Simonsen, 19, aims to become youngest to win bowling major

Anthony Simonsen likes to joke he’s been bowling since before he was born. That’s because his mom was in a bowling alley at nine months pregnant with him when his dad bowled one of his several perfect games.

Nineteen years later, Simonsen has an opportunity to accomplish his own historic feat in the bowling alley. A victory Sunday in the United States Bowling Congress Masters will give him his first major title, and it will make him the youngest bowler ever to win a Professional Bowlers Association major. He’ll be the No. 1 seed in the stepladder final, which airs live at 1 p.m. Sunday on ESPN from Woodland Bowl on Indianapolis’ north side.

In reality, Simonsen fist rolled a bowling ball when he was 3. He bowls today the same way he did then: with two hands. He even has “#TWOHANDS” on the collar of the red, white and blue bowling shirt he wore Saturday.

“Just being so young and little, I couldn’t really get the ball down there with one hand,” Simonsen said, so he put his “other hand on it and started giving it a roll from there.”

But, still, didn’t anyone try to correct him? Both his parents were league bowlers. And he bowled competitively in a bumper league starting around 3 or 4 years old, still in a formative phase where his style could be adjusted.

“No, they just kind of let me do my own thing,” Simonsen said. “My parents would hang out in the bowling alley, and when they’d bowl in leagues, I was on the other end of the lanes where nobody’s bowling. They were like, ‘Hey, just get out of our hair.’ I would just bowl and bowl and bowl, and it stuck.”

Bowling with two hands is becoming more common and acceptable. Three-time defending Masters champion and two-handed bowler Jason Belmonte has 12 titles and 17 career PBA 300 games to his name.

Exit one two-handed bowler and enter another. Belmonte was eliminated Saturday, while Simonsen grabbed the No. 1 seed for the stepladder final.

Simonsen, of Princeton, Texas, earned the top seed by beating Canadian amateur Dan MacLelland in the final of the winners bracket. Before that, he pulled off a stunning comeback in the third game of the semifinal, winning 664-602 against Wes Malott, who knocked off Belmonte to start the day.

Simonsen trailed by 53 pins, 451-398, after the second game against Malott. But he said a bowling match is never over, with the three-game total pin fall format. He’s seen people in the past, he said, bowl a 250, then fall down to a 180, and vice-versa.

As for Connor Pickford and Kyle Troup, Simonsen’s tour roommates when his girlfriend isn’t with him, they knew from experience not to count him out.

“Nothing’s ever over with this kid,” said Pickford, who won October’s Mark Roth/Marshall Holman PBA Doubles Championship with Simonsen. “When it gets down to the nitty gritty, he can make shots. And when you make shots like that under pressure and put pressure on your opponent, things can sway the other way.”

For Pickford, who was following the match on his way to the bowling alley with Troup, it was after the sixth frame that he thought Simonsen could pull off the comeback. Simonsen had opened the third game with seven straight strikes and finished with nine for a 266.

“I asked Kyle on the way here, ‘Does Simonsen even know what he’s doing? Or is he just bowling?’” Pickford said. “‘And Kyle says,’ ‘He’s just bowling.’ Every game is just another game of bowling for him. And when you look at it that way and you keep your eyes on the moment, that’s when you succeed.”

Simonsen joined the PBA Tour in 2013 at 16 years old when he dropped out of high school late in his freshman year. He had “some family stuff back home” (Simonsen declined to talk about it more in-depth) and felt if he was going to start bowling for money to support himself, he said, the timing just worked out. He’s earned one title, the doubles championship with Pickford, and $41,030. A win in the Masters will pay out $50,000.

As for whether dropping out of high school and joining the PBA Tour was the right decision, he said: “These are the best bowlers in the world, so you can’t just come out here and expect to win.”

Potential trouble for Simonsen?

The stepladder final will be conducted on lanes 55 and 56 — out of 70 —on the right side of the bowling alley. Simonsen struggled on the far right-side lanes during qualifying, bowling a 138 and a 167. He had been throwing a urethane ball in those qualifying rounds.

After finding success with the reactive resin ball in the semifinal, he thinks he’ll stick with it, he said, but will see how practice goes tomorrow. Based on his positioning in the match play bracket, the farthest right he had to bowl was lane 40, and he averaged 224.2 during 18 match play games.

How will the stepladder final work?

The seeds are as follows: No. 1 Anthony Simonsen; No. 2 Dan MacLelland; No. 3 Chris Loschetter; No. 4 Wes Malott; and No. 5 Tom Daugherty.

Seed No. 5 will bowl against No. 4 in a one-game match. That winner will take on No. 3. Then that winner will bowl against No. 2, with the victor of that match advancing to the championship game against the No. 1 bowler. The top seed has lost the past two years.

The payouts for the Masters are: $50,000 for first place; $25,000 for second; $15,000 for third; $10,000 for fourth; and $8,000 for fifth.