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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A look at bowling Web sites
If you met Pete Weber, you'd never guess that he is "the loudest, most controversial and successful athlete you don't know," as ESPN's "SportsCenter" has called him. He is five feet seven and a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet, with a neatly trimmed mustache and thick, swept-back brown hair that's just starting to go gray. He looks like an electronics salesman. And, by some people's standards, he doesn't even play a sport: he bowls. Weber recorded his first 200 game at the age of eight, and his first 300 game at twelve. He dropped out of school to turn professional at seventeen. By 1989, as a twenty-six-year-old, Weber had earned a million dollars in record-breaking time; now forty, he is second all time in career earnings, with $2.4 million, and he's first in victories. But if you were to sit next to him in a bar, let's say in the Kansas City suburb of Raytown, Missouri, you might find him telling you, "I don't do much strenuous activity. That's just not my style." Then he'd probably drag on a cigarette before adding, "Now, hunting--I want to know what those guys do to stay in shape."
Weber's style, as a bowler, looks something like this: he begins his approach way over on the left, and takes five quick, almost mincing steps, his right arm reaching back well above his shoulder, before attacking the foul line with a mini-hop that leaves his left foot pointing, pigeon-toed, at the junction of the left gutter and the foul line--but only for a second, because soon he's drifting right, just like his ball. The ball, travelling slower than the high backswing might suggest, slides ominously toward the right-hand gutter, until, about ten feet from the pit, it appears to stop for an instant, then bites and hooks sharply, back into the pocket. The pins explode--they don't just fall--with a hollow thwock. Weber is a self-described "tweener," which means that he's neither a straight bowler (a misnomer; every pro throws some form of curve) nor a dead-hook bowler. But when the conditions are right--when the oil on the lane is giving him the reaction he needs, and if he likes "the characteristics of the house"--there is no one whose ball flirts with the gutter in the same time-stopping manner as Weber's. "I can do pretty much to a bowling ball what I really want to do with it," he says. "And to be successful, to be great in this game, you got to be able to finagle the bowling ball."
But it is Weber's other style--he likes loud shirts and gold chains, and wears sunglasses indoors--that has lately brought him, and bowling, a great deal of attention. This style accounts for why Weber is no longer able to sit in an airport bar, hundreds of miles from home, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, a hat, and his shades, and watch a golf tournament on TV without being accosted by camera-wielding fans. Around cameras, especially television cameras, Pete becomes someone named P.D.W. (his initials). P.D.W. isn't entirely unlike Pete Weber, but, in the words of his alter ego, he's "a little more colorful." He speaks in the third person: "That's right, and it's Pee Dee Dubya!" He taunts his opponents: "You better bring it!" He expends more calories after his throws--with fist pumps,...
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