Tommy Farmer was inducted by Shawn Thompson
When my parents first took me bowling in 1984,1 am sure they did not know they sparked my love for this sport then and there. By the end of that year, I entered my first tournament at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina, and won a spot on the youth travel team. The next winter season, I joined the youth league in Sumter, and thanks to my wonderful, and very patient coaches, I truly began my “career” in bowling. By the time I graduated high school, I had bowled all over North and South Carolina, competing in the Timothy Spenser Rice(TSR) tournament series, and had gone to Ohio for my first national youth event; I quickly realized that I was totally unprepared for that level of competition. All of the travel allowed me to make friends and acquaintances from all over the region. I am grateful for those friendships, because one of them led me to my wife, Joanne Farmer. As the story goes, we first saw each other at a TSR tournament, and I remember looking at a friend and saying, “I’m going to marry that one. ”It was probably not the most elegant way of saying things, but 2 years later we did just that. Jo has always been my biggest supporter: she has been there to pick me up when I’ve had the wind knocked out of me and encouraged me to get my ‘head back in the game ’when it was necessary. For that, and everything else, I’m eternally grateful to her for being “that one.”
