Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (21 page)
Authors: Gianmarc Manzione
Schlegel responded with two more perfect strikes as they began the match with a combined seven consecutive strikes between them. Again, he paused at the foul line to accentuate his latest double—a vaguely frothy gritting of the teeth, a fist pump more ferocious than the last. Just as it was back at Central, it was all about the hustle here in Detroit.
Schlegel was hardly the only opponent Bill Coleman faced each time he stepped up to the approach. In Schlegel, Coleman faced all the hustlers from the Manhattan of Schlegel’s youth whose legends endured in his scowls and fist pumps, the Kenny Barbers and Richie Hornreichs whose thousand-dollar matches in the middle of the night were as tough as any match he would have on tour. They were the men who long ago taught Schlegel that a scowl was worth as much as any score if it became the thing his opponent thought about, that the opponent’s mind was a room he could ransack as long as he tried the right key.
Coleman stepped up in the eighth frame to demonstrate with another explosive strike that the only thing he planned to think about was beating Ernie Schlegel.
“We’re dead even through eight!” Michaels shouted.
“Al, as we expected, tremendous scoring and tremendous competition,” Burton said.
Coleman struck yet again for four strikes in a row, or what pro bowlers call a “four-bagger.”
That was when another opponent stepped in: Schlegel’s wife Cathy, who lunged from her seat and shouted after Schlegel returned Coleman’s strike with a clutch strike of his own in the ninth frame, a crucial moment known as the “foundation frame” for its importance as the foundation of the final frame of the game.
A pair of 1970s shades with lenses as wide as wall clocks obscured her rouged face. Cranberry-red lipstick stunned her powdery complexion with a flourish of color as fiery as the outburst with which she celebrated Schlegel’s strike. She tossed thick waves of red hair back behind her shoulders and took several emphatic breaths as she leered out from under her brow, fuming somewhere inside herself. She glared out of the corners of her eyes to see if anyone had a problem with it, perfectly prepared to give them some problems of their own if they did. Then she gathered her composure again, pulling in the sides of her coat and adjusting her seat.
Any wife of a PBA pro knows that no pressure their husbands feel on the lanes compares to the agony with which a wife endures moments like these. Schlegel was the one with the ball in his hands, but Cathy could only watch and hope.
Detroit was the hometown of the man Schlegel had to beat in a Friday-night “position round” match to make it into the Dutch Masters Open show the following day: Bob Strampe, Hall of Famer, one of a very few men to bowl a perfect game in each of five decades. Strampe was a man whose prime was long behind him, but his will to win was beyond the power of age to diminish. Sunnybrook Lanes was Strampe’s home bowling alley. The locals loved him like a hero. That match was the moment Cathy became what Schlegel would later describe as “a raving lunatic.”
As Schlegel and Strampe were led from the locker room to the lanes for that match, Strampe got some hometown love from the fans. They chanted “Strampe! Strampe! Strampe!”
Cathy, nervous and shaking with a desire to see her husband on the show, decided she would start a chant of her own.
The hell with this!
she thought. She leapt on top of a table, cupped her hands around her mouth, and screamed into the Strampe-loving din.
“Schleee-GEL! Schleee-GEL! Schleee-GEL!” she shouted.
Strampe laughed, and that crack in the legend’s composure was exactly the advantage Schlegel was looking for. He crushed Strampe to make it onto the TV show.
“There’s Schlegel’s wife Cathy, and she’s sure excited,” Burton chuckled as Cathy exploded out of her seat on the show.
Burton, who had surely been there to see her scream Schlegel’s name from a table top the day before, knew as well as anyone just how “excited” Cathy got.
As Schlegel stepped up to bowl the final frame of his match against Coleman, maybe he heard those kids in Gerhmann’s gym crowd around him once again to cheer him through this latest test. Maybe he heard Gehrmann himself telling them about the things a champion does when he is down. Maybe he heard nothing but the silence of his own focused mind.
Schlegel was finishing first, Coleman last. If he threw three strikes he would force Coleman to do the same. Anything less and all Schlegel could do when he was done was sit and hope while Coleman bowled.
Here he was again, staring down sixty feet of wood at the only obstacle between himself and the champion he had planned to become that day he made his first seven-mile jog from home to Gehrmann’s zoo. Just like he did against Curt Schmidt in Baltimore. Just like he did against Steve Wallace in Buffalo. Just like he had done so many times before. But he never made it out of any of those shows a winner. How many more chances would he get to win? How many chances does a professional bowler—anyone—get in a lifetime? More of those questions Schlegel could not answer.
It felt like an eternity passed before Schlegel even looked up at the pins. This time he would bowl on his own terms, fine and all, shot clock be damned. If this was one of those chances he would give away and wonder for the rest of his life where it went wrong, he would be damned before he’d give it away to Harry Golden and the stopwatch police.
The crowd erupted the second Schlegel let the shot go. Schlegel collapsed as he watched the shot, sliding across the approach on his knees. It was a beautiful shot destined for the pocket, and destined, too, to silence that word on tour that he choked in big matches. And that was when he heard them again, those superlatives that stung with their praise, the failure cloaked in compliments from those who knew how many times he had thrown this shot before, how many times he returned to his seat making plans for next week.
“And what a bad break!” Burton insisted. “A tremendously well-controlled shot by Schlegel. When he’s gotten in this position before, he has usually gone high. But this time he stayed down . . . really a super, super shot with all that pressure.”
