PBA Hall of Famer Sean Rash ended the 2025 PBA Tour season by winning his 18th career title in Helsingborg, Sweden on Sunday night. This marked his first PBA Tour title in four years since his 2021 PBA Chesapeake Open win.

I have to tell you, fellow reader, that moments before the first match play round, a strange feeling wouldn’t let me go that Rash might go all the way to the title.

The idea was based more on feel than on solid arguments, but seeing how Rash was comfortable on a very simple, yet, demanding oil pattern we've been used to see 10-15 years ago, only strengthened that feeling.

Rash seemed to be enjoying the conditions on the lanes. Even though he did not win any squad, he was scoring well right from the beginning, eventually earning a bye to Final Step 2 after his second try on the lanes with 1,367 total.

When I shared the idea with my colleagues, they nodded that they had the same feeling.

Rash’s calmness clearly showed he had found something others didn’t. Plus, with his experience, he avoided the bad decisions, unnecesarry bal change and mistakes. It didn’t take long for the scoreboard to reflect it.

What once was just a feeling started to take shape when Rash successfully passed both match play rounds, defeating Finland’s Kaaron Salomaa 606-567 and later England’s Raymond Teece to advance to the final four.

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Semifinal: Rash vs Purches

Once the finals stage was set at the iconic Olympia Bowling, Sean Rash stepped on the lanes in the opening semifinal against 2024 Rookie of the Year Nate Purches.

Before his first PBA TV finals appearance, Purches said that he wanted to have some fun. However, the fun was hardly seen in either player’s face or body language as they both struggled to strike.

Even without strikes, Purches managed to build a lead to the ninth frame. The feeling about Rash’s title started to fade. The veteran struck in the ninth and tenth frames to keep his hopes alive, but all Nate needed was a mark.

The first shot went way high, leaving the 3-6-9-10. Nate looked devastated, but Cristian Azcona, sitting in the crowd, was quick to calculate that Nate needed a mark and shouted to Nate to calm down and take the spare.

Nate fired. The ball went right through the 3 and 6 pins, knocked down the 7, but the 10 pin stayed. The crowd sighed as Nate’s dreams of playing for his first PBA Tour title shattered in the most brutal way possible.

Semifinal: Anderson vs Rissanen

Nevertheless, any shock faded quickly with the second semifinal starting. Almost Sweden’s local, Andrew Anderson took his second SLLM semifinals appearance since 2023 against Finland’s Juho Rissanen.

Anderson stepped on the lanes as a clear favorite to win the title, as he plays for local club IS Göta in the Swedish Elitserien. Anderson not only knows the lanes very well, but he has also earned the crowd’s love, which can definitely help knock pins down, especially in hard conditions like these.

But the label of favorite carries no guarantees, especially when just ten frames decide the outcome.

Anderson could not convert two splits in the early stages of the match, meanwhile Rissanen played the most stable game of the whole TV finals, defeating Anderson 213-189.

“Pretty cool,” Juho Rissanen said, summing up his feelings after defeating Andrew Anderson to advance to the finals against Rash.

Injury Almost Cost a Title

For those who have never been part of these kinds of events, you would probably be interested to know that during the semifinals, the advancing player does not calmly wait for the final. Instead, they get a separate lane to practice.

Rash went to practice and what happened there almost cost him the title.

During the opening shot of the final, Rash missed left, and the ball looked like it slipped off his hand. Rash instantly grabbed his palm and from his facial expression you could clearly see he was in pain.

Rash taped his sore hand and rolled it after each shot with a massage roller. It seemed like he couldn’t hook the ball properly, as Rash continued to aim directly at the 3-pin with minimal rev rate.

This spare-like straight shot turned out to be an efficient. Rash led the whole game, eventually needing just a mark to shut out Rissanen. Then Rash threw three straight strikes to clinch the title.

Injured, in pain, and forced to adapt his throw just to reach the pins, Rash resembled a car running on its last reserves. Yet that machine still made it to the destination no one else could.

“This one’s for the old guys, I guess,” Rash said claiming the trophy.

Right after the win, Rash sat in a chair to absorb the moment. From the crowd, Kyle Troup handed him a phone - on the line was the one person Rash most wanted to share the victory with: his wife.

“My anxiety started to take over my mind. I called my wife, and she said, ‘Mind over matter. You got this, do what you can,’” Rash recalled claiming the trophy.

For his triumph, Rash collected 165,000 SEK (about $17,500 USD).

The award ceremony featured Storm Products Inc. CEO Barbara Chrisman and President Tyler Jensen. Given that Storm and Rash parted ways earlier this year after his complaint regarding a vaping incident, receiving the prize and trophy from company leaders added another layer to the moment.

On his way to claim the trophy, Rash embraced each tournament official, but when it came time to receive the trophy from Tyler Jensen, the moment was noticeably more formal than the rest of the celebrations.

There’s a lot of talk around Rash as a player and as a human. You might love him or hate him, but Rash has bowled here in Europe for more than two decades, including numerous competitions at the Super Six Tour here in the early 2000s, showing how much it means to him to bowl not only in the U.S., where he now has 18 PBA Tour titles, but also in Europe. That is why he is in the Hall of Fame.