After a few years of being close, Raymond Teece has finally reached the Storm Lucky Larsen Masters finals and given himself a real chance to win the first PBA Tour title of his career.
Teece reached the quarterfinals at Olympia Bowling last year before losing to eventual champion Sean Rash. This time, he made it through two Sunday final stages and two match-play rounds to become one of the last four players standing.
Raymond’s run to the TV finals is no coincidence—he feels right at home in Sweden.
When Teece walks onto the tv pair on Monday night, his Swedish League teammates will be behind him at Olympia Bowling, while his parents are travelling from England to keep a promise made to Raymond and his brother Richie when they were young.
They promised their sons that if either of them reached a PBA Tour final, they would be there to watch. They kept their word when Richie won the 2017 PBA Shark Championship. Now, it is Raymond’s turn.
Teece will face Sweden’s Carl Eklund in the semifinal, two wins away from joining his brother among PBA Tour champions.
After years of work, near misses and what he calls “emotional torture,” the opportunity means far more than one night of bowling.
A Tournament of Ups and Downs
Teece made an immediate impact by bowling the first 300 game of the tournament during Squad 9. However, the perfect game did not lead to the six-game total he wanted.
“The tournament, I feel like it’s had its ups and downs,” Teece said. “It started early with the first 300 of the tournament. I didn’t take the opportunities that I had in that squad to start with. I played another squad and didn’t really make much of it.”
Teece then took a few days away from competition and spent time with family in Sweden. He returned on Thursday and produced the score he needed, helped by a big final game. Confident that it would be enough, he did not enter another qualifying squad.
“I just thought, ‘Let’s just start on Sunday and see what happens,’” Teece said. “Just keep going until I don’t get any further.”
His Sunday began in Final Step 1. Teece advanced through that round and Final
Step 2 before earning the fifth seed for match play.
He defeated 2024 SLLM runner-up Teodor Samuelsson 699-614 and then ended qualifying leader Tomo Gaber Pinteric’s run with a 604-580 victory.
“The Biggest Two Games of My Career”
Teece reached the quarterfinals in Helsingborg last year before losing to eventual champion Sean Rash. This time, he has taken the next step and will compete in his first SLLM tv finals.
“Which leads into, as you say, two games now—the biggest, potentially two games of my career,” Teece said. “It’s what you train for. It’s what you work towards. It’s what your dream is, and it’s what you’re aiming to do.”
He knows how much is at stake, but his plan is to narrow his attention to the things he can actually influence.
“I’m just going to try and focus on what I can control,” Teece said. “But if it all goes well for me, if it works out for me, then it would be a dream come true. It would be a lifetime of dreaming, a lifetime of working and a lifetime of, shall we say, emotional torture through my career to get here, and hopefully take it home.”
The Messenger Came When It Mattered
Teece joked that he did not receive his first messenger of the tournament until the quarterfinal. It arrived when he needed it most, but he does not believe luck—or a lack of it—tells the full story of his week.
“It was kind of sweet, because last year I got so close and I was using a completely different set of skills,” Teece said. “This year, it’s almost like the opposite, trying to use different angles, different speeds and different ball rolls to manage what’s in front of me.”
Instead of waiting for the lanes to suit his game, Teece has focused on adapting to each situation and making the right decisions before the pins determine the rest.
“I’ve been able to control the pocket when I’ve got the ball off my hand,” he said. “It’s just been a matter of making sure I make the decisions at the right time and just staying out of my own way, as it would be for anyone in that situation.”
“It would be nice if the lanes, for lack of a better phrase, suited me, but in this day and age, it’s not really possible, I don’t think, to properly suit one style of play because there are ways and means of attacking it. It’s just a matter of the pins falling the right way.”
The one-game semifinal between Teece and Eklund begins as part of Monday’s
final show at 7 p.m. local time.
Tomas Käyhkö and Albin Gullstrand will meet
in the other semifinal before the two winners bowl one game for the title.
The entire show will be streamed live on the
Storm Lucky Larsen Masters YouTube channel.
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