Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (19 page)
Authors: Gianmarc Manzione
But no amount of guts or flash would shut the door Schlegel left open as he stumbled through the early frames of the match with two bad shots for splits. The crowd may have loved him, but crowds are fickle, and soon they could find themselves falling in love with the loser.
If it was possible for a country kid from Indiana to out-scrap a brawling gambler from mean streets, Curt Schmidt would have one shot to prove it now. And he would have to do it on the right-hand lane—the lane on which he had not yet thrown a strike.
The crowd continued to roar over Schlegel’s clutch turkey. Burton strained to be heard over the din, explaining that “Curt Schmidt needs one strike to beat Ernie Schlegel.”
Schmidt conferred with Harry Golden, demanding to have the pins re-racked just so he could buy himself some breathing time while the pins were being set. Schmidt wiped the sole of his left shoe—the sliding foot—with a lemon-colored towel, never once looking away from the pins he glared at as if they formed the face of an enemy. He shook a rosin bag in his bowling hand and waited. Maybe he even breathed once or twice as he stood and stared down the lane; maybe he hardly breathed at all.
Schlegel draped his arms across the chairs at each side of him, his legs crossed and his ruffled sleeves dangling from under his arms like flags sagging from a pole on a windless
day. The stripe of silver stars strung up the legs of his snow-white pants sparkled under the lights. He adjusted the glove on his bowling hand as if to assure himself he would bowl one more game.
The crowd quieted to a hush as Schmidt gathered his ball and wiped it clean of lane oil with his yellow towel. He stepped up to the approach to throw his shot.
Schmidt threw his shot, pausing over the foul line with his bowling hand raised just over his eyes like a man trying to glimpse a far-off building through the fog. The ball cut sharply toward the pocket. Clearly this shot at least stood a chance of winning him the match as it sliced to the left. And then it happened. The ball blasted all ten pins into the pit, and the country kid from Indiana pulled the curtain on the show the Bicentennial Kid had put on for the past three games. Schmidt twirled around and collapsed to one knee as he pumped his fist and held it there.
“That is a winning shot, Bud!” Burton shouted over the crowd’s ovation.
The camera panned quickly to Schlegel to find him picking up his bowling balls from the ball return and packing them away after having shaken Schmidt’s hand in defeat. The PBA Tour’s TV shows provide bowlers with little time to sulk on the set. Another match awaits; the show must go on. The vanquished must gather their things and go.
Even as Burton and Palmer knew Schmidt was the man who would move on from here, it was Schlegel’s performance, and not Schmidt’s gutsy strike, that they could not stop talking about. Palmer noted that Schmidt would face top seed Dave Davis in the final match almost as an afterthought, and then he offered a final and emphatic note of praise for Schlegel.
“Tremendous pressure bowling by Ernie Schlegel,” he said as the show cut into a commercial break.
Anyone who had seen the show knew that this mop-headed hero would show his face on their TV screens again. More than knowing it, they would hope for it. Whether those who tuned into ABC that afternoon loved or hated what they saw, they wanted to see it again. That was a minor victory no one could take away from him.
M
inor victories were fine in 1976. After all, Schlegel did make it onto more TV shows that year than at any time in his career, find the woman of his dreams, and prove to the world that he belonged on tour. But by 1979, he was three years deeper into his career and he still had not a single title to show for it. It was time for an actual victory, not the pyrrhic one he enjoyed that day back at the Fair Lanes Open in Baltimore. It was time to answer the gathering chorus of questions surrounding him.
“I really hope that Schlegel wins a pro title, and soon,” Larry Lichstein, then working as the Director of Player Services for the PBA, wrote in
Bowlers Journal
at the end of the 1978 season. “Why? Because he’s paid his dues. Schlegel’s had his chance to win on several occasions, but something always managed to go wrong. However, the fact that he got into those title matches was no fluke. The man’s a tremendous bowler.”
That was the question: Why was this “tremendous bowler” not winning? Where was the scowling kid from Upper Manhattan who pounded his chest like a gorilla as he defied all comers one summer day at Central Lanes in Yonkers, a gush of Vaseline melting out of his hair in the heat? Where was the Ernie Schlegel who shoved his raw fingers into those blood-stained holes and threw the best three strikes Johnny Campbell ever saw? When would that Ernie Schlegel please stand up and take a bow? By 1979, people began to lose hope that that winner would ever show his face on tour.
“Some call him the greatest non-champion of them all,” wrote bowling historian and co-founder of the PBA, Chuck Pezzano, that year. “Others are not so kind when the name Ernie Schlegel enters the conversation. The words apple, choke and flake are tossed around loosely.”
The only conversation anyone was having on the PBA Tour at the time surrounded one name: Mark Roth. As Schlegel chased an elusive first title for more than a decade, he watched Roth pace him twenty-two times in a four-year stretch from ’75-’79. A stocky, fearless kid from Brooklyn who had the stare of a killer and threw the ball like a cannon, Roth grew up storming some of the same smoky action bowling haunts as Schlegel, leaving stories in his wake that would be told for decades to come. There was the time he busted out of a bowling alley at twenty-two years old with $4,500 and showed up in a new Dodge the next day; the time he threw a bowling ball through the floor in fury; the time he got married in a New York Ranger’s jersey; the night he converted the virtually impossible 7-10 split.
The pioneer of something known in bowling as a “power game,” Roth’s stomping steps resembled a stampede of startled buffalo as he charged toward the foul line. He kept his wrist cocked under the ball as it exploded out of his hand and whipped back toward the pocket to obliterate the pins. It was
a ferocity never before seen in the sport, a physical dominance that had many opposing players beaten before they threw a ball, so intimidating was Roth’s presence.
