Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (16 page)
Authors: Gianmarc Manzione
“Harry Smith, our statistician, noted before we went on the air that young Wallace appeared very loose,” Jackson said. “He was a little tight the first couple of frames, but he seems to be loosening up.”
The men Schlegel faced in all those nights of hustling back home may not have been any better or worse than Steve Wallace, but one thing he knew for sure was that Houston was no New York City. Schlegel tried to prove it on his next shot, when he struck again. Wallace stormed back with a crushing strike of his own.
Wallace gave Schlegel a chance to seize the lead when he left two pins standing on his next shot and converted the spare,
but suddenly neither man could do enough to give the match away. Schlegel fumbled with a split on his next shot, then came so close to converting it that the crowd erupted with shrieks as he collapsed to his knees like a boy in the midst of desperate prayer. It was exactly the kind of misfortune that any budding champion stomped on, but instead Wallace left a split of his own. He cast an anxious glance at the scoreboard overhead to survey the damage done. He sighed, slumped his shoulders, and dropped his head.
“This is really the tell-tale shot, you might say, of this match,” Welu explained as Schlegel rubbed his gloved right hand on his pants, stepped up to the approach, and inserted his fingers into his ball for the next shot. “Ernie Schlegel needs this strike to put the pressure on young Steve Wallace.”
Wallace may have been young, but the kid had game. And Schlegel knew it.
It was shots like these that Schlegel had thrown so many times before, dancing on the razor’s edge of a match with nearly enough money on the line to support a family for a year. But that was back in the poorly lit and seedy bowling alleys of New York City. Here in Buffalo under the TV lights, he would have to learn to close the deal under the glare of millions of viewers.
Schlegel stood and stared down his target with those narrowing eyes and began his shot, falling to one knee at the foul line as soon as he let the ball off his hand. He looked like a kid who was about to spring a diamond ring on the woman he meant to marry. He threw the ball harder than any shot he had made. It was the shot of a man who was not just looking to win; he was looking to kill. The ball blew through the pins, and then Schlegel got his first taste of the sting he would have to learn to savor if he was ever going to make it on tour. A single pin withstood the pounding.
“Well, it looked good!” Jackson said, baffled.
“Yes it did, Keith,” Welu says. “The only thing is he might have had a little too much roll.”
A little too much roll. Five years of waiting aimlessly on the streets of Inwood and soaping down AC units in Hackensack to enter the most revered arena the sport had to offer—the nationally televised finals of a PBA tournament—and all it took was “a little too much roll” to nudge him back onto the sidelines of his dreams. Now he was merely a hopeful onlooker again, merely another dreamer.
Wallace went on to clobber the next two bowlers, including Billy Hardwick, who was then in the midst of one of the most sensational winning streaks the PBA had ever seen, winning a total of seven titles in 1969 alone. His record would stand for the next decade.
Wallace then lost to Dick Ritger in the title match. He would have nothing to be ashamed of, as Ritger would go on to become a Hall of Famer and one of the game’s greatest teachers. For a nineteen-year-old kid who dropped out of college in his sophomore year to see if he could hack it against the big guns on the lanes, Wallace’s performance in Buffalo was one of the gutsiest efforts that fans of pro bowling had ever witnessed.
But there is no such thing as a consolation prize in professional sports. You either win or you lose. There is no gray area between greatness and mediocrity. If greatness is measured by the number of times a man weathers heartbreak to come back and try again, Schlegel soon would prove himself to be the most determined man in PBA history.
N
othing cures a sore hamstring like a well-rolled fatty and a dream. Back in a motel room in Buffalo after another lousy round of competition on the 1975 PBA Tour, six years after his debut in Buffalo, Schlegel stuffed and rolled another joint as he lamented a hamstring that felt like a stab wound and a career that seemed more like a curse. The man who never doubted that bowling would be his ride to freedom and recognition began to suspect, for the first and perhaps the only time in his life, that he might be the victim of a tragic overestimation of his own abilities.
Many thoughts crowded Schlegel’s mind every time he stepped up to the approach to make another shot. He thought about that sore hammy and how close it might be to snapping and ending his career for good. He thought about the cruel deck of cards his body was dealing him at precisely the moment when everything felt like a new start—the divorce he had just
finalized, the debts he had paid off, the second shot at life he thought he was about to seize. He thought about those dead-end jobs he took after an unexceptional debut on tour in 1968 sent him back to the streets of New York City penniless and looking for a way to support his young wife and baby daughter. How dreadful it was to consider that he may have to subject himself once again to those long nights behind the wheel of a cab, or those muggy summers unloading trucks for Coca-Cola, or those air-conditioning units he soaped down out in Hackensack. Jobs that made him feel only half alive. Now, years from all that and still looking for his first PBA title, he faced one of life’s fundamental cruelties: The dreams you chase easily can turn to nightmares should you dare to pursue them.
In fact, 1975 turned out to be Schlegel’s worst year on tour. Something had to give; he needed a perk.
Even Schlegel could not have known how appropriate it was that he found that perk by looking himself in the mirror. In just a few years’ time, he no longer would recognize the man he saw there. With the smoke of his joint spiraling into the stale air, Schlegel stood and turned to the mirror. He did not know that what he would see there would change his life forever, but this was the moment he would refer to as the “vision” that reignited his career.
