PBA’s Best Bowling Trick Shots

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The top four nominees for the pba.com fan poll of best PBA bowling trick shots. Vote for your favorite at pba.com by March 20, 2015 at 8 p.m. ET and watch for the results during the PBA ESPN telecasts beginning March 29.

Featuring Norm Duke, Chris Barnes, Osku Palermaa and Andy Varipapa.

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50 Comments on “PBA’s Best Bowling Trick Shots”

  1. I like Oskus shot the best.   Norm Duke said that it was the strongest shot he had ever seen plus it hit dead flush in the pocket.  Then he did a rock star celebration!

    1. Makes no difference if they are synthetic. Brunswick dropped a ball a million times on a synthetic lane and no damage. Wood would be another story. Still I prefer wood lanes.

    2. VinylToVideo do you have a link to the story where Brunswick dropped a million balls on a synthetic lane? I keep trying to tell people that lofting the ball does not really damage synthetic lanes

  2. I saw Varipapa at a newly expanded Palladium Bowl in Seattle back in the 1950s. He was amazing.

    1. If he saw him, let’s say, in 1955 and was 10 years of age, he is now aprox 66 and if he saw him when he was 20, he would be 76. I say that is possible.

  3. Andy Varipapa was, and always will be, the greatest bowling trick shot artist of all time. He didn’t have just one insane trick, had an entire repertoire of trick shots.

    1. @Jake Snussbuster well i assumed that the description of it was describing backup bowling but I see that he is talking about the celebration

    2. I can go flat on my back with my feet pretty much level with my hips (probably damaging my knees in the process) but I can’t get up as fast as he could.

  4. Andy did a similar shot to Barnes’s back in day. And Andy’s shot that they showed here had a touch of Norm’s shot with the slow roller but just done with his foot instead. Ambidextrous Andy then shows off how good he was with both hands. By the way, later in his life, his health would not let him use his right arm. So he started playing the rest of his life with his left arm. He was still averaging in the high 180s. Impressive! Watch some of the old trick shot videos he did. I’m gonna have to go with Andy on this one.
    https://youtu.be/fzjPcVZRCxA

  5. Honestly as impressive as it looks I think the flying Eagle would be the easiest for me to pull off. I could possibly pull off the over the chair shot depending on how far down the lane it is but the other two I’d have no shot at.

    1. So that chair is sitting around 22-23’ downlane, and with the height of the chair; you’d have to land the ball 35’ or so to have a shot. Oh, and you have to strike. Good luck! Lol

  6. All amazing. Norm Duke’s though had so much that had to go right. The slow ball had to stay in the middle. He had to throw a backup ball around the first ball. And that ball had to clear the pins away just right for the slow ball to have just enough pins that it could knock them over moving so slow. The sheer amount of power Palerma needed to clear that chair and rev the ball enough to get it back to the pocket was unreal, though.

  7. When I was a kid I remember seeing a guy on TV who picked up 7-10s using a ball in each hand and bouncing them off each other in mid lane, and he could repeat it too.

  8. I didn’t realize how amazing the ‘over the chair’ shot was until I saw it from the side and realized how far he had to throw that ball!!!!

  9. I’ve known of Andy Varipara for forty years. He has more tricks than the whole PBA constituency and membership put together. Andy was and still is the best.

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