Roth’s ability to transform bowling balls into bombs came at the expense of a thumb that rarely endured the stress without bleeding—a thumb that became as much of a myth as the man himself. Whenever Roth’s thumb bled, it filled with pus, putting him out of commission until the swelling receded. Schlegel referred to himself as Roth’s “doctor,” and would “build” Roth a thumb from the gnarled mess it became, repairing it with a liquid bandage called Nu-Skin to the point where Roth still could bowl well enough to qualify for the televised finals. Many who watched Roth develop as one of Brooklyn’s emerging players told him he would never make it throwing the ball that way. Within a few years, no one remembered the names of those doubters, but everyone knew the name of Mark Roth.
Ironically, Roth also happened to be Cathy Schlegel’s last boyfriend. At that time, Catherine DePace had been twenty-four years old and ready for more, but the only marriage Mark Roth was interested in was the one between him and the lanes that would make him famous. Enter Ernie Schlegel and the tournament in Detroit where he turned to find Cathy sitting next to him. She was ready for a starring role and feared she would never find it with Roth. Schlegel was her answer, and soon he became her husband.
Now it was Roth, and not Schlegel, who was dominating the pro tour. As Cathy watched Roth break Billy Hardwick’s record for most titles won in a single season—eight, which he won in 1978—she could not help but wonder why Roth was winning a title virtually every week, but Schlegel had not yet won at all. To anyone who had witnessed what Schlegel was capable of in the early days when he and Roth were a couple of
New York City kids, it didn’t make sense. Schlegel was making money on tour; he just was not making good on his dream to become a PBA champion. What tour money he pocketed in the meantime was like sand passing through his fingers. It was barely enough to make rent and child support payments. By 1979, Schlegel needed more than just “a perk.” He needed to become a bonafide champion.
By 1979, the Schlegels had moved to Vancouver, Washington, to live near the headquarters of the Contour Power Grips company. Schlegel had signed on to sell the company’s “grips”—rubber inserts placed inside finger holes to give a bowler more lift on a shot and help generate more power and revolutions on the ball. Schlegel’s quirky personality and fairly routine appearances on national television soon would prove to be a goldmine for the company. Every time he paused on the approach to set up for a shot on TV, he made sure to hold his bowling ball in such a position that the grips in his finger holes were in plain view of the camera. He went on to move millions of units for Contour, hawking bags full of grips from tour stop to tour stop, working the phones, and adding proshop proprietors from coast to coast to his burgeoning list of clients. His partnership with Contour would endure for nearly twenty years.
Before the 1979 season, he found something else in Vancouver: a man who made champions. Gery Gehrmann was a 6’2” ox of a human being with the build of a hunter who carries home the deer he shot on his back. A member of both the local and national amateur wrestling halls of fame who played tackle for Washington State in the early 1960s, Gehrmann had leathery hands the size of catcher’s mitts. In addition to his duties as gym teacher at the local high school, Gehrmann also served as football coach. He imposed two easy rules on his students: no fighting, and no cursing. When one kid decided
it would be a good idea to kick another square in the balls, Gehrmann pulled the kids apart.
“Get your hands off of me, or I’ll sue you!” the kid told Gehrmann.
Gehrmann’s eyes, two blue beads pinched into his gigantic bull’s head, tightened.
“All right,” he told the kid, “you get the first swing, and then I’ll break your neck!”
“I won’t do it again, sir!” the kid squeaked.
Any way you looked at it, Gehrmann was tough. He had recently undergone two angioplasties and was already running the seven-mile stretch between school and home again. After his incredible rebound from the heart attack—the first of four he would survive in his life—he carried himself with the confidence of a man who knew he had done something no one ever could take away from him. Schlegel himself thirsted for that kind of confidence, and put himself in Gehrmann’s hands. The first thing Gehrmann did was to replace the four packs of cigarettes Schlegel smoked each day with a fitness regimen so grueling that the first day left him writhing in the street like a fresh scrap of road kill.
“What did he do to you! What did he do!” Cathy screamed the day she found Schlegel crawling home on all fours after a preliminary workout with Gehrmann. He had just completed his first seven-mile run up and down the hills of Vancouver.
“I don’t know,” Schlegel said, “but it hurts!”
It was the sort of pain generally reserved for two types of people: inmates of seventeenth century asylums in France or people who stand in front of speeding trains. Naturally, then, Schlegel showed up bright and early to endure the fullest extent of this agony day after day. In Gehrmann, Schlegel found a drill sergeant so schooled in the benefits of self-inflicted punishment that his high school gym students became known
collectively as “Gehrmann’s Gorillas.” Gehrmann honored their tolerance for pain with a sign outside their workout area that read: “Gehrmann’s Gorillas: Please Do Not Feed the Animals.” Here was a zoo Schlegel eagerly wished to join at a time in his career when an unflattering designation as the PBA Tour’s “greatest non-champion”—the bowler who had earned the most money in PBA Tour winnings without claiming a single title—plagued him. Schlegel was looking to win, and Gehrmann knew it.
“Greatest Non-Champion.” Nothing softened the sting of that phrase. To be a “non-champion,” great or not, was—in Schlegel’s mind—to be a loser. And to be a loser was to commit to a failure for which he could never forgive himself, the failure to live up to an admonishment from his father that he never forgot all those years ago, when he stood before a judge with a gaggle of pocketbook-snatching kids from his block.