PBA Xtra
REVENGE IS SWEET: Speaking of those who derided him for his embarrassing tumble on TV in 2012, Blanchard says, “It’s nice to win, to get them to shut up a little bit.”
JOSH BLANCHARD
FAMILY TIES: Blanchard draws confidence from knowing that his wife, Amy, and baby daughter, Madalyn, are “not going to think any differently if I win or lose.”
“I wish I had tried to play my own game Honor may well come to those who
BONUS INTERVIEW To listen to more from the
Josh Blanchard interview, touch the play button above.
achieve “mastery of self,” but the problem for Blanchard was that he could not decide which self to master. Did he want to mas- ter the hooking game he envied in players such as Osku Palermaa or Jason Belmon- te? Or did he want to master the game he knew, the one in which the angles are straighter and accuracy is everything?
more, and been myself, instead of trying to evolve into somebody different and change my game to match other people,” the former Wichita State Shocker says of the things he wishes he knew when he first arrived on tour in 2011. “I just went back to my grassroots, when I was bowling really good in college, and it’s worked. “I’m more of a stroker and tweener,
more of a shot-maker, and when I came out on tour, I tried to turn into someone who could hook it with the best of them,”
Blanchard adds. “I realized, after a couple years, that these guys are way more pow- erful than I am ever going to be … I don’t have that power. “I tried to generate it with my legs, and
I tried to generate it with my hands, and I just couldn’t do it. I went back to being more accurate than everybody else, and really making better shots than everybody else.”
Blanchard found that new approach
amid trials that might have sent lesser players looking for a new profession. In 2013, Blanchard battled Tom Small-
wood to a 232 tie on the Scorpion Cham- pionship show, then matched the 2010 PBA World Champion strike-for-strike for four straight frames in what became the longest televised rolloff in PBA history.
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