Darren Tang Wins PBA Chameleon Championship
The Twin Cities witnessed PBA history on Sunday night at Lucky Strike Lakeville.
Darren Tang won the PBA Chameleon Championship, the second title event of the PBA World Series of Bowling XVII, to claim his second career PBA Tour title.
Tang became the first player in PBA history to win PBA Tour titles as a one-handed and two-handed player.
The 32-year-old defeated Boog Krol, Santtu Tahvanainen, and Jason Belmonte to prevail in the 12-player bracket finals.
“I’m choked up. My family is here. My girlfriend is here. It means everything,” Tang said. “To bowl against the greatest of all-time, in my opinion, for my first two-handed title, it just doesn’t get better.”
There is an analogy to be made regarding Tang's first two-handed title coming in the Cameleon Championship. How he adapted to his surroundings, reinvented himself, and found a way to thrive.
Within the analogy, however forced it may be, lies a kernel of truth.
Tang was a one-handed player with an elite pedigree and a résumé that included collegiate All-American berths, Team USA nominations, more than a dozen PBA Regional Tour titles, and a PBA Tour title.
When he won the 2021 PBA Bowlerstore.com Classic, he compared his growth as a player to a slow climb up a mountain. His win, combined with leading the PBA Tour’s Summer Swing in points, meant he had finally reached the summit.
Tang spent the next three and a half years tumbling back down the mountain.
He finished the 2022-2024 seasons, respectively, ranked 28th, 40th, and 56th. He made zero championship rounds, sparse match play appearances, and inconsistent cuts, leading to infinite dissatisfaction.
After finishing in 50th and 91st place in the first tournaments of 2025, Tang had enough.
He switched to two-hands for the PBA Owens Illinois Classic, finishing 54th individually and seventh in the concurrent Roth/Holman Doubles Championship with Chris Via, a close friend who was a strong supporter of the change.
Tang netted a 16th place finish in his Nevada, just his third tournament as a two-handed player, and flirted with making the nine-player finals in the Tournament of Champions later that season.
In July, Tang finished third in the PBA/PWBA mixed doubles tournament with Li Jane Sin.
This season, Tang has cashed in nine of 12 tournaments and each tournament since March 23.
“I feel like I've been bowling really well since the Masters,” Tang said. “I've been knocking on the door for the last six events or so. If everything went the right way the last six months, I could have made five or six shows, because I found myself in the top five after qualifying a bunch of times. The biggest thing I've changed mentally is acceptance. Whether you strike, split, stone-8, or lose a match, you accept and move on. It's made it a lot easier for me to make better shots after leaving a split or missing a spare. Accept that it happened, move on and keep playing the game.”
During the qualifying rounds of the WSOB, acceptance paved the way for confidence to manifest.
Tang advanced to two animal pattern championship finals, including tomorrow’s PBA Scorpion Championship, and the nine-player AMF PBA World Championship stepladder finals.
“This was a really big week for me,” Tang said, “confidence wise by putting myself back in the position to be able to do what we do. I have the confidence that I will be able to make shows year in and year out now.”
He relied on an old adage from Wes Malott — that “you have to learn how to do everything in waves” — to help reset his mentality.
“You have to learn how to do qualifying. You have to learn how to bowl through match play. You have to learn how to learn how to make the show, and then you have to learn how to bowl on the show,” Tang said. “I took that to heart. I think I've figured out how to bowl in qualifying now, fairly consistently. The biggest thing is to give myself opportunities out here (on TV). Of course, I wanted to win, but the expectation wasn’t really to win. I’m going to gain experience no matter what, even if I don't win tonight, I have a show tomorrow. Even though I did win, I'm taking the experience from out here and definitely taking it in tomorrow and then the World Championship next month."
This mindset released the burden to win that he felt often throughout his career, unlocking a perspective that he also had when he won in 2021.
“I felt so free,” Tang said. “Obviously, there were nerves, but there wasn't really the pressure of winning like I put on myself in the past. I used to look at it as ‘you don't know how many of these opportunities that you're going to have, so you have to get it done now.’ That is just an enormous weight to put on your shoulders.”