What he saw in that mirror brought him back to the ravaged apartment on Sickles Street where he lived as a bachelor. He heard the blasting Isley Brothers tune that rattled the walls after a concerned friend, Pete Mylenki, showed up to offer him that job out in Hackensack. He saw Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon in his star-spangled costume and cape. He saw the Four Tops taking the stage in sequined suits and sparking smiles as Levi Stubbs swiveled toward the microphone for another booming take on “I Can’t Help Myself,” the euphoric crowd throbbing to the beat.
By the time he stood and stared into the mirror in that motel room, he knew exactly how he would let people know he was around. In the flash of that moment he met the legend he would become. He knew every seam and hem in the costumes he would wear. He knew the sequins that would adorn them, the aviator shades he would sport. He knew it all.
The man who stood before a motel room mirror that day was the first-generation son of a superintendent who discovered in the 200th anniversary of his country’s birth an opportunity to become the legend he always felt he would be, a real-life comic book hero vanquishing enemies from coast to coast in his star-spangled get-up. If winning titles the way legendary peers such as Earl Anthony or Dick Weber did would not be his path to celebrity, then maybe this other way would work—this other self he saw in the mirror, this American hero.
To Schlegel, bowling was a boxing match, a spectacle viewers expect to entertain them. So many players on the PBA Tour in 1975 bowled the show in drab slacks and wooden hair with the expressionless countenance of the dead. That was about to change. The vision weed afforded him in that Buffalo motel room included more than shades and sequins and the passions they might provoke. It also included a redheaded woman. He had no idea who it was, or what she was doing there.
In September, 1975, at a PBA Tour stop in Detroit’s Hartfield Lanes, twenty-four-year-old Catherine DePace scoured the bleachers behind the lanes for a seat where she could get a good view of the action. What she found instead was a seat next to the man she would marry weeks later. Then engaged in a souring relationship with another tour player named Mark Roth, DePace knew enough about the PBA to recognize Schlegel in those bleachers. She also recognized the empty seat next to him.
“Is that seat open, Ernie?” she asked.
Schlegel eyed the trim, stunning redhead who asked the question and gleefully answered in the affirmative. He soon discovered more to be happy about than DePace’s looks. He discovered she, too, was a New York City kid. That she was an artist with a taste for fashion and design. The product of a family full of architects, DePace was a painter and a photographer then seeking to start her own graphics company and get her foot in the door with
House and Garden Magazine
. Within minutes, she knew the details of Schlegel’s “vision” so comprehensively it was as if she had been renting space somewhere inside of it long before she met him. What she did not yet realize was that she indeed had spent time inside of it. That of all the bizarre props in the fantasy Schlegel indulged back in Buffalo that day, it was the mysterious redhead he remembered most vividly. And now the mystery was in the seat beside him. This was no fantasy now; this was his life. They left the bleachers for the lounge and kept talking.
The sequined suits, the aviator shades, the moniker to match the occasion of the nation’s bicentennial, the rich man Schlegel planned to be when it was over and the many heads he planned to turn in the meantime—DePace listened to it all in a smoky lounge at the bowling center amid the din of crashing pins that would become the backdrop of their lives. She listened with the ear of an artist, but she also listened with the ear of a hard-nosed kid from the same tough streets where Schlegel watched heroin strike down his friends with the efficiency of a wartime draft. In DePace, Schlegel found someone who learned as early as he did that the only way a kid gets by in a town like that is on guts and grit alone. The pills and weed so prevalent that those who did not partake were outcasts, the street gangs loitering around their local candy stores, the fine line between a life doomed by drugs and a life worth living—none of that was new to Cathy. At age seventeen, DePace phoned her father one
day to inform him she would not be coming back home. She got by hauling paint brushes and buckets from apartment to apartment by subway, and painting living room walls for fifty bucks a pop, the kind of work DePace expected to come of the day she shared as many ideas as cigarettes with the dreamer she met in Detroit—another way to make a living. She would paint a few bowling bags. She would sew some sequins onto a shirt. Maybe when it was done she would have a few extra bucks to spare after paying the rent. It was her against the city streets. She’d follow a dollar wherever it may lead. It had led Cathy to the living rooms of locals whose walls needed painting, to the offices at Madison Square Garden where she put in her best effort as another nine-to-fiver in the accounting department, to this lounge chair at a bowling alley bar in Detroit.
She told Schlegel about the graphics company she had started with her brother, Joe. She handed him her business card and told him to get in touch when he was back in town. Cathy thought she merely had made another business deal that day. Three days later he showed up at her place with a toothbrush and a pair of socks in an overnight bag and absolutely no intention of leaving. They would be engaged that night. Money was going to be tight in a union between a starving artist and a struggling bowler, but that didn’t matter to Cathy.
“People say that when you fall in love, that kind of stuff doesn’t matter,” Cathy recalled of the money she didn’t have back then. “I could have lived with Schlegel in a dumpster.”
They did have enough money to get hitched that December at the courthouse in time to make it out to the next PBA Tour stop together. All Schlegel had for a wedding ring was the one his sister gave him to put on Cathy’s finger. The ring formerly belonged to his mother. The wedding rings and the money they didn’t
have to buy one were minor details to a couple of dreamy kids at the dawn of their life together. All that mattered now was that Schlegel had an appointment with destiny, the perfect woman at his side to help him get there, and an utter lack of fear before the immensity of his ambition. Schlegel and Cathy were done talking about the future. Now, it was time to make it happen.