As Indy said to Mutt Williams after the latter is stung by a scorpion in the latest (and hopefully last) installment of the blockbuster Indian Jones film franchise, “When it comes to scorpions, the bigger the better.” The same apparently applies to the PBA’s Scorpion lane pattern, because on Sunday’s show, almost everything that was bigger, in fact, was better.

Our first case in point? Jason “Big Boy” Couch making his return to official Championship Round bowling (he did appear on…and win…the Chris Paul Celebrity Invitational to kick off the Tour season, but that was merely an exhibition). Couch squeaked onto the show by a mere three pins (how exciting must that position round have been…and there weren’t even any “scoring malfunctions!”), giving us a chance to see him in action once again, as he took on recent winner and Player of the Year candidate Brad Angelo in Match 1. Were it not for a bad rack on the right lane (the 1-2 were practically touching!) that caused a 7-10 split on a good pocket hit in the 5th, and then a weak 7-pin in the 7th, Couch would have defeated the red-hot Angelo and moved on to the semifinal. Instead, he bowed 225-212. But making the show is a good sign for Jason, especially with his favorite tournament (the Tournament of Champions) coming up soon.

So Angelo moved on to face Ken Simard, the man with (according to Randy and Rob) the biggest hands on Tour. And you know what they say about guys that have big hands, right? The have big…uh…rev rates. “Big Hands” Simard did not disappoint for, after closing out the tournament on Friday with games of 276, 279 and 300 (the 300 came against Angelo in the position round to vault Simard into second place), he proceeded to blister the front 10 strikes of the game (making it 22 in a row against poor Brad, who obliged by literally waving his towel in surrender), giving him the opportunity to become the 19th man in PBA history to roll a perfect 300 on TV. Quick feet in the 11th caused the ball to push too far down the lane before it hooked and he left the 8-pin (the 2-pin tripped out late), leaving Simard short of bowling immortality but with a 289-199 win (Angelo’s shot dried up and he never mounted much of a challenge) and a chance to take on the biggest of the big nasties in the field, Wes Malott, for the title.

Malott was making his third TV appearance of the season, and he’s made the show on all three of the different “pattern Championships” this year, so I guess that means he’s not only big, but really, really good. Unfortunately, no one can really call Wes the “Big Lucky” or the “Big Horseshoe” when it comes to bowling on TV and, I must say, based on the way Simard was bowling, I too felt like Wes’ chances were fairly slim again this week. But the big rev rate of Simard eventually began to play havoc on the oil, and his ball started hooking too big as early as the 2nd frame. A 4-6-7 (which he missed entirely, costing him four pins in count – which, coupled with a spare of the inconsequential 10-pin he missed on his fill ball, would have given him a tie) leave on a decent shot signaled the need to move even deeper and Simard eventually employed a shortened three-step approach on the right lane to compensate for the ball return being in the way.

The entire match was essentially a test of whether or not Simard could keep moving left faster than the lanes were breaking down versus whether or not Malott could finesse a strike out of his pocket hits on the left lane (which he mysteriously chose to finish on). Coming down to the 10th, Malott had a chance to close out the match with two strikes…and he almost did, except for the very familiar ringing 10-pin that seems to be following Wes around the country and popping up every time he needs a critical strike. Simard then had a chance to double in his 10th frame to win his first title and, after an extremely fortunate love-tap on the 10-pin on his first shot, he left a duplicate of Big Wes’ ringing 10 to lose the match and keep his very much unwanted 79-tournament non-winning streak alive. Maybe this is just the break Malott needed to jump-start his luck on TV. If so, he could have a very, very good season.

The bigger-is-better theme also applied to the championship match of the Women’s Series event. With big, bad Michelle Feldman taking on the relatively dainty Missy Bellinder, it was obvious in the early stages of the match that the dominant Feldman’s size and strength advantage on what had obviously become a blown-up inside-line specialist’s lane condition would be a pretty tall order for Bellinder to overcome. After jumping out to a huge lead in the first five frames, Feldman coasted to her second straight Women’s Series title 200-147 (she was the runner-up in the other event, by the way) and is clearly the big woman on campus for the class of 2008-2009.

Here are a few other items of note for this week’s show:
· Carmen Salvino was great in the booth this week and I also loved seeing the footage of him bowling during his heydey in the intro segment. But I wondered why this week’s 50 greatest segment did not feature him rather than Johnny Petraglia?
· Simard could have knocked Teata Semiz out of the Tournament of Champions with a win this week. Huh? I know there’s been a lot of criticism of the limited ToC field in the recent past, but Teata Semiz?
· Congrats to Norm Duke as well as Del Ballard, Jr. and John Handegard on their inductions to the Hall of Fame! Norm was a class act (as usual) in the booth during the semifinal match.
· I hope Michelle Wie (or her dad) weren’t watching the show.
· Can the players cut down on the swearing a little? I counted two more language slip-ups this week. It’s not that I’m so much like the Church Lady from SNL, but I have a feeling the reason we don’t get to hear the guys’ mikes very often is the production truck’s fear that they can’t censor themselves…which causes us to miss some really cool under-the-breath self-talk when the players are trying to figure out the lanes.
· How about putting the Women’s Series match on first? Having the ladies shoot 140’s because of the burned-up-by-the-guys lane condition probably isn’t helping generate excitement for watching them bowl on TV. Plus, having them bowl last feels a bit anticlimactic to me.
· Rob Stone mispronouncing Wii (pronounced “We”) as “Why.” I guess the twins are too young to be asking for one for X-mas?