Chris Horn: “In the 21st century, several University of South Carolina athletics teams have been crowned national champions. Women’s basketball and women’s track, baseball and equestrian have all reached the apex of their respective sport, some of them multiple times. But exactly 50 years ago, in 1976, another Gamecock team put it all on the line and won it all.
“I’m Chris Horn, and today on Remembering the Days, we’re honoring the team that feels like it never quite got all of its 15 minutes of fame for bringing home the gold. If you’re coming up blank trying to remember or guess which team it was, I’ll give you two hints. No. 1, it was a club sport team, not a varsity team competing. Hint No. 2, they played all their games in lanes — bowling lanes.
“It was the USC men’s Bowling Club that dominated competition in the Southeastern Intercollegiate Bowling Conference, then went on to beat the best of the best at the national tournament held in Oklahoma City in 1976. The club had lots of members, but only five students with the top bowling score averages were on the traveling team that competed in away matches against other universities and in the national tournament.
“The club bowled its home matches at Star Lanes, a bowling alley that used to be on Assembly Street near campus. It was where USC’s Arnold School of Public Health Research Center now stands.
“In 1976, the USC men’s Bowling Club found itself in a winning groove, posting a perfect 10-0 record before heading to the national tournament. Now, in the golden anniversary year of their triumph, the team members are sharing their memories.”
David Leadbitter: “From what we understood, we were one of the first teams of any sport, regardless of NCAA or club sport, anything, that we had one of the early championships in any men’s sport, and we were real proud of that accomplishment. But it really didn’t hit, I don’t think. It didn’t with me. It was kind of surreal.”
Chris Horn: “That’s David Leadbitter, one of the club’s champion bowlers. His teammate Steve Adams remembered their feat as a pinnacle achievement.”
Steve Adams: “They put the gold medallions around our necks. We felt like Olympic champions, at least I did. I don't know, I think everybody else did, too.”
Chris Horn: “Steve was a graduate student at Carolina and the oldest member of the five-man team that won the national bowling title. He had nicknames for the other four bowlers.
“Matt Culbertson, a Navy ROTC student from Rhode Island, was dubbed ‘Batman.’ Jeff Bellinger was called ‘Big Bell.’ Mike Bruce was nicknamed ‘Silk’ because of his smooth style, and David Leadbitter became ‘Superman’ after his heroics at a particular match against N.C. A&T University.
“Steve didn’t give himself a nickname, but his younger teammates obliged and called him, simply, ‘Old Man.’ I guess that was fair: Steve already had earned a bachelor’s degree and served a combat tour in the Vietnam War before joining the bowling club as a grad student in accounting.
“Matt Culbertson — Batman — was the youngest member of the five-man squad and had a singular claim to fame.”
Matt Culbertson: “I’m probably the only freshman that brought a bowling ball from Rhode Island with him. You know, I said, ‘Well, let me just try this.’ I was a pretty good bowler in Rhode Island, but I wasn’t sure, you know, what level of competition this was going to be. So I come down, and the first person I meet is Steve. And we start talking; I started bragging about how I’m going to come in here and I’m going to get on the team and all that. And he’s looking at me like some wet-behind-the-ears freshman. And so we get out there, and we start bowling. And he can see, he looks and says, ‘Wow, this kid’s pretty good. So maybe he will make the team.’”
Chris Horn: “I asked David Leadbitter, aka Superman, how old he was when he first started bowling.”
David Leadbitter: “Six. Dad was stationed in Panama, in the Canal Zone, and they had the lanes down there on base with kids doing the pins.
“So I spent my elementary years in Massachusetts — Western Massachusetts. And about the time we got up there, my mother was very lonely as I went to school then, started first grade up there. So she decided she needed a job, and there was a bowling center being built, so she got a job at the bowling center, and from there it just took off. Couldn’t get enough bowling out of my system.”
Chris Horn: “Leadbitter majored in international studies and history and met his first wife, Beth Martin, at USC. She was a biology major and bowled with the women’s club.
“Jeff Bellinger wasn’t interested at first in joining the bowling club at USC, but the club certainly wanted him. He had competed in bowling leagues in Columbia before enrolling at Carolina and had a reputation as a very good bowler.”
Jeff Bellinger: “I had no aspirations to bowl on a Carolina team or anything else. And almost the beginning of the second semester, I was walking into the bowling center, and somebody came running up to me that knew I’d bowled out of Fort Jackson and said, ‘Hey, listen, the Carolina team is going to Vegas. Do you want to go?’ I went, ‘We’re going to Vegas. Do we have to pay?’ ‘Oh, no, the school's paying for everything.’ I went, ‘I can do that.’ So I went home and looked, got my bowling equipment, went off to Vegas, and I ended up finishing fifth in that tournament. When I came back, they said, ‘Well, we want you to bowl for the team.’ And I went, ‘No, not really. Not really something that I want to do. I enjoyed the trip, though.’ So the following year I went down there, and David was there and a couple other people that I knew were there, and they said, ‘Well, why don't you bowl?’ And I went, ‘OK,’ so I'm pretty competitive about that kind of thing, and we started bowling. And anyway, it got down to where we ended up having a pretty decent team.”
