This is a completely different type of Toteboard post.
A Brilliant Career
William Joseph “Billy” Welu was one of the top competitive bowlers during the 1950s and 1960s, a time when recreational bowling enjoyed unprecedented popularity across the country. It was also a time when the professional sport was transitioning from a league-based model (under the auspices of the American Bowling Congress) with traveling teams sponsored by beer and liquor companies, catch-as-catch-can local events, and intermittent syndicated television programs, to the formation of the Professional Bowlers Association in 1958, which would eventually develop a national touring circuit with big-ticket weekly individual tournaments, culminating in a live national telecast every Saturday afternoon of the four-match final round. Billy Welu was one of the few performers who made his mark in both phases of bowling’s evolution. He won his first local tournament as a teenager in Houston in 1952, and won three more in Texas the following year, eventually serving legendary stints in the “Falstaffs” and the “Budweisers,” the two most dominant teams of the era. As a charter member of the PBA, Billy continued his success as a team bowler, but also eased seamlessly into the new tournament format, winning a pair of big events early on. His most significant performance milestone was probably his back-to-back 1964 and 1965 victories in the prestigious ABC Masters tourney, a feat that would not be duplicated for the next 48 years. He also made the finals five times in the granddaddy of them all, the Firestone Tournament of Champions, once rolling a perfect 300 in the initial round. In its final volume of 1999, Bowlers Journal International ranked Billy the 22nd greatest bowler of the 20th century. Maybe not quite up there in the rareified air with legends like Don Carter and Dick Weber, but placing ahead of such memorable names as Ray Bluth, Johnny Petraglia, and the well-loved Carmen Salvino.
At 6’4” and 230 pounds (on a lean day), Bill Welu regularly towered over his opponents and interviewers, and one might have expected that he would muscle through his matches on raw power alone. But to the contrary, Billy adopted a measured and fluid style, almost gentle by today’s standards, where he emphasized control and finesse more than velocity and spin. He was also one of the sport’s first true technicians, perhaps even its first intellectual. Bowling with a single ball on wooden surfaces with unstable shellac or lacquer coating – today’s game allows players to use multiple balls on synthetically designed surfaces to produce inflated scores, i.e., a “chicks dig the long-ball mindset – Billy studied the mathematics behind the movement, and often observed his peers at length through binoculars to see how their mechanics influenced the ball’s rotation and finish. One can catch glimpses of Billy’s accuracy, consistency, and smooth technique in rare extant footage of head-to-head competition, but no more so than in his miraculous on-camera conversion of what is essentially an unmakeable split. For those who appreciate the subtleties of bowling, Billy was nothing less than an artist.
A Brilliant Second Career
Billy Welu was not only a splendid bowler, he was also a tremendous ambassador for the sport. In addition to serving as PBA president for two years, he regularly participated in charitable events, conducted bowling clinics, and gave exhibitions at schools, military bases, veterans hospitals, and the like, literally traveling hundreds of thousands of miles in the US and abroad. On one of his outings, Billy was the keynote speaker at a tournament sponsored by the American Blind Bowling Association. On another, he led a group of fellow pros for a tournament in Venezuela, at a time when South American politics were especially volatile and Yankees were not universally welcome, though he reportedly disarmed tensions by thanking his hosts and accepting trophies in fluent Spanish. His adventures also occasionally brought him into close contact with an incongruous collection of celebrities. At the 1959 opening of a much-hyped new bowling mega center in Dallas, Billy posed for a now iconic photo with the reigning Hollywood bombshell Jayne Mansfield and her daughter, the future model and sometimes actress Jayne Marie Mansfield. On more mundane (but practical) matters, Billy lent his name to an assortment of bowling paraphernalia and even wrote a book (actually, more like a lengthy photographic primer) on how to improve one’s bowling game
For all of the executive positions, travels, photo ops, and celebrity endorsements, Billy’s best known ambassadorship almost certainly came when he landed a permanent gig as the color commentator for ABC’s live network broadcasts of the Pro Bowlers Tour, teaming with the affable but wooden (and comparatively diminutive) Chris Schenkel. With his mellow voice, southern-midwestern drawl, and easygoing delivery, kind of like a cross between Gomer Pyle and Lyndon Johnson, Billy proved to be a natural behind the microphone. Each week, he would patiently explain both the basics and the nuances of the game, like what happens when you hit the head-pin on the “nose” or on the “Brooklyn” side, what the difference was between playing the “inside line” and “outside line,” how the lane conditions would influence each bowler’s strategy, and so on. Most memorably, Billy brought some folksy expressions into bowling vernacular. To describe a light hit on the head-pin by a ball with heavy rotation, Billy would say, “Hit ‘em thin, and watch ‘em spin.” Or in admonishing a bowler to have confidence that his ball will hook after it’s thrown deeply to one said of the lane, “Trust is a must or your game is a bust.” Once Billy’s sometimes comical but knowledgeable persona was established, he began recording bowling tips with occasional novelty shots thrown in, like picking up single pins in two adjacent lanes using only one ball (!), a trick he probably learned fifteen years earlier from his Budwisers teammate Don Carter.
May 16, 1974 . . .
About a month after the 1974 Firestone Tournament of Champions, and a month before the beginning of the PBA summer tour, Billy Welu was dead. The Associated Press reported that Billy had died of a heart attack, at the age of 41. The New York Times and other newspapers ran brief obituaries, generally relegated to the back pages, as most sport journalists barely acknowledged bowling as a “real” sport.
