Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (25 page)

Schlegel’s father always told him that whenever he felt he had been wronged, he had to fight. Those words rang as true now as ever before. Time to fight.

He crunched the pocket on his opening shot for a strike, pumped his fist, and ran across the neighboring lane shouting “Yeah! Come on!” through clenched teeth. He quickly set up for his next shot, scowling at the pins with a face contorted by rage. Then he tossed another perfect strike, turned to glower at Pedersen, and said “You’re mine!” The crowd erupted.

The match, as they say, was on.

“He’s saying ‘You’re mine.’ He’s talking to Randy Pedersen,” Earl Anthony observed from the broadcast booth. “That’s an action bowler, folks! He wants you to think about anything but your game. So he talks to you. That’s Ernie!”

Anthony then was the winningest player in the history of the PBA Tour. He had won forty-three titles, one of them a major
coming at Schlegel’s expense in the title match of the vaunted PBA National Championship in 1981. Anthony edged out Schlegel that day by a score of 242-237. He previously had beaten Schlegel in the TV finals of the 1978 AMF Magiscore Open in Kissimmee, Florida. By 1995, they had long-since become great friends, and Cathy had become a close friend of Anthony’s wife, Susan. By 1995, Anthony played more golf than he bowled, but he did provide commentary for the PBA alongside his broadcast partner and fellow PBA Hall of Famer, Mike Durbin.

As Pedersen grabbed his ball to set up for his next shot, the crowd was still cheering so loudly that Pedersen paused and retreated from the approach with ball in hand. Then he turned to the raucous fans and smiled before trying to get set again. Though only moderately better than his previous shot, this one nonetheless found its way to the pocket. The 10 pin briefly withstood the blow; then another pin rolled across the deck and knocked it back into the pit. Pedersen, sensing now that to bowl an action player for $40,000 was to be locked in a cage with an untamed animal, gave Schlegel a taste of the action he was better known for dishing out. Pedersen paused at the line, shook a clenched fist at the pins, and roared, veins popping out of his reddening neck. He walked away looking back at the lane screaming “That’s right! That’s what I’m talking about! Right there!”

The crowd became hysterical.

“Is Randy the type that would talk right back to him?” broadcaster Mike Durbin asked his partner in the booth.

“Randy’s liable to do anything,” Anthony retorted.

Durbin was himself a PBA Hall of Famer. He had won fourteen titles. In 1984, he set a record when he won the coveted Tournament of Champions title for a third time.

It seemed Pedersen was liable to do one thing in particular that day—strike. He packed the pocket in frame three for three
strikes in a row. Then he gestured wildly to the roaring crowd, circling the settee area where he and Schlegel would wait out each other’s shots in their seats, shouting with his tan face turning ruddy and his brow slickening with sweat under the set’s hot lights.

“Tell you what, we’re not a long way from downtown Pittsburgh, but I bet they can hear us in Harrisburg right now!” Anthony said of the crowd Pedersen whipped into a riot.

Schlegel stepped up and demolished the pocket yet again on his next shot, but this time he left the right-hander’s nemesis: the 10 pin off in the corner. Simply put, the 10 pin is bowling’s version of flipping someone the bird. It was a tough break that Schlegel, like most right-handed pro bowlers, had suffered countless times before. Sometimes, even a great shot that properly strikes the pocket and ignites the pin action required to stuff all ten pins in the pit still can leave that corner pin standing. Sometimes the problem is a bad rack of pins, which occurs when a misaligned pinsetter sets a pin or even several pins slightly off their spots. Even if the rack is pristine, the bowling ball sometimes will deflect off of the headpin in a way that causes the 6 pin to twirl around the 10 pin and leave it standing rather than slap it out of the rack for a strike. Such a deflection can be the result of changes to the pattern of oil on the lane that occur as bowlers manipulate the lane pattern; those changes can alter the bowling ball’s angle of entry into the pocket, affecting the way the ball moves through the pins to the player’s detriment. A legendary pro bowler named Don Johnson famously left the 10 pin in the memorable title match of the 1970 Tournament of Champions on the final shot of what would have been a 300 game worth a bonus check of $10,000. He collapsed to the ground, prostrate and devastated, as his opponent, Rick Ritger, came out on the
approach to help him to his feet like a man trying to aid somebody who had just been struck the street.

Fortune had intervened for Pedersen; Schlegel found no such luck. He winced as he returned to wait for his ball to come back, and the microphone pinned to his fuchsia shirt documented his disgust.

“Yeah, you didn’t look! Didn’t look at that lousy rack, Schlegel!” he fumed in his Manhattan accent. “Why didn’t you look first! Ernie, Ernie, geez. You didn’t even look at it.”

One game of bowling offers ten frames to end up with a better score than the other guy. To blow one of them on a perfect shot is to tempt fate once too often. Schlegel gathered himself and made the spare, then struck again on his next shot. This time, he turned back disgusted, shaking his head, and still ruminating over “that lousy rack” as he took his seat.

Schlegel may have been in his fifties, but the thing about bowling pins is they do not know how old you are. And neither, apparently, did Schlegel.

The camera spotted a rioting fan in the crowd holding up a sign that said “Ernie’s Army.”

“There’s Ernie’s Army! You remember Arnie’s army! We’re in Pennsylvania, not too far from Latrobe!” Anthony said of golfing great Arnold Palmer’s hometown in southwest Pennsylvania. “We’ve got Ernie’s army, here in the Pittsburgh area!”

Schlegel stepped up in the seventh frame to the crowd’s chants of “Ernie! Ernie!” Pedersen did what he could, but it was Schlegel’s hand this crowd was eating from now. He blasted another strike. Durbin joked that Schlegel had “thrown the left jab . . . now he’s looking for the right cross.” Anthony chuckled. Schlegel delivered the right cross in the eighth frame, another resounding strike that blew the rack of pins violently back into the pit. Then he did it again in the ninth. This time,
he trotted back to his seat scowling and pumping a clenched fist. “He’s mine! He’s mine!” he shouted. The arena’s writhing crowd erupted as if they could reach a decibel so high they might steer fate themselves.

The camera panned to Schlegel’s wife and now-grown daughter, Cathy and Darlene, who exploded out of their seats in the crowd after his eighth-frame strike. Darlene had flown in the day before to be there.

Professional bowling is a lonely sport. For all the legends who may have left their fingerprints on Schlegel’s character back in the days of pre-dawn bets and gangsters, for all the fist pumps fans may perform in unison with him, the only way to win in bowling is to stand on the approach alone and go. First, he had to sit through Pedersen’s ninth-frame shot. It was a perfect strike—perhaps his best of the match—after which Pedersen performed his best Hulk Hogan. He cupped his hand to his ear to elicit the crowd’s praise as he turned to take his seat. That was the last strike he would throw.

Schlegel stared down the pins through his wide-lens glasses, gulped a mouthful of air and exhaled hard from somewhere deep within himself. Somehow, amid all the frenzy and bombast, his mousy hair still sat neatly parted on his head. The TV lights glimmered off of his receding hairline. He looked down at his ball once more and adjusted his stance slightly, then looked back up at the pins with his mean mouth and narrowing eyes, his gnarled nose still striped with an ivory Breathe Right strip.

“Biggest shot of the match, right here,” Anthony said.

And as Schlegel ran to the opposite lane pumping his fist after blasting the pocket yet again for a strike, Anthony asked the question many in the arena surely were pondering by now.

“How can he do it any better than that?” Anthony says. “Fifty-two years old, and he’s running them out!”

Schlegel’s
strike on his last ball in the tenth frame forced Pedersen to strike on his next shot or go home a loser. The cameras caught Pedersen mumbling to himself in his seat as he stared down the ten pins that stood between him and $40,000.

“One shot,” he seemed to say to himself. “One time.”

The golden smile of the kid from San Marino once known on tour as “Captain Happy” was noticeably missing when Pedersen took the approach. Now he wore the stormy poker face of a man with nothing on his mind but the business before him—throw a strike and sign the back of that $40,000 check. Anything less and you lose.

“Well, it’s all up to Randy Pedersen,” Anthony said. “One ball, and we’ll know if we’ve got a winner or a loser right here.”

Pedersen got the shot off quickly. Anthony had hardly finished that last sentence before the ball was halfway down the lane.

The shot was every bit as perfect as his last three, each of which crunched the pocket for no-doubt strikes.

Pedersen was about to be reminded that in bowling, as in life, sometimes perfect is not good enough.

Seconds after Pedersen got the shot off, he collapsed to the ground in a fetal position. His face turned as red as a beet as he buried it in his hands. Like everyone else in the building, he could not believe what he had just seen. His ball angled violently toward the pocket the way it had so many times before in this game. But this time, a single pin in the back row—the 8 pin—remained standing. In professional bowling, it is a break so devastating it has its own name; pro bowlers call it “the stone 8.” The ball cleared the pins off the deck so violently that none remained to give this one the kind of fortuitous nudge
from which Pedersen benefited earlier in the game. It was as alone on the pin deck as Pedersen was on the floor, the arena roiling with the screams of a disbelieving crowd.

Schlegel came unhinged.

“I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!” he shouted as he lunged out of his chair flailing his fists. “Unbelievable!

Thirty years earlier, in an action match against Mike Limongello, Schlegel needed a strike in the tenth frame to shut out Lemon. He threw a clutch shot that seemed destined to hammer the pocket when Cliff Burgland, another bowler who happened to be betting on Lemon, screamed “somehow!” loud enough to be heard from one end of the bowling alley to another. He knew Schlegel’s shot was a strike; he screamed out of a desperate hope that somehow the perfect ball Schlegel had thrown would leave a pin standing. Schlegel’s ball plowed through the pocket only to leave the dreaded stone 8 pin, losing the match and lining Burgland’s pockets. Schlegel had that match in mind when he watched the ball clear Pedersen’s hand in the tenth frame, thirty years from that match with Lemon. He screamed
Somehow!
inside his head. And, somehow, it happened—Pedersen left the very stone 8 that had doomed Schlegel that long-ago night against Lemon. Quite literally, Schlegel could not believe it.

Pedersen gingerly picked himself up off the floor.

“For the old people!” Schlegel screamed. “I am the greatest! Muhammad Ali!”

Later, some would take that reference as an arrogant suggestion that he was Ali’s equal; in fact, Schlegel meant it merely as an homage to his idol.

Schlegel continued running from one end of the set to the other, reveling in his glory.

“Well, let’s hope Ernie doesn’t have any heart problems,” Anthony said, “because he is
flying!
”

Schlegel’s heart made it through fine. It was Pedersen’s heart that broke.

There would be no shortage of opinions about the way Schlegel handled his good fortune that night. Many would say Schlegel could have been more graceful about it, that they themselves never would have reacted that way, that Schlegel should have acknowledged, at least, the great but doomed shot he had thrown in that clutch moment.

Years later, Schlegel had his own take.

“Hey, half a million people may love me, half a million people may hate me, but that’s a million people who are gonna watch me.’”

EPILOGUE

I
first met Ernie Schlegel at a senior pro bowling tournament called the Treasure Coast Open at Stuart Lanes in Stuart, Florida, in January 2007. I went to see the guys I loved to watch on TV when I was a kid. I had no idea Schlegel would be there, and I was thrilled to see that he was. I was also thrilled to see other legends in attendance, including Mark Roth and Johnny Petraglia. Unsurprisingly, both Petraglia and Schlegel made the championship round of the Treasure Coast Open, although neither man went on to win the title that week. That went to another Hall of Famer named Dale Eagle.

As I squeezed my way through the crowd to watch the action, I struck up a conversation with Cathy, still as elegant as ever. I told her how much I enjoyed watching Schlegel bowl on TV when I was a kid. She soon introduced me to the man himself.

He looked right at me and said, “I’m the greatest hustler who ever lived.” I expected nothing less. Schlegel did not know then that I grew up watching him on TV. I was mesmerized by his performance on the 1995 Touring Players Championship
show, which I watched the day it aired. For months afterward, when I would go bowling with my best friend, Dominic Perri, at Melody Lanes in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, I would leap, scream, rant, and rave in the manner of the man who had captured my imagination—Ernie Schlegel.

In March 2009, I headed out to Las Vegas to spend some time with the Schlegels. Ernie planned to attend a fiftieth reunion at the South Point Hotel, Casino and Spa with buddies from the old neighborhood. Vegas remains one of the world’s premier destinations for elite bowlers to compete for good money. The city has hosted some of the greatest events in the history of the PBA, such as the Showboat Invitational, the Tournament of Champions, and the World Series of Bowling. As long as its casinos throb with the glittering din of slot machines, the outbursts of gamblers waving fists full of betting sheets at football scores and horses, and the shrieks of players wielding royal flushes at poker tables, it will be the only place on earth where Schlegel and his posse from the old days will want to kick back and remember how it was.