Former CT Bowling Standout Elected to PBA Hall of Fame

A professional bowler who made Windsor Locks his home during the prime of his career has been selected for the sport’s highest honor.

Pete Couture, a six-time winner on the Professional Bowlers Association Tour and two-time major champion on the senior tour, was elected to the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA) Hall of Fame Monday.

Couture, 70, was elected in the PBA50 Performance category based on his exceptional record for a minimum of 10 years as a “senior” competitor.

“I have a combination of elation and relief,” Couture said in a phone interview Tuesday from his Florida home. “I’ve been so close to getting in the last couple of years, missing by one vote last year. It’s hard to get 70 percent of the votes. This is the pinnacle for a PBA member; it’s the thrill of a lifetime.”

On the heels of a 24-year career as a PBA Tour competitor, Couture began his PBA50 career in 1995 when he earned PBA50 Rookie of the Year honors. He won the first of nine PBA50 Tour titles in Reno in 1996, and captured a pair of USBC Senior Masters titles in 1998 (when he was selected as PBA50 Player of the Year) and 2002.

“The biggest highlight had to be the 1998 Senior Masters title in Akron, Ohio, which paid $60,000 for first, because that was the last time it had big money involved,” he said. “It has gone backwards ever since, which is really a shame.”

A native of Maine, Couture had a taste of sports history a week before his 20th birthday, witnessing one of the most controversial boxing matches of all time.

“My father was a boxer, and I sat at ringside with Willie Pep for the Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston rematch in Lewiston,” he said.

Clay (now known as Muhammad Ali) won that fight with a first-round knockout which many boxing historians say never touched Liston; it has become known as “the phantom punch.”

Couture developed his bowling skills at the local and state level, winning more than 20 state and local association titles in Maine and Connecticut despite getting a relatively late introduction to the game.

“I didn’t bowl tenpins until I got out of high school, because I was a candlepin bowler as a junior bowler,” Couture said.

He became a PBA member in 1971, and moved to Connecticut three years later.

“That was the best thing I could have done for my career,” he stated. “Coming from Maine, I had to drive too far to bowl in the NEBA tournaments. You have to bowl against the best to get better. I was fortunate to come along at the right time; the PBA was very strong with 35 tournaments a year all over the country.”

He nearly gave up the sport in 1977.

“I bowled five events and didn’t do that well, and my final stop was Windsor Locks (known at the time as the Monro-Matic Open),” he recalled. “I made the finals, finished something like 16th (actually 11th) and that was going to be it, I was going to hang it up. The very next week, there was a $100,000 tournament in Garden City, N.Y., so I decided to go there, made my first TV show and came in second. I hardly missed a tournament for the next seven or eight years after that.”

That runnerup finish at the AMF Pro Classic kicked off a breakthrough year for Couture, as he wound up with five top-5 showings that season. Early in 1978, he finally made the national winner’s circle, defeating Hall of Famer Dave Davis in the finals of the Midas Golden Challenge in New Orleans.

He made quite a splash in his own back yard in 1979, finishing third in the BPAA U.S. Open at Bradley Bowl. He won two televised matches in the stepladder finals before falling to eventual champion Joe Berardi in the penultimate matchup.

He partnered with Tommy Hudson to defeat two of the all-time greats, Mark Roth and Marshall Holman, in the 1980 Showboat PBA Doubles Classic, then captured the Syracuse Open that fall.

Couture named the hard-throwing Roth as the toughest competitor he ever faced on tour.

“He helped change the sport, influenced a lot of young bowlers, and he was one of the toughest in the clutch,” Couture said. “When he needed a strike, it was always there.”

The 1981 Firestone Tournament of Champions put Couture and the legendary Earl Anthony into the record book. Each bowled a 205 in the quarterfinal match, then scored 40 apiece in a two-frame rolloff, necessitating the first double-rolloff in PBA Tour history. Couture nailed four strikes in the second rolloff to eliminate Anthony, then defeated Gary Dickinson in the semifinals before falling to Steve Cook in the championship match.

Victories in the 1982 King Louie Open and 1983 Kessler Open were his last triumphs on the regular tour. In 1990, he and Dave Husted teamed up to win the National/Senior Doubles in Reno, Nev.

In addition to six victories, Couture had three runnerup finishes and 11 other top-5 performances on tour before joining the senior circuit. He moved to Florida in 1993, after calling Connecticut his home for nearly two decades.

He will be inducted into the PBA Hall of Fame on Monday, Feb. 1, at Oklahoma’s Grand Casino Resort & Hotel as part of the FireLake PBA Tournament of Champions.

This will be Couture’s fifth Hall of Fame induction. He has previously been honored by the Connecticut State USBC Association (1993), Greater Central Connecticut Bowling Association (1993), American Bowling Congress (2004) and Florida Space Coast Bowling Association (2015).

“I’ve been fortunate, I’ve gotten to bowl in France and England, and on the senior tour in Japan,” he concluded. “If it weren’t for bowling, I may never have left the state of Maine.”

Photo courtesy of Pete Couture; video from YouTube