At that time, it was unusual, but not unheard of, for someone that young to die of a heart attack. Back before the widespread availability of sophisticated diagnostic and interventive medical resources, back when we all thought pastrami sandwiches were healthy, it seems like just about everyone had a relative or neighbor or friend of a friend who had died much too young of a heart attack or complications related to heart disease. Billy’s was actually one of several celebrity deaths that occurred at roughly the same time – Wally Cox, Bobby Darin, Cass Elliot, Richard Long, Rod Serling, and Allan Sherman – all dying from heart problems, all in their 30s or 40s (except for Serling, who was 50). The bowling world was devastated, grieved, and reluctantly moved on.
Some years later, the PBA established a small scholarship in Billy’s name, which continues to this day, as do the many testimonials to his memory. Billy’s broadcast partner Chris Schenkel wrote: “Billy Welu's expertise and beautifully placed humor elevated the quality of our ABC ‘Pro Bowlers Tour’ telecast for 13 years. Billy was bowling's most effective ambassador, teaching amateur and professionals alike, showing his uncommon skills, his knowledge of all phases of the sport. With Billy's untimely death, I lost a best friend, a colleague, and we all lost one of God's gifts to the human race.” Likewise, Billy’s successor in the broadcast booth Nelson “Bo” Burton Jr. remarked in an interview: “Welu was just a terrific guy. He had the voice, the brains. He kind of molded the tour and the professionalism of it. Billy had the charisma and he had the brains, and everybody liked Billy. Just a world-class guy.”
May 28, 1974 . . .
Although the information apparently never found its way into the newspapers, an autopsy subsequently revealed that Billy did not die of a heart attack; rather, he died of an intentional overdose of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate that is currently used in euthanasia, assisted suicide, and executions. As unlikely as it sounds, William Joseph “Billy” Welu, a man who appeared to be riding high both personally and professionally, who had earned the respect and affection of colleagues and fans alike, and whose two hugely successful careers took him on adventures all over the world, had taken his own life.
If there was any buzz in the bowling world about the backstory to Billy’s suicide, it never really found its way into the public record. Some have suggested that he was despondent about having been passed over by the American Bowling Congress Hall of Fame – though the year after his death, he would finally be inducted, into both the ABC Hall and the stellar inaugural class of the Professional Bowlers Association Hall of Fame. Others have wondered if it had to do with an injury that may have prematurely curtailed his competitive career – he reportedly tore a tendon in his bowling arm and once competed with an arm full of Novocain. But all of this was, of course, just speculation.
And Now . . .
And so the Toteboard would like to consider a different perspective on Billy’s tragic demise, one that it offers with nothing but admiration, compassion, and empathy. Simply stated, the Toteboard is wondering if it is possible that Billy was a closeted gay man, who was living a distressed and lonely interior life, and who because of that just did not see a way forward? In retrospect, Billy did check a number of boxes that corresponded to the gay stereotypes of the era. He was raised Catholic and attended parochial schools, he never married or had children (which was highly unusual during the “marriage boom” of the 1950s and early 1960s), he displayed somewhat unusual body language, and he sometimes dressed flamboyantly, once competing (off-camera) in purple and chartreuse trousers, a marked contrast from the ill-fitting King Louie jerseys he wore for those televised Championship Bowling matches.
Whatever Billy’s story may or may not have been, the competitive bowling world would have been an especially difficult place for a gay man. With its center of gravity in the Midwest and South, the PBA (which was founded by a sports agent from Akron, OH) began as a fundamentally conservative organization, with strictly enforced rules about clothing and comportment (e.g., a bowler could even be fined for failing to try hard enough during a charity event). Needless to say, there were no “open secrets” about gay men and women in that environment like there were in Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Five decades after Billy’s death, one can still detect elements of the parochialism that pervaded the sport’s cultural milieu. In a private correspondence last year, a prominent bowling writer – yes, there is such a thing – shared his perception that Billy was likely both gay and closeted, but also added that “it would be shameful of me to cast such an assertion in anything I wrote about him” without “direct evidence of this.” While the author’s intention was clearly to respect and protect Billy’s legacy, he also betrayed an attitude that strikes the Toteboard as sadly retrograde. There is no “shame” in the possibility that Billy (or anyone else) was gay. Where the “shame” truly lies is in the religious and cultural norms that can create such turmoil for a person who is unsure of his or her sexual identity, norms that make it next to impossible for a person to trust that his or her own community will not withhold support with the revelation that he or she might be gay. And trust, as Billy Welu so often said, is a must.
And regardless of whether or not Billy was gay – remember, this is really all still conjecture – this story reminds us of the too many LGBTQ people whose names we do not know, but who over the years have been unfairly denied the opportunities to live their lives fully. It reminds us that the rate of attempted suicide among LGBTQ teens is still significantly higher today than it is for other teens. And it reminds us that LGBTQ people are more fearful in today’s political climate than they have been for a long time.
On a final note, the Toteboard would like to make clear that the purpose of this reflection has not been to “out” Billy Welu; it has been to dignify the man and his life, and perhaps to shed some light on the struggles that may have caused him to prematurely end that life. Billy was an accomplished bowler, an expert broadcaster, and, according to those who knew him well, a fine human being. This is someone the Toteboard wishes it could have known. And it wishes that there were some way to turn back the clock and prevent that tragedy from occurring.
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