More than 20 years before any University of South Carolina varsity team ever won a national championship, a club sport team at USC competed against the nation’s best and came home with gold medals.
It was 1976 — 50 years ago — that the men’s bowling club posted a perfect 10-0 record in regular season play in the Southeastern Intercollegiate Bowling Conference, then went on to win it all at the national tournament held in Oklahoma City. In the final match, the team defeated the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee by 66 pins.
“They put the gold medallions around our necks,” says Steve Adams, a member of the winning five-man bowling squad. “We felt like Olympic champions, at least I did. I think everybody else did, too.”
Adams was a graduate student in accounting who had served a combat tour in Vietnam and earned a bachelor’s in business before joining the bowling club. His younger teammates nicknamed him “Old Man,” and he assigned nicknames to them, as well.
Matt Culbertson, a Naval ROTC student from Rhode Island, was dubbed Batman. Jeff Bellinger was Big Bell, and Mike Bruce was nicknamed Silk for his smooth style. David Leadbitter earned the moniker of Superman after his heroics at a particular match against N.C. A&T University.
There were many more members of the men’s bowling club, but those five consistently had the highest bowling score averages that year and bowled in nearly all of the matches with competing schools.
How much attention did the bowlers receive when they returned from Oklahoma City in triumph?
“We weren’t expecting thousands at the airport when we returned, but we thought we might get a splash in the newspaper,” Adams recalls. “But the Gamecock baseballers got invited to the regional tournament and got the headlines. Now, they didn’t win the regional tournament — they were just invited to it. We won a national championship and got a small paragraph.”
That fall, the bowling squad was invited to appear during halftime ceremonies at a football game at Williams-Brice Stadium, but even that moment didn’t turn out so well.
“We walked out onto the field and heard just a tremendous uproar down in the corner of the end zone,” Adams says. “I just sort of waved, thinking yeah, we’re great. I asked my dad the next day, ‘Was that great or what?’ And he said, ‘Well, once you got out there and they started to make the announcement, cheerleaders started throwing those little footballs up in the stands. And students went so crazy that you couldn’t hear a word that was going on. So nobody had any idea what y’all were doing out there.’ So there went our 15 minutes of fame.”
All five members of the winning team returned to Carolina the next year but couldn’t quite conjure the same magic as the year before. They made it to the national tournament again but finished in fifth place. As the years went by, interest in the bowling club tapered off and the bowling alley on Assembly Street where the team had practiced and competed closed. USC’s bowling club turned out the lights, as well.
Still, for a shining moment 50 years ago, the Gamecocks were national champions in the game of strikes and spares.
Pictured: Matt Culbertson, photo courtesy of Garnet & Black yearbook