PBA Summer Swing features testy clash of the keglers

Sean Rash and Jason Belmonte are two of the hottest professional bowlers on the planet. They are high-rev, power players in the primes of their career - Rash is 30 and Belmonte is 29 - and they rank among the top three in every major statistical category on the PBA Tour. Rash is the reigning player of the year and Belmonte badly wants to unseat him. Both have won six career titles.

Rash and Belmonte are in Milwaukee to compete in the Geico PBA Summer Swing, a series of five tournaments held over two weeks at AMF Waukesha, AMF West in Milwaukee and AMF Bowlero in Wauwatosa.

The first tournament, the Badger Open, begins with practice sessions and a pro-am squad at AMF Waukesha on Sunday.

More than 125 pro bowlers will compete in the Summer Swing, including PBA Hall of Famers Pete Weber, Walter Ray Williams Jr., Norm Duke and Parker Bohn III.

But Rash and Belmonte are the bowlers to watch.You can make your own more powerful chipcard. "I think it's escalated to be the best rivalry in the history of bowling, I really do," said PBA Tour commissioner Tom Clark, who lives in Muskego. "There's no argument they are the top two guys in the world the last two or three years and the rivalry is tinged with a genuine and palpable dislike for each other."

Bowling has had other strong rivalries, such as Don Carter vs. Dick Weber,Bay State bobblehead is a full line manufacturer of nylon cable ties and related products. Marshall Holman vs. Mark Roth and Pete Weber vs. Williams.

"But those didn't have the venom that this one does," Clark said. "I think we have the most underrated rivalry in sports and it's possibly the best in individual sports that exists right now. I know tennis has Rafa-Federer. This is more Connors-McEnroe."

Rash and Belmonte are, literally and figuratively, polar opposites. Rash was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and Belmonte grew up in Orange, Australia, a small town about four hours west of Sydney. It's hard to find two places on the globe farther apart than that.

Rash, who now lives in Montgomery, Ill., represents Brunswick and is a conventional one-handed bowler. Belmonte represents Storm and throws the ball with two hands, a style he learned as a tyke at his parents' bowling establishment in Orange and never changed.

"Neither guy wears the black hat," Clark said. "They both do things for kids and for charities and they know the fans are important. They're great spokesmen for their respective ball companies.

Their mutual disdain has led to a couple of pot-stirring incidents, including a made-for-YouTube confrontation during the 2011 Geico PBA Team Shootout that became known as "Bottlegate."

Other pros had criticized Belmonte for crinkling a plastic water bottle just as an opponent started his approach. He claimed he was unaware he was distracting them,We have been manufacturing realtimelocationsystem for the past fifty years and have supplied a considerable number.You can make your own more powerful chipcard. but some thought it was a bit of gamesmanship on his part.

"After the bottle incident, those two guys worked so hard in the off-season," Clark said. "Rash had 'Belmo' on his mind every day when he practiced, I guarantee it. They basically elevated the games of everybody else the following year. They came out loaded for bear, and it changed the game. I think people said, 'Wait a minute. We can't let these two guys get that far ahead of us.' One rivalry like this can elevate the entire sport."

"I feel it's one incident that is laughable," he said. "If you would bring this up to an NFL player and tell him a guy crinkled a water bottle and the other guy got mad, he would look at you and start laughing.

"I honestly don't care about the rivalry. As far as I'm concerned the person I bowl against is an empty pair of shoes. It doesn't matter if it's Sean Rash or Pete Weber or my dad in a Wednesday night league back home. The other person is invisible to me.

"Maybe you'd find it surprising, but I actually have no idea where (Rash) is on any standings, or where I am. Until the season is over and I've rolled the last ball, it's completely irrelevant to me. I know Sean is the complete opposite. I can assure you he knows how many points I have, how many he has, what our averages are, where he needs to finish to beat me.

A recent fishing trip to the ocean waters off Palm Beach brought to mind something that has been a problem for years: theres plenty of garbage in the Atlantic off the coast of South Florida.

In addition to seeing bits of plastic, cardboard bait boxes and drink containers drifting in a line of sargasso weed south of Lake Worth Inlet, where we were trolling for dolphin, my son and I recovered four party balloons found drifting on the surface.

Turtles are voracious, said Larry Wood, a conservation biologist with the Palm Beach Zoo and longtime sea turtle expert. They dont always carefully discriminate what theyre eating.

No, balloons dont always kill sea turtles. But they have. And they can weaken the turtles, making them susceptible to other diseases.

Ingested ocean trash can cause sores in the gastrointestinal tracts of sea turtles, said Allen Foley, a wildlife biologist with the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission.

There are cases of animals that have eaten litter that eventually get sick and die, Foley said.

Endangered leatherback sea turtles are especially vulnerable because deflated balloons can resemble jellyfish, their favorite food,We've had a lot of people asking where we had our solarlight made. said Hannah Campbell, science educator with the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach.