Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (22 page)

While Schlegel got in his practice shots during the commercial break, Burton talked baseball with fans in the front row as if to make sure they saw he was not sweating this, that he had been here before and come up a winner fifteen times more than Schlegel had, and he knew it.

“This is going to be a match of psyching,” play-by-play man Chris Schenkel said as the match began, “because Ernie Schlegel, the tournament leader, is just full of that type of ‘action,’ and Bo Burton is not a slouch, either.”

“Not a slouch” indeed. The Burton whom Schenkel spoke of picked up blackjack and poker at the ripe age of six. His father gave him an itch for action so fierce that the nuns he had for schoolteachers prized his penchant for numbers as if it were a divine math miracle. The nuns did not know the unsavory source of his propensity for arithmetic: learning when to hit or when to stay in a game of blackjack. That taught Burton more about numbers than any nun’s math ever would.

Bowling was the one hand of cards he knew would never fail him. Not that night in Chicago, not the time he shot up his thumb with Novocaine to bowl a tour stop after thirty-eight games of action the night before, not the time he was stripped of his stripes as an Army Sergeant for reporting to duty late after another long night on the lanes.

“They tossed me in the guardhouse for twenty-four hours, and I went back to private for a while,” he remembered years later. “I didn’t mind much, because I figured I had made the equivalent of a year’s pay in those matches.”

Burton’s days of banging heads with bowlers in the mob haunts of Chicago were the memories of another man’s life by 1980. With a cushy TV gig that paid in one year what he used to make in one good night on the lanes, the checks he bowled for amounted to little more than beer money. Burton never again would depend on his ball and shoes to pay the
bills, but money is not the thing that feeds the ego of a born competitor. Only winning does that, and then the next win, and the next. When Burton looked across the ball return and shook hands with Schlegel to start the final match of the King Louie Open, he did not see a man or a fellow bowler. He saw his next win.

Schlegel’s raiment struck a balance between Frank Esposito’s dated taste and Schlegel’s urge to dazzle. He tucked a steel-gray, V-neck shirt into a beltless pair of violet slacks whose bottoms roiled around his ankles as he shuffled toward the foul line. He wore a yolk-colored baseball glove under the blue Dick Weber wrist support most bowlers Velcroed around their wrist on TV to rake in some endorsement dough. His thick bush of bowl-cut, dirty blonde hair looked like someone halved a pumpkin, painted it the color of honey, and plopped it on top of his head.

The packed crowd behind the lanes erupted with exclamations of “Come on, Ernie!” as he glided into his first shot and blasted the pocket. It was a strike, the first of many he would throw that afternoon.

Cathy sported an emerald silk, emerald shirt in the crowd, her pale cheeks stunned with a subtle flourish of rouge. A shock of permed, auburn bangs obscured her forehead and hovered over her wide-lens glasses. Beside her sat Sy Marks, a buddy of Schlegel’s from the old neighborhood, with a trimmed, dark goatee and a sharkskin suit. To the Schlegels, Sy’s presence made everything feel like yesterday.

“There, you see he’s five-eleven, one-fifty-five, and can you
believe
it? He’s looking for his first title,” Schenkel said as Schlegel’s stats appeared on screen. The stats documented the twelve years he had spent on tour, the quarter-of-a-million dollars in earnings he had bagged over that time, the goose egg where his number of PBA titles ought to have been.

“It’s very hard for our pro members to believe that he is looking for a title for the first time,” said Dick Weber, filling in for Burton, of the gaping zero, “because he is an excellent bowler.”

Weber calling you an excellent bowler was like Wilt Chamberlain telling you that you’re a hell of a basketball player. Bowling’s Mount Rushmore began with Dick Weber’s face. With twenty-six PBA titles and accolades strung across nearly half a century of bowling, the man was the sport’s marquee legend.

Burton greeted Schlegel’s opening strike with an even more convincing one of his own. He wasted little time strutting back to the ball return with a vaguely annoyed expression on his face, as if no non-titlist had any business burdening him with the need to show up in a championship match. For the rest of the afternoon, Burton would perceive Schlegel the way he had perceived so many other challengers over the years—as a fruit fly he meant to swipe off his armor in a joust.

Burton’s next shot sailed left of the headpin. A single pin remained. He sauntered back to retrieve his ball, shrugged, and sighed. He stared down the lane as if the pins had to be kidding him. His next shot sailed left again and nearly missed the spare. Burton paused at the line in disbelief. It seemed, for a moment, as if bowling’s golden boy might not be so golden this time around.

It is customary for a bowler on a PBA show to stay put in his seat until the opposing player completes his shot. Schlegel had never been much for custom, and as a jolt of adrenaline coursed through his body after watching Burton nearly miss an easy spare and stiffen with embarrassment, he launched out of his seat before Burton even turned away from the foul line. There was an urgency about him, the mildly angry desperation of a man determined not to let this afternoon join the many bad memories he had made in this spot before.

Adrenaline is a fickle assistant. In moderation it may be the edge you need, but let it consume you and it can easily mean your demise. Schlegel leered at the pins with his reptilian squint, ball in hand. He rushed to the line and the ball seemed to drop from his hand as he let it go. He fell off balance to his right and watched the ball whiff the headpin and leave four pins standing.

Schlegel’s next shot was a strike, but the damage was done. To miss a spare in a championship match against a bowler of Burton’s pedigree was to leave a trace of blood in shark-infested waters. It was merely a matter of time before you were destroyed. Burton swaggered into position to throw his next shot, cradling his ball in his arms as he adjusted his blue and white bowling glove and holding his hand over the air blowing out of the ball return. If you did not know he was bowling for a top prize of $11,000 dollars, you might have thought he was preparing for a walk to the post office. His placid demeanor could not have struck a starker contrast to Schlegel’s jittery intensity.

Burton fired his ball into the pocket, left a 10 pin standing, and converted the spare with the textbook aplomb for which he was known. When the camera honed in on Schlegel, he was crouching over the ball return and holding a knife in plain view of Burton, who was gathering himself for his next shot. Schlegel picked up his ball and took it back to his seat with his knife, the blade twice as long as his index finger, and began fidgeting with the thumb hole in his ball. No image could possibly be more emblematic of a match between the prince groomed for glory and the former gangster.

Weber attempted to explain away the sight as typical of bowlers so fraught with nerves the blood rushes out of their fingers and makes the finger holes feel bigger, a problem only another piece of thumb tape can fix.

Ostensibly, the knife helped Schlegel stuff a piece of tape into the thumb hole of his bowling ball, but if Burton happened to be thinking about Schlegel’s knife when he set up for his next shot, well, call that a bonus. This may have been Kansas City, but this also was a game Schlegel picked up in the shady haunts of Brooklyn or the Bronx—a game as much of the mind as of anything else.

It was Schlegel’s mind Burton was after when he stuffed his next ball into the pocket for his finest strike of the match—a shot aimed at Schlegel’s gamesmanship. Burton already was walking back to his seat when the camera found him again seconds after his shot, poker-faced and unfazed. In this psychological standoff between Schlegel’s knife and Burton’s moxie, Burton’s moxie had won. Schlegel’s antics may have earned him his share of money back home, but here in Kansas City, opposite one of the greatest bowlers the tour had ever seen, he would have to win with his score alone.

Schlegel buried his next three shots for strikes, chomping furiously on a piece of gum. Burton struggled into his sixth frame—a spare here, a bad shot followed by an open frame there. The slow-motion replay captured Burton wincing and turning away from the pins with the stiff manner of a stunned man. Maybe he got away with a lousy shot now and then that long-ago night in Chicago, where Johnny Campbell noted the name of the cocky kid in the button-down shirt who never bowled a game under 240. Those were matches against men whose names no one remembered; this was a match against a man who someday would join him in the most elite club the sport has to offer—the Hall of Fame. The far-away look in Burton’s eyes as he took his seat after blowing a spare betrayed the surrender of a champion who knew he was running out of time. In all likelihood, he may have already coughed up the title on the kind of spare he converted a thousand times a year.

Burton’s struggles made Schlegel’s next ball perhaps the most crucial shot of his life. A strike here would bring him closer to the thing he had chased across the country for more than a decade—his first PBA title. Many thoughts flashed through his mind as he stood and stared down the pins, his bowling ball ribboned with a stripe of lane oil that glistened under the TV lights. Maybe he thought about those years he spent waiting on the sidelines of his dreams, or the blow this title would deal to those who had stood between him and this moment—Harry Golden and his stopwatch, Frank Esposito and his grudges.

Schlegel took a deep, heaving breath, the sweaty edges of his bowl-cut hair clinging to his clammy forehead, and took his first step toward the foul line.

“Legs trembling now, he’s moving to the line, he’s yet to win,” Schenkel said as Schlegel glided into his shot and let the ball go.

At first the shot looked awfully similar to the one that sailed by the headpin in the second frame—the only frame in which he did not strike. Then it meandered in the direction of the pocket from somewhere out near the gutter, making it all the way to the headpin as Schlegel pressed his fists together at the foul line and stiffened with hope. All pins cleared the deck except for the 7 pin in the corner, which withstood Schlegel’s shot for a split second before another pin lunged out of the gutter and slapped it out. Strike.

When Schlegel struck yet again on his next shot, Cathy, stunning in her brilliant emerald blouse and auburn hair, exploded out of her seat. Then she swiveled to her side and swung a clenched fist down like some livid judge pounding her gavel to manage an unruly court. There were many injustices she meant to avenge with her husband’s triumph this afternoon—that night screaming away a pro-Strampe crowd
with shouts of her husband’s name from a table top in Detroit, the tyranny of the fashion police who dulled Schlegel’s edges when they forced him into the clothes of a square, the many titles she had watched slip through his fingers since their hasty wedding. All of it, if Schlegel could hang on for the win, would fade into this long-awaited triumph over the past and its many bruising failures.

With his fifth consecutive strike and sixth in seven frames, Schlegel was virtually assured of the title. It was exactly the point in the match when Burton found his shot. He rushed to the approach after Schlegel’s fifth strike and tossed one of his own, so disgruntled with his own performance that he sauntered back to the ball return shaking his head. Though a 7 pin stood despite another great shot on his next ball, it would be the last time he left a pin on the deck for the rest of the game. Frame after frame Burton pounded the pocket for a strike—the ninth frame, then the first in the tenth, and the second, and the third.

There was one problem for Burton, and his name was Ernie Schlegel. Schlegel’s face assumed the scowling expression of the Other Ernie as he watched his next ball crush the pocket for his sixth strike in a row. It was a look of such irascible menace that neither Weber nor Schenkel could contain their laughter at Schlegel’s intensity. Schlegel swung his arms wildly through the air after blowing back all ten pins. He crouched down and clutched his fists, falling out of the camera’s view and exposing, once again, an ecstatic wife who darted out of her seat and pumped her fist in the crowd.

For perhaps the first time that afternoon, viewers noticed something else about Cathy. She was clutching something in her left hand—a stuffed monkey. The monkey was a gift given to her by a business partner. She tossed it to Schlegel.
He kissed it and tossed it back to her in the crowd. At last, Schlegel had shrugged the monkey off his back. He now could call himself a PBA champion. Here, finally, was a title few action bowlers ever attained, and the conclusion of a quest that began in the smoky bowling alleys of New York City all those years ago.

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