Ron Mohr is on the top of the world right now. He just returned home to Eagle River after seizing the No. 1 ranking in the Pro Bowlers Association's Senior Tour with a victory at a tournament in North Carolina on Wednesday. Later this month he heads to Pennsylvania for another Senior Tour event, where he'll be one of the star attractions.
"It doesn't get any better," Mohr said. "I consider myself extremely blessed.
"I just miss Linda. I wish I had someone to share it with."
The Senior Tour's 2009 Player of the Year, Mohr is back after missing most of last season to help care for his wife, Linda, a woman so perfectly suited to Mohr that she agreed to sandwich their 1998 Las Vegas wedding between the groom's back-to-back tournaments.
Their love story turned tragic last year. On June 30 Linda had elective surgery on her knee and was given acetaminophen during her recovery. By Aug. 7 she was in a Seattle hospital with liver disease that Mohr said was triggered by the pain relievers. Over the next seven months, Linda received 41 blood transfusions, was put on the list for an organ transplant and was in and out of the hospital five times. She was 50 when she died Jan. 16 in Seattle.
"On January 19 I was back in Anchorage and this was my therapy," Mohr, 55, said Friday, gesturing to the lanes at Eagle River Bowl, where he honed the skills that made him one of the country's top amateurs through the 1990s and one of the PBA's top seniors now. "I came out and practiced two hours a day."
And though Mohr haunted Eagle River Bowl in the weeks after Linda's death, he barely saw a bowling alley while she was sick. During those seven months, Mohr rolled a grand total of 12 games -- this for a man who routinely plays eight in a single day on the Senior Tour.
Given that hiatus, Mohr wasn't sure he had a shot at doing anything this season. But the bowling communities -- both locally and nationally -- urged him to try. You've gotta get back, people told him. She'd want you to go back.
Not sure if his game was sharp enough, Mohr came up with a plan. He'd play the first three tournaments of the season and let his results decide the rest of the year. If he wasn't competitive, he was prepared to quit the tour with no regrets and get his bowling fix at the Wednesday Night League at Center Bowl.
Mohr placed fourth in a field of 120 in the April 17-21 season-opener. He placed third in a field of 148 at the April 23-26 event. And he won this week's event to vault to the top of the tour standings, ahead of PBA great Walter Ray Williams Jr.
"Honestly, I can't believe it," he said. "This was completely unexpected, this level of success. You want to attribute it to her -- 'She's helping me out' -- but are you just saying that?"
Maybe, but Mohr is certain she helped him avoid a meltdown after his first game back on the tour last month.
The owner of a 226 average and 59 perfect games of 300, Mohr rolled a 185 in that game -- a score he ordinarily would beat himself up for. But not this time.
"Normally I'm pretty intense," he said. "A 185, I'd be on fire, I'd be so mad at myself. But for some reason I had this amazing sense of calm after that 185 -- 'I'll be OK, I'm doing what I love.' I can only attribute that to her, because that's not me. I have a pretty short fuse with myself."
He put that game behind him and more than made up for it, finishing the six-game block with a 225 average. He's been on a roll ever since, returning home $13,000 richer and with the No. 1 ranking.
Linda, a 1979 Bartlett graduate, was a 190-average bowler and her husband's biggest cheerleader. She was with him when he won the Dick Weber Open in August 2009 to clinch that season's Player of the Year award, an occasion Mohr calls the highlight of his bowling career.
"I went through the whole stepladder and she was there. It was just the coolest time. We were both crying -- tears of ecstasy," he said. "So she was there for the best."
Just as they were together for the worst.
Before her knee surgery, Linda had a blood disorder that made her sensitive to the sun, but she had never been diagnosed with liver disease. But the combination of acetaminophen -- which can damage the liver -- and the blood disorder proved fatal.
Even though Linda's condition was serious enough for Anchorage doctors to send her to Seattle immediately after getting the results of a biopsy, the Mohrs were optimistic at first.
"This really stinks, but we're gonna enjoy life so much when it's over, when she gets her transplant," Mohr said they told each other, really believing it.
It wasn't until they were asked, in the first week of January, what their "do not resuscitate" wishes were in the event Linda had a heart attack or other event that would take her off the transplant list.
"That was the first time we were thinking we might not get out of here," Mohr said.
Sure enough, Linda suffered two strokes. She was on dialysis, intubated and in a medically induced coma when doctors told Mohr her condition would not improve and recommended removing her breathing tube.
A numb Mohr agreed.
"How can it be that in seven months you go from having a great time and her getting elective knee surgery to where you're not gonna have a wife anymore?" Mohr said. "They pulled her tube out and I held her hand as tight as I could."
Then he returned to Eagle River, to their home and their three dogs, and spent the next month in a fog.
"I was a zombie," he said. "I came home and everything was still three -- her clothes, her hairbrush. Every second was a reminder of a life partner who's not going to be around anymore."
Family friends Mike and Jackie Graeber took over planning the funeral, and the Graebers and the bowling community took care of Mohr. Soon people began to urge him to return to competition. Soon Mohr reminded himself how much Linda loved seeing him live his dream as a pro bowler.
"She knows I loved it out there and I know how much she enjoyed it, so I knew I wanted to try," he said.
He said he talks to Linda every day, usually about bowling, and he never forgets to thank her for all the years she supported him. He just wishes those conversations weren't in his head. He just wishes he could celebrate his successes with her, like he used to.
"That part is hard," he said. "I still really miss her."
Reach Beth Bragg at bbragg@adn.com or 257-4335.
By BETH BRAGG
bbragg@adn.com