Hall of Fame
t isn’t easy to pick out a single moment during Carl Mackerer’s varsity career with which to say, this was it… this is what made him special… this is why he goes into Rutgers-Newark Athletic Hall of Fame today. All of which is by the way of saying that as a member of the varsity bowling team from 1958-62, he wasn’t good… he was spectacular.
In his sophomore year, he led the Eastern Intercollegiate Bowling Conference in overall average. He was the key to the 1960-61 squad, which won the New Jersey Division title in that conference and went on to sweep the conference crown by winning eight of 12 games in a round robin playoff against Brooklyn Poly of the Long Island Division and NYU, the Manhattan champions.
But as good as this team was, Mackerer’s individual performances go beyond its accomplishments. In 1959, he won the conference’s Christmas Tournament and five months later swept the Eastern Intercollegiate Match Game Championships. That moved him into the seeded finals of the National Intercollegiate Championships at Bowlmore Lanes in New York. Bowling against a star-studded field on national television, Mackerer stunned the huge out-of-town contingent by sweeping second place. A month later, The Official Bowling Review Magazine named him to its All-American team. He also finished a spectacular ninth in the prestigious American Bowling Congress National Intercollegiate tournament. Mackerer received a PhD from the University of Nebraska College of Medicine in medical biochemistry in 1971. He is currently manager of biomedical toxicology for Mobil Oil in Princeton. He lives in Pennington, N.J. and he and his wife, Marie have three children.
