Betty Ruth Burton Morris-Laub (born 1948) is an American professional bowler, who won seventeen tournaments throughout her career. Bowlers Journal named her Woman Bowler of the Decade for the 1970s. A December 1999 Bowlers Journal International poll rated her as the fiftieth greatest bowler, male or female, of the twentieth century. That year twenty bowling experts polled by the Miami Herald also rated her as the sixth greatest woman bowler of the century.
Life
Betty Burton was born on May 10, 1948, in Sonora, California. She attended Linden High School in Linden, California and then San Joaquin Delta College.
Aged 17 she won the California State Match Game title. She won her first professional tournament, the Showboat in Las Vegas, despite being six months pregnant. She won the 1973 PWBA Players Championship, and was-runner up at the 1974 PWBA Players Championship. She was also runner-up at the 1974 WIBC Queens tournament, and won the 1977 U.S. Women's Open. Morris won the WIBC national tournament six times: she won the all-events in 1976 and 1979, won the singles in 1979 and 1980, and was a member of the winning team in 1974 and 1989.
During the 1970s Morris worked in real estate alongside bowling, and she kept up that career on retirement from competitive bowling. In 1988 she became an advisor to AMF Bowling. On February 24, 2001, she married professional bowler Larry Laub. She was National Sales Manager for the National Bowling Stadium in Reno, Nevada from 2001 to 2004, and in 2008 became marketing director for Bowling World newspaper.
References
- ^ Hickok, Ralph. "Morris, Betty". A Who's who of Sports Champions: Their Stories and Records. Houghton Mifflin Company. p. 571.
- ^ Grasso, John; Hartman, Eric R. (2014). "Morris-Laub, Betty Ruth Burton". Historical Dictionary of Bowling. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 213.
- Grasso, John; Hartman, Eric R. (2014). "Laub, Larry Earl". Historical Dictionary of Bowling. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 184. ISBN 9780810880221.