Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (15 page)

The Pete Mylenki who showed up at Schlegel’s apartment a few years later wasn’t looking for a doubles partner. He was looking to pay back a friend in a currency far more lasting than money—the currency of friendship. Mylenki locked eyes with Schlegel through a vaguely blue and chalky haze of weed that thickened the air inside the place and altered the direction of Schlegel’s life forever. He looked over the devastation of the apartment and shook his head.

“Ernie, this ain’t you. You gotta straighten out,” Mylenki told him. “I got a job for you in Jersey. I got you a place to live out there, too. You start Monday.”

Mylenki had landed Schlegel a job cleaning air-conditioning units out in Hackensack.

“I don’t even have a car,” Schlegel told him.

“You can find one when you get there,” Mylenki said before leaving.

Mylenki may not quite have understood at the time that the haze of hydro hanging over the obliterated and rollicking apartment he entered that night was as much a part of Schlegel as the fabled “Other Ernie.” As with that latter, morbidly violent half of him, the Schlegel that Mylenki found in that Inwood shanty also needed to be saved from himself. Mylenki’s connection with an air-conditioning technician in Hackensack who happened to want an assistant was all he needed to make
that happen. Naturally, Schlegel and his friends found a way to turn Mylenki’s miraculous intervention into another occasion for sordid debauchery.

“Guys!” Schlegel shouted as he turned to his friends upon Mylenki’s departure, “I got a job starting Monday! Toga party!”

It was the last weekend that Schlegel would live with his roommates, Dicky Bott and Jerry Markey, the final party he and his friends would host in that apartment, and the last time many of them would see each other for fifty years. But they made sure, on their way out, that the landlord would never forget who lived there. He came banging on the door to yell at them about the noise. Markey opened the door and said “We’re leaving Monday!” Then he slammed the door in the landlord’s face, and the party went on. The apartment quaked with the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” on full blast; Schlegel and the boys flipped up the volume fast every time they heard the word “Shout” and screamed it together.

Schlegel moved to Westwood, New Jersey and bought a beat-up station wagon for $125. He would spray the air conditioning units of Hackensack looking for air bubbles that betrayed the spot at which Freon leaked out. Their boss also had an account at one of the YMCA’s in New York City. There, Schlegel and Chuck installed air-conditioning units in the windows in May and removed them come October. He did this work for several years.

Thanks to this period on the straight and narrow for the first time since elementary school, Schlegel returned to bowling. Mylenki would not leave him alone until he did. He saw the dream in Schlegel’s eyes, however much Schlegel himself tried to turn away from it.

“You have to follow your dream, Ernie,” Mylenki told Schlegel.

“I tried everything,” Schlegel said. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” Mylenki said. “You have to. This is not the way you want to live the rest of your life. You weren’t born to fix air-conditioning units. You were born to bowl.”

When Schlegel looked in the mirror, he saw a broken-down young man with nowhere to go. Mylenki saw someone else; he saw a dreamer who still had a shot. By 1967, he was essentially running Schlegel’s life. He placed Schlegel in several bowling leagues. Schlegel would put in a day’s work in Hackensack and then, two or three nights a week, he would head off to bowl a few games of league. He started getting a taste of what he had left behind. He started feeling the itch he hadn’t scratched in years—the itch of the gambler, the itch of that chest-pounding gorilla who lorded over Central Lanes years ago, the itch of a guy who just wanted to be somebody.

Then Mylenki got in Esposito’s ear. He wanted Schlegel to bowl an upcoming PBA Tour event. Toru Nagai, Schlegel’s old cohort from his very first days in the action, agreed to sponsor him.

“Well, can you can you clean him up a little?” Esposito asked Mylenki.

“Oh, Frank, come on,” Mylenki said.

“No, I
mean
it. Clean him up and we’ll let him bowl—otherwise, no.”

Mylenki must have gotten Schlegel looking clean enough for Esposito’s taste, because Schlegel bowled a PBA regional event in Newburgh, New York, soon thereafter. The regionals are the minor leagues of the PBA, local tournaments for less money where the area’s aspiring pros lock horns on the lanes. Those who dominated their regions would be ready for a taste of the national PBA Tour. Some had success there. Others—most others—learned it was time to find a day job.

To Esposito’s chagrin, Schlegel led the tournament first game to last and walked away with the top prize. Mylenki pushed Esposito a little harder, leveraging Schlegel’s victory. Esposito let him bowl again—this time, a national stop, the 1967 PBA Camden Open in Camden, New Jersey, in late November. Schlegel led the first round, then finished in 9th place in a field dotted with future Hall of Famers. One of those future Hall of Famers—Mike Limongello—finished ten places behind Schlegel, at 19th.

There was no way Esposito could justify his opposition to Schlegel’s desire to become a PBA member now. That knife fight with Ginsberg was a distant memory as the calendar turned to 1968. And as for those kids who smudged Esposito’s carpet with the smokes at Paramus Lanes, Schlegel had not seen any of them in years. He was holding down an honest job in Hackensack. Esposito finally agreed to let Schlegel become a PBA member.

In the winter of 1969, at the Greater Buffalo Open, Schlegel finally broke through. He qualified as the fourth seed to bowl the nationally televised championship round on ABC. He had survived 42 games of competition against the greatest bowlers on the planet. After eighteen games he was in the top five. He maintained his position for most of the tournament, but it was close. His middle finger was sore, so he kept opening the finger hole with a bevel until it was large enough to keep the pressure off. It worked, and now, finally, here was the future he had been waiting for.