The ball pounded the pocket like every previous shot he had thrown in the match, and like several shots before that did not strike, he left the right-hander’s nemesis pin, the dreaded 10 pin in the corner that so often stands even on the best shots. For all the things within Schlegel’s control—the curls and squats in Gehrmann’s gym, the pre-show jogs where game plans swarmed his mind like bees—the standing 10 pin in the sport of bowling proves that destiny is beyond the power of any human being to govern.
No one in Sunnybrook Lanes could know it yet, but the match ended the minute Schlegel rose from his knees, flailing his arms in fury at the single pin standing between himself and his dreams.
Mathematically, it still was possible for Schlegel to emerge the winner. In fact, it even was possible for the match to culminate in a tie. But there would be no ties that afternoon, no chances to come back a second time.
Schlegel left another 10 pin on his next shot, which also crushed the pocket to no avail. In fact, every time Schlegel threw a ball he put it right where it needed to be to strike, slamming the pocket each frame, only to leave Schlegel staring at a 10 pin just once too often to win. That was how the dice of destiny rolled.
“A bit discouraged, Ernie Schlegel. That’s the finest game he’s ever bowled on national television,” Burton said. “He’s gonna go home in defeat with a 246.”
Burton, himself a PBA titlist many times over, knew that no shot was “super” that left you a loser. The only thing that kept you out on tour was a wish to erase your name from the list of “great” non-champions. Not when your resentment of that foil crown was so great it compelled your wife to leap onto a tabletop and shout the name of the man who wore it as if she could scream it off of his head. Not when you had chased a dream for ten years and had only this image of yourself crumbling to the ground on national TV to show for it. Soon, the reward Schlegel and his wife pursued from town to town in their motorhome would come to them.
B
y 1980, Schlegel was still waiting for the elevator in the lobby of his dreams. Nelson Burton Jr. already occupied the penthouse on the top floor. Burton would enter the Hall of Fame in a year’s time. He claimed his first PBA title in 1964 at age 22 and made six shows that year alone. Schlegel, meanwhile, had spent the early ‘60s nursing the bitter blow of his banishment from the PBA, falling asleep behind the counter of the watch store his mother worked in, loading soda trucks in the muggy heat of a New York City summer, or repairing AC units in Hackensack.
In his school days, Burton was the kind of kid who captained the baseball team to a city championship, the high school wrestler and all-around jock who made girls blush in the hallway. He went on to fly his own private Cessna from tour stop to tour stop, make news when he flew it down to the Florida Keys and yanked a 190-pound tarpon out of
the sea, and win several majors on tour before Schlegel had won at all.
Bowling fans knew him as “Bo.” He was the man whom broadcasting pioneer Roone Arledge—creator of Monday Night Football and Wide World of Sports—had tapped to do color commentary alongside Chris Schenkel for PBA telecasts on ABC. But he still bowled tour stops when he felt like it, and occasionally someone had to fill in for him in the broadcast booth because he still bowled his way onto the TV show now and then. As professional bowling’s popularity waned in the years to come, Burton’s name would become symbolic of the sport’s golden era—a time when millions of viewers tuned in to watch Burton and Schenkel call the strikes and spares each Saturday on ABC.
To the action bowlers who crossed paths with him back in the early 1960s, Burton’s name was symbolic of only one thing: losing your money. He showed up unannounced and unknown one night in 1961 at a place in Chicago called Miami Lanes. Most locals swore the place was run by mobsters, and everybody swore it housed some of the greatest action bowlers in the country. That was the curious thing about Burton: Many bowling alleys claimed to have the country’s greatest action bowlers until he showed up to adjust their definition of “great.” He had one such adjustment in store this night in Chicago.
“I have a young man here who says he will bowl anybody in the house,” the manager said on the PA system. Johnny Campbell, then a local action player of modest notoriety, found that rather unusual.
Anyone who is going to come in here and make a statement like that has some real balls
, he thought to himself.
A dark-haired, nineteen-year-old Burton emerged in a crew cut and a button-down white shirt and dark slacks. He looked like a polished kid reporting to the office for his first day of
work. Then he started bowling. After trouncing his opponent for six straight games, Campbell, who was keeping score, realized Burton may have looked like a kid, but he bowled as well as any grown man. Burton did not bowl a single game under 240. Then Campbell wrote down his name—Nelson Burton Jr.—and it hit him.
“Oh, my God!” Campbell said. “This is Nelson Burton’s son!”
Burton’s father, Nelson Burton Sr., was one of the greatest bowlers in the history of the sport. And so, it seemed, was his kid.
Nearly twenty years later, when Burton Jr.’s path crossed Schlegel’s at King Louie Lanes in Kansas City for the 1980 King Louie Open title match on TV, he had fifteen titles to Schlegel’s zero. His last one had come weeks prior at the Fair Lanes Open in Baltimore. As a commentator, his made-for-TV tan, full head of bushy, black hair and sculpted biceps bulging in the arms of his ABC Sports coat established him as the media darling one writer called “the PBA’s answer to Robert Goulet,” referring to the actor who scored a breakout role as Lancelot in the Broadway musical
Camelot
.
Yes, by this point in his career, Burton was bowling royalty. How fitting, then, that he was bowling the finals of an event called the “King Louie Open” in a pair of golden bowling shoes with his cocky strut and square jaw. A beltless pair of pressed, beige slacks was buttoned up over his navel. The sleeves of his red-and-black striped polo shirt with a cotton-white collar tightened around his biceps every time he lifted his ball for another shot. The shirt clung tightly to his sculpted abdomen. With his slender legs and chiseled arms, he cut the figure of a trained athlete in a sport more commonly perceived as the refuge of beer-bellied hustlers and degenerates.