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McLaughlin wins 9th Match Game title in veteran matchup against Walton

By LONNIE McMILLAN Sports editor Veteran bowlers dominated the Wyandot Match Game Invitational this year, and in the end, Don McLaughlin won his ninth championship, beating five-time champion Brandt Walton twice Sunday at Wyandot Lanes. After losing in the quarterfinals, McLaughlin worked his way all the way through the losers’ bracket and then downed previously unbeaten Walton 636-595 and then 523-516. “It feels just as good,” McLaughlin said. “It was a lot of work this year. I went through a lot of matches to get here. After losing in round two and then coming all the way back to the finals and then winning, that’s quite an achievement.” Walton could not get things going, and McLaughlin took early leads in both series. In the first one, McLaughlin led 226-180 after the first game. After an open frame and a spare to start, he had strikes on eight of 10 balls to close out the game. Things were much different for Walton, who had three splits in a five-frame stretch. “I still felt like I had a shot in the first set,” Walton said. “I really felt only being down 30 or 40 pins, I was going to be OK. I could bounce back. He could make a mistake just as well as anybody, and he didn’t, and I just couldn’t get caught up, couldn’t get things lined up right.” Walton closed out his second game with three straight strikes for his highest score of the day, 216, but he only got three pins closer as McLaughlin bowled a 213. An open frame by McLaughlin in the sixth frame of the third game gave Walton an opportunity to get even closer, but in the end, he could not string together enough strikes to make that happen. McLaughlin clinched in the final frame on a strike in which the final pin fell late. That forced a winner-take-all second series, and McLaughlin again took control right away with a huge 223-152 advantage in the first game. Both bowlers had open fourth frames, but Walton had two more of them after that. “Some of it was me, the speed, and it felt like the lanes were slicker than normal,” Walton said. “The weather has been up and down, so it’s hard to say if it was me or the conditions or the weather. It’s tough. The situation just (Continued on page 5) (Continued from page 8) wasn’t good. The whole thing just didn’t play right for my game.” Walton started with five of six strikes to start his second game, but he had two splits leading to open frames after that, and McLaughlin added to his lead with a 214-202 advantage. Needing a huge effort to have any shot, Walton instead had four open frames in his final game. “I knew Brandt was having some trouble carrying and not hitting the pocket real well, so all I tried to do was just not give the pocket away,” McLaughlin said. “I just took up the 10 pins and picked them up. Making the spares, that was a big key.” The No. 1 seed with a 216.4 average, Walton ran through the winners’ bracket with four straight victories, scoring 667, 653, 595 and 664, but he simply could not get pins to fall Sunday even though he felt like he was throwing good balls. “Everybody kind of knows, and I know too, day to day, you never know what’s going to happen,” Walton said. “You’ve got to come out with that open mindset, and it just wasn’t my day. No matter what I did, I felt like I was hitting my mark.” After losing to No. 2 seed and brother Allen McLaughlin the quarterfinals 705-653, Don McLaughlin won seven straight matches, including the two against the fellow 58-year-old Walton. They also met in the 2010 finals with Walton winning that time. Losing 635-612 to Don McLaughlin on Saturday, Mike Brady was third. Aaron Van Horn finished fourth, and Tanner Brown took fifth. Van Horn and John Miller shared high game honors for the tournament with 300s, while Don McLaughlin’s 785 in the first round was the high series. “The older I get, the more it feels good to be able to do it,” Don McLaughlin said. “This is my 13th finals this year. It’s an unbelievable run for me. I just keep trying the best I can every year going forward. It gets harder every year the older you get. Brandt’s the same age, so it was an old guys battle. The final four of us were over 50, so we took out some of the younger guys, and we made jokes about it during the semifinals, about us being the old guys taking out the young guys.”