin up on his off er to bowl the PBA50 Tour stop in Dayton. Now he is not just calling it a comeback; he is ready to tell you that he’s been here for years. “It’s defi nitely changed my outlook
and obviously gotten the competitive- ness in me going again,” says Pedersen. “I think that I would be lying now if I didn’t expect to do well. I’m going out there with the expectation of winning.”
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June 2013
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