The EJ Tackett Question: What Golf Can Learn From Bowling’s Renaissance

I’ve been around professional golf long enough to recognize when an outsider holds up a mirror to the sport. EJ Tackett isn’t that outsider—he’s something more interesting. He’s the road not taken, the what-if narrative that reminds us golf’s dominance in the athletic world isn’t inevitable.

When I read about Tackett’s decision to leave Division I golf for professional bowling in 2012, my first reaction was the same as most golf people’s probably was: curious sympathy mixed with mild condescension. Professional bowling? But after sitting with this profile from Golf Journal, I think we’ve been looking at this story backwards.

The Talent That Could Have Been

Let’s establish the baseline: Tackett competed against Scottie Scheffler, Jordan Spieth, Xander Schauffele, and Justin Thomas at the 2010 U.S. Junior Amateur and Junior PGA Championships. That’s not fringe talent. That’s the same pipeline that’s currently dominating major championships. Scheffler has won three Masters in four years. Spieth won two majors before his 24th birthday. These weren’t hobbyists Tackett was playing against.

Yet here we are, thirteen years later, and Tackett is a four-time PBA Player of the Year with seven major championships and 27 tour titles—credentials that would make him a legitimate Hall of Fame candidate in any sport. But because he chose bowling, his Q-rating and bank account operate in a different universe entirely.

“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 and takes it to a different level.”

That quote stopped me. Not because it’s surprising—we all know professional bowling’s prize purses have historically been dwarfed by golf’s—but because it crystallizes something I’ve been thinking about for years: golf’s economic dominance isn’t a permanent condition. It’s a feature of our current ecosystem, not a law of physics.

A Sport Transitioning From Caravan to Jet

In my thirty-five years covering professional golf, I’ve watched the tour transform from something resembling Tackett’s bowling circuit—guys sharing hotel rooms, caravaning between events, building genuine friendships forged in road-trip proximity—to the current model of private jets and five-star isolation. There’s something lost in that translation, though I’m not naive enough to suggest we should romanticize financial struggle.

What strikes me about Tackett’s career arc is that he’s living in the professional bowling world I remember from early PGA Tour history. His comment that he’s “only recently stopped having to share hotel rooms” shouldn’t be a punchline. It’s an indicator that bowling still has something golf has largely abandoned: genuine community among competitors.

“We spend more time with each other than we do with our families. I’m gone 200 days a year. There’s a bunch of my buddies that are always getting dinner when we’re done, going for lunch, having a few beers, hanging out. It is fun, like having a family away from home.”

Having caddied for Tom Lehman in the ’90s and early 2000s, I saw the tail end of that era on the PGA Tour. There was real camaraderie. Players actually knew each other beyond the competitive sphere. Now? Players arrive Thursday, compete, and depart. The ecosystem has become more lucrative and less human.

The Athletic Credibility Problem

Tackett raises another point that deserves serious consideration: the perception gap between bowling and golf when it comes to athletic legitimacy. Both sports suffer from casual dismissal—”it’s not a real sport, you’re not that athletic”—but bowling catches more grief because spectators can, theoretically, play it themselves at the local alley after drinking beer.

This is absurd, obviously. The precision required at elite levels of both sports is nearly identical. Tackett’s explanation deserves wider circulation:

“On these harder patterns, we’ve got one, maybe two boards to hit — so you’re talking about 1-2 inches. Plus, you need the right speed, the right rev rate, the right rotation. Just like in golf — How much spin do I want? Draw or cut? Is this an 80 percent shot? — all these things get calculated into what you do.”

One to two inches of margin for error across forty frames. In golf, we understand that U.S. Open greens demand precision. We understand that Tour-level accuracy is superhuman. We should extend that same recognition to bowling.

What HBO’s “Born to Bowl” Really Means

The documentary series is the real story here. Golf had ESPN’s coverage and devoted cable channels for decades before streaming changed everything. Bowling is getting premium platform distribution right now, in 2024, when global sports consumption is fundamentally different than it was when golf built its media empire.

If “Born to Bowl” gains traction—and early indicators suggest it might—the economic model supporting professional bowling could shift meaningfully. Not overnight, but perceptibly. That’s when we’ll find out if Tackett’s sacrifice was strategic genius or well-intended misdirection.

From where I sit, having spent thirty-five years watching professional golf’s ecosystem, I’m betting on genius. Tackett picked the road less traveled at exactly the moment that road was beginning to get repaved.