When your team ends a match in a dead tie, deciding which player should bowl the roll-off is a lot easier when you have a teammate whose ferocity inspired a coach to name him after an animal. So when Team USA found themselves in that position at the 2008 World Men’s Championships in Thailand, they knew exactly what to do: Send in the Rhino.

And if anyone on his team had forgotten why they call him Rhino, he didn’t waste much time reminding them. Such was Rhino Page’s displeasure at leaving the 4-7 on his first shot that the 7-pin came flying halfway up the lane on a crushing spare conversion, a performance he followed with two clutch strikes in the tenth to put the pressure on Korea’s Kim Tae-Young.

Team USA came away from Thailand with the gold medal that year, but Rhino Page knows that a fine line divided loss and victory, and he expects the path to the medal stand to be no easier in Munich.

“It was a big moment for me and for Team USA, but this is a new year,” Page says. “It was a big wake-up call to barely win gold in Thailand. There is no doubt that the players internationally are great players, and this year we know they will be ready for us.”

Patrick Allen, the teammate whose shouts of “One time!” resonated through the center during that roll-off in Thailand, agrees.

“The bull’s eye is on our back even more now than in 2008,” Allen says. “People were in awe then that these guys they have seen on TV were bowling this event, but I think the fact that we did not have a dominating performance in 2008 increased the confidence level of the other teams. The pool of talent around the world is much better now than it was five or 10 years ago.”

The quality of talent that other nations bring to the World Championships might be changing, but one thing that remains the same is the passion those jerseys with the letters “USA” emblazoned across the back ignite in Page.



The hours he spent blasting plastic pins around his mother’s kitchen as a boy had nothing to do with dreams of money or even fame; they had to do with proving to himself that he is worthy of the respect reserved for the childhood idols that inspired him all those years ago – players such as Aulby, Bohn, Anthony.

The scowl straight out of an Eastwood western that Rhino adopts on PBA telecasts is more about earning that respect than it is about earning a paycheck. The PBA trophies he raises over his head do as much to satisfy the dream that began in that noisy kitchen as they do to intensify a hunger for more. But only the World Men’s Championships offers him a stage on which success grants him the right to truly consider himself among the greatest players in the world.  

“I have enormous passion for this team and for representing the United States,” Page says. “I’ve told many people that you can win a PBA title and, yeah, it’s an amazing feeling, but nothing is better than winning a World Championship as a team and being on that medal stand while the United States flag rises and the national anthem plays.”