The EJ Tackett Question: What Professional Golf Can Learn From Bowling’s Rising Star

I’ve spent 35 years around professional golf — caddied the bag, covered 15 Masters, sat in enough tower rooms to qualify as a weather expert — and I’ve developed a pretty reliable instinct for recognizing talent that transcends sport. So when I read about EJ Tackett’s rise in professional bowling, including his recent HBO Max documentary and his near-$500,000 earnings from five PBA Tour wins in 2023 alone, I found myself thinking about something that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough in golf circles: we might be looking at a cautionary tale about what happens when one sport fails to nurture its generational talent.

The numbers alone are staggering. Tackett competed against Scottie Scheffler, Jordan Spieth, Xander Schauffele, and Justin Thomas at the 2010 U.S. Junior Amateur and Junior PGA Championships — elite company by any measure. He was good enough to play Division I golf at Purdue Fort Wayne. By all accounts, the kid had game. Yet here we are in 2024, and Tackett has built a Hall of Fame resume in bowling — seven major championships, 27 tour titles, four-time and reigning PBA Player of the Year — while his former junior rivals are household names pulling down seven-figure purses.

The Path Not Taken

What strikes me most about Tackett’s candid explanation for his career pivot isn’t the money differential — though that’s certainly real and worth discussing. It’s his honesty about the grind: “I wasn’t seeing the results that I thought I should see. I hated school and just didn’t want to do it anymore.” He was commuting an hour each way, working at his parents’ bowling center, trying to balance it all. The system wore him down.

In my three decades watching golf, I’ve seen talented juniors flame out for similar reasons. The path from elite junior to tour professional isn’t just about skill — it’s about infrastructure, financial resources, and frankly, timing. Tackett made a rational choice. He knew he was elite at bowling and uncertain about golf. His parents owned a bowling center. The calculus made sense.

But here’s what gnaws at me: How many other Tacketts are we missing? How many genuinely talented junior golfers chose a different path because the early-career economics didn’t align, or because they lacked the financial cushion to grind through college golf and Q-School and the developmental tours?

The Parallel Play Paradox

One of the more revealing moments in this interview came when Tackett discussed the mental architecture of his sports. Both golf and bowling are what we call “parallel play” — you’re competing alongside someone but can’t actually influence what they do. His philosophy?

“I’m just out there trying to do the best I can. If someone is bowling really well, I might look at what kind of ball they’re using, where they’re standing to start, the line they’re playing, trying to get a better visual that might help me… If someone makes a split, yeah, I’ll give him a high-five, or if he bowls a 300 game, it’s like, ‘Good job — happy for ya.'”

This is the mindset we preach to tour players constantly. And yet, Tackett’s observation about camaraderie is worth sitting with. He notes that PBA pros spend 200 days a year on the road together, often still sharing hotel rooms to save money — a throwback to what the PGA Tour looked like in the ’40s and ’50s. There’s something to that. The financial reality of professional bowling has inadvertently preserved a closeness that modern professional golf, with its private jets and five-star hotels, has largely lost.

I’m not romanticizing struggle. But I’ve caddied for players who benefited enormously from that camaraderie — the informal coaching, the shared war stories, the brotherhood that comes from grinding together. There’s value there.

The Technical Crossover Nobody’s Talking About

What genuinely fascinates me is how Tackett articulates the technical parallels between his two sports. He’s 5-foot-8, 150 pounds — undersized by any measure — yet he generates serious power in both disciplines. His swing path mirrors his bowling approach. The footwork carries over. But more importantly, his language reveals a sophisticated understanding of biomechanics that extends across sports.

“They load up the left knee, and it straightens as they turn through the ball, and sometimes that left heel is coming off the ground. Then there’s the old term: ‘Wait on it.’ If you’re trying to make things happen too early in your swing, it throws your timing off and you get herky-jerky.”

I’ve heard Tour players describe their mechanics with far less clarity. This suggests something important: elite athletes in any sport develop pattern-recognition skills that transfer. Tackett’s ability to code-switch between disciplines speaks to genuine athleticism that transcends any single sport.

The Money Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Tackett won five times in 2023, including two majors, and earned roughly $460,000 — falling short of half a million. He acknowledged the disparity candidly:

“If bowling was making what golf made, I would’ve earned 15 or 20 million dollars before the FedEx Cup. It’s, like, dang, if we had bowling for, you know, half a million or even a million dollars in major championships, that revolutionizes the sport.”

The math is brutal. A player with Tackett’s resume — multiple majors, consistent excellence, Hall of Fame trajectory — would be a millionaire several times over in professional golf. In bowling, he’s comfortably middle-class, at least until recently.

This isn’t a criticism of bowling or praise for golf’s financial model. It’s a reality check. Professional sports economics follow eyeballs and tradition. Golf has both. Bowling is fighting upstream. The new HBO Max documentary might help shift that needle, even marginally. Media exposure drives sponsorship and viewership, which drives purses.

What This Means for Golf

The Tackett story should remind professional golf of something we sometimes forget: you’re competing for the world’s best athletes, not just the world’s best golfers. Every time a supremely talented 22-year-old looks at their options and chooses a different path, golf loses. Tackett clearly has regrets about that missed opportunity on the golf course — his words suggest he still wonders “what if?”

That’s not really a bowling problem. That’s a golf problem. Or rather, it’s a professional sports problem where luck, timing, and early-career economics matter as much as talent.

EJ Tackett is thriving. He’s found his sport, built a Hall of Fame resume, and maintained a respectable golf game in the process. Good for him. But the fact that he’s the exception rather than the rule — the elite junior golfer who got away — tells us something worth considering the next time we’re marveling at the depth of talent on the PGA Tour.