This rediscovered freedom allowed him to take down a pair of two-handers, Boog Krol and Santtu Tahvanainen, whose carefree attitudes are a hallmark of their success.
Those wins allowed Tang, who qualified second, to meet the top qualifier Belmonte in the Race-to-Two championship match.
The match-up between the two-handed experiment and the two-handed revolutionary is almost too poetic to believe.
Belmonte has won 32 PBA Tour titles, including a PBA record 15 major championships and nine WSOB titles. He is a three-time Chameleon Championship winner and the only player to have won a WSOB animal pattern championship three times.
He is the reason why, even though only a handful of players bowled two-handed 20 years ago, most of the up-and-coming generation bowls with two hands.
Making it to a championship round, let alone three in a week, proved to Tang that he made the right decision 15 months ago.
But a win over Belmonte, the greatest two-hander of all time, would mark the final step in Tang’s return to the peak of professional bowling.
Tang bet his career, in many ways risking his livelihood, for a chance to return to the mountaintop.
On Sunday, Tang returned to the summit, far sooner than anyone, himself included, could have expected.
The reward proved to be far greater than any trophy or check could provide. Fortunately, he has two working hands to help carry it.
Players qualified for the televised bracket finals on Saturday, May 2 at Bowlero Brooklyn Park. Jason Belmonte, who has won the Chameleon Championship three times in his illustrious career, led the 120-player WSOB field during the 10-game qualifying round.
The top four seeds earned a bye in the bracket. In the Round of 12 and quarterfinals, two matches took place simultaneously. All matches prior to the Race-to-Two championship were single-game matches.
Match Results
Round of 12
No. 9 Mitch Hupé def. No. 8 Anthony Simonsen, 206-182
No. 5 Kyle Sherman def. No. 12 Riley Woodard, 244-233
No. 10 Boog Krol def. No. 7 Tobias Börding, 288-165
No. 6 Santtu Tahvanainen def. No. 11 Deo Benard, 232-227
Quarterfinals
No. 1 Jason Belmonte def. No. 9 Mitch Hupé, 215-205
No. 5 Kyle Sherman def. No. 4 Jakob Butturff, 206-181
No. 2 Darren Tang def. No. 10 Boog Krol, 242-195
No. 6 Santtu Tahvanainen def. No. 3 Jason Sterner, 245-206
Semifinals
No. 1 Jason Belmonte def. No. 5 Kyle Sherman,194-193
No. 2 Darren Tang def. No. 6 Santtu Tahvanainen, 201-192
Championship (Race-to-Two)
No. 2 Darren Tang def. No 1 Jason Belmonte, 2-0
Game 1: Tang def. Belmonte, 241-217
Game 2: Tang def. Belmonte, 176-167
Final Standings
- Darren Tang, $20,000
- Jason Belmonte, $12,000
- Kyle Sherman, $9,000
- Santtu Tahvanainen, $9,000
- Jason Sterner, $5,000
- Jakob Butturff, $5,000
- Boog Krol, $5,000
- Mitch Hupé, $5,000
- Tobias Börding, $3,500
- Anthony Simonsen, $3,500
- Deo Benard, $3,500
- Riley Woodard, $3,500
More information on the PBA World Series of Bowling XVII is available here.
PBA World Series of Bowling XVII Schedule
Monday, May 11 — Lucky Strike Lakeville — CBS Sports Network
5 p.m. (6 p.m. ET) — PBA50 Petraglia Championship finals
6 p.m. (7 p.m. ET) — PBA Scorpion Championship semifinals
8 p.m. (9 p.m. ET) — PBA Scorpion Championship finals
Tuesday, May 12 — Lucky Strike Lakeville — CBS Sports Network
5 p.m. (6 p.m. ET) — PBA50 World Championship finals
6 p.m. (7 p.m. ET) — PBA Shark Championship semifinals
8 p.m. (9 p.m. ET) — PBA Shark Championship finals
Saturday, June 13 — Thunderbowl Lanes — CBS and Paramount+
11 a.m. ET — AMF PBA World Championship semifinals
1 p.m. ET — AMF PBA World Championship finals