Chris Horn: “Like David Leadbitter, Jeff Bellinger met his future wife, Phyllis, who bowled with the women’s club team at USC. After graduating in accounting, Bellinger went on to enjoy a 17-year career as a professional bowler, notching two national titles, 16 regional titles and one national senior title.
“So, you’ve met four of the members of that championship-winning bowling squad from 50 years ago. Sadly, Mike Bruce, the one known as Silk, passed away a number of years ago.
“Well, now let’s hear how they brought home the national trophy. As Matt Culbertson points out, the team’s winning chemistry was not the result of them hanging out together all the time.”
Jeff Bellinger: “The interesting thing is, when you look back at it, other than bowling, none of us did anything together.”
Matt Culbertson: “My time was pretty well in uniform doing stuff, you know, in ROTC. That was my other team, if you will.”
Jeff Bellinger: “And I never saw Mike. I never saw Matt. I never saw Steve. Now, David and I were good friends and — but we were good friends because we had bowled out of Fort Jackson together. So I saw David every once in a while. It’s not like a football team where everybody sees each other all the time and you get together. No. Monday, when the league started, we saw each other then, and we talked about what we wanted to do, and, you know, we’d have a little meeting after the — whoever the guys were going — and we'd talk about, you know, what we were going to do.”
Chris Horn: “They might not have been best buddies, but each of them had a particular skillset when they bowled, and they believed in each another. When they got to the national tournament in Oklahoma City, they knew the competition was stiff.”
Matt Culbertson: “We went to this tournament having really no idea because we never bowled with — I think the University of Florida was there — we didn’t bowl with any of these teams. They were hot shot teams from the West Coast, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And we just said, ‘Let’s go have fun.’”
Steve Adams: “There was a team from Santa Clara, and they only had one guy on the team that averaged under 210, and we only had one guy who averaged over 210. All the rest of us were below 200.”
Jeff Ballenger: “We had five guys that had nothing in common as far as how we threw the ball. We had one guy who threw the ball really hard and straight off the corner. We had one guy who threw — David threw the ball harder off the corner than you did. You can’t raise your hand on that one. (David Leadbitter: ‘That’s true.’) And then we had Matt who, (David Leadbitter: ‘We weren’t sure what he was doing.’) but we always knew that he was going to shoot somewhere between 195 and 205. So we just always knew he was going to be constant.
“And then we had Mike Bruce, who we called Silk because he was as smooth as he could be, and his ball would roll up to the pocket. And, you know, he always kept the ball in play. And then we had Old Man. He was always left of everybody else because his ball was always hooking more than everybody else.”
Chris Horn: “I guess Jeff was trying to say that if Fan Duel or Draft Kings had been around back then, it probably would not have been wise to bet the farm that the Gamecock bowlers were going to make it very far in the tournament, much less win the whole thing. They were very good, but great? The jury was still out.
“Things didn’t get off to a good start, either, especially for David Leadbitter. His wallet was pickpocketed on the way to Oklahoma City, his glasses got broken, and his favorite bowling ball got chipped. But he got the glasses repaired and found another ball that suited him.
“After qualifying play, the top six teams competed, and when the talcum dust had finally settled, USC had notched a 63-pin victory in the finals over the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.”
Jeff Ballenger: “When it was all over with, they said, ‘Well, we need to talk to your coach.’ And we went, well, that could be a problem. And they said, ‘What do you mean?’ We said, ‘We don’t have a coach.’ ‘Well, then we need to talk to your faculty rep.’ ‘Well, that might be a problem ’cause we don’t have a faculty rep out here.’ ‘Well, you can’t be here without a coach or a faculty rep.’ ‘That might be a problem because we’re already here, and we’ve already won.’ So the following year, when we qualified, they were kind enough to write us a letter explaining to us that if we did not have a faculty rep or a coach with us, that we could not participate.”
Chris Horn: “A photo of the Gamecock national bowling champions on the medal stand appeared in a bowling magazine, and back home in Columbia, they got some attention, but not as much as they might have hoped for. Here’s Steve Adams.”
Steve Adams: “We weren’t expecting thousands at the airport when we returned, but we thought we might get a splash in the local newspaper, maybe not headlines of the front page of The State, but maybe, maybe even headlines on the sports page. But Gamecock baseballers got invited to the regional tournament. Now they didn’t win the regional tournament, they were just invited to it. We won a national championship. We got a small paragraph.”
Chris Horn: “That fall, the bowling squad was invited to appear during halftime ceremonies at a football game at Williams-Brice Stadium. But even that moment wasn’t quite what they had imagined it would be.”
Steve Adams: “We heard a, just a tremendous uproar down in the corner of the end zone and all around — seemed like all around — the stadium, and I just sort of waved ... ‘Yeah, we’re great. We’re great.’ And, uh, we won the football game. And I asked my dad the next day, ‘What do you think? Was that great or what?’ And he said, ‘Well, the football game was pretty good, but y’all marched out there smartly, but once you got out there, 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.”
Chris Horn: “All five members of the winning team returned to Carolina the next year, but they couldn’t quite conjure up 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, the bowling alley on Assembly Street closed, and, eventually, 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.”