But this was Ernie Schlegel, so there had to be something more to overcome, some additional adversity that would give him the chance to prove to himself that his dreams could only deny him as long as he allowed them to. No one was burying knives in anyone’s chest this time; no one was tossing his dreams off the George Washington Bridge. No, this
time—for once—the obstacle Schlegel faced was not named Ernie Schlegel. Rather, its name was Mother Nature, and she was sporting her full winter regalia as Buffalo found itself in the throes of a blinding blizzard. In March, no less.

“Why would anybody live here?” Schlegel thought as he toppled an Everest of snow off the windshield of his car. Man-sized snow drifts flanked the roads. Schlegel dug the driver-side door out of the snow it was caked in, pulled the door free of the ice that had frozen shut the lock, and headed to the bowling alley.

Schlegel could not sleep the night before. So he borrowed a page from the days of toga parties and the Isley Brothers: He rolled himself a fatty and fell asleep sitting up in bed.

The trouble Schlegel faced at Fair Lanes in Buffalo the following day was that in any given week on tour, Schlegel faced hundreds of other Ernie Schlegels, men who also grew up in the tough terrain of bowling alleys and proved that they were the best bowlers anyone in town had ever seen. They, too, had dangled by their fingernails from the cliffs of their egos and clawed back to the top often enough to believe that nothing could bring them down. Every bowler on tour believed that, but most of them had headed out of town for the next tour stop by show time that week in Buffalo—most, that is, except for the five bowlers slated to compete before a national audience on ABC.

The kind of pressure that a twenty-five-year-old Ernie Schlegel faced under the steaming lights of TV cameras that snowy afternoon was not the kind relieved by a mere loosening of the finger holes in his bowling ball. Busting the budgets of Jersey kids at Paramus Lanes on Friday nights was one thing five years ago, but trying to do it against the greatest bowlers in the world with the nation looking on was quite another. With only a handful of channels available to viewers in 1969, nearly
ten million people carved time out of their Saturdays to make room for the pro bowling telecast on ABC. That was quite a stage for the first-generation American son of a superintendent to leap onto for the first time in his life.

The Ernie Schlegel that announcers Keith Jackson and Billy Welu introduced to the nation at the start of the show had the pensive countenance of a president reading a Soviet telegram threatening nuclear holocaust. They introduced the five contestants one at a time; each got up and threw one shot as his name was announced to the applauding crowd. Schlegel was the only one of the five to whirl through his one shot about as quickly as a bullet blows through a cake. He was already halfway through his hurried approach to the foul line when his name was called, and unlike the other four contenders, he hardly paused to watch his ball strike the pins before darting back to his seat at the pace of a jogger getting chased by a slobbering Doberman.

Schlegel’s polo shirt was buttoned to the chin. His hair was greased to the consistency of glass and parted cleanly off to the right—a rigidity that belied the storming spirit inside him. For now, he was merely the kid from Sickles Street in New York City who, as Billy Welu said in his introduction, was “completing his first full year on the tour.”

Welu’s partner in the booth was Keith Jackson. Jackson’s beady eyes were pinched into his round, doughy face. His dark tie was flawlessly knotted in the center of a collar so tight that the flesh of his neck looked like a pot of steaming milk about to boil over.

“If it sounds like I’m carrying the rigors of winter on my back, you’re right, I am,” he said to apologize for his haggard voice.

It was 1969, after all; you could still say things like that and expect to be taken seriously. Jackson would cover sports for ABC for the next thirty-seven years. His voice would become
synonymous with college football, and he would rank among America’s most beloved sportscasters. Here in the snows of Buffalo in 1969, that was all decades away, and there was a pro bowling show to get on with. The crowd was decked with horn-rimmed glasses, beehive hairdos, women sporting the wool dresses that Jackie Kennedy made famous, and men lighting cigarettes as casually as kids watching the afternoon pass by from a buddy’s stoop. Nearly every man wore a suit and tie and was freshly shaven. These were men who were not too far removed from the days when no man left the house without his fedora.

Everyone’s eyes turned toward the pair of lanes where the afternoon’s matches were about to unfold. Steve Wallace, the fortunate son of wealthy parents out of Houston—and Ernie Schlegel’s opponent—stepped up to throw the first shot of the game. A nineteen-year-old psychology major out of the University of Houston who dropped out to try his luck on tour, Wallace’s wiry frame prompted Welu to joke that Wallace weighed “one hundred twenty-five pounds soaking wet, with bowling ball,” during his introduction. His clothes hung from his body like a shirt left out on a laundry wire in the wind. He looked as if he were nothing more than a cadaver dressed in a young man’s shirt and pants—bowling’s own Ichabod Crane. His jet-black pair of Buddy Holly glasses contrasted so sharply against his snow-white complexion that he looked like he had the eyes of a raccoon. Even at the tender age of nineteen, a receding hairline broadened his forehead.

Wallace’s opening shot was a bad one. He spared, took his seat, and left the lanes to Schlegel. Schlegel now prepared to throw his first shot on national television. He hid his wildness well with manners so staid as to be supine—just the way Esposito and the boys wanted it—despite the $6,000 top prize. But the one place where he could not conceal the wild
man within him was his eyes, which narrowed into a reptilian squint as he stared down his target on the lane. He looked like a lizard closing in on a fly.

Schlegel lost the war with his nerves and left a split. He sauntered back to the ball return, then turned toward the split he left as if checking to see if that really just happened. Seeing that in fact it had, he frowned with a mixture of embarrassment and disgust. Here he was with the jewel of his dreams more within reach than ever before, and he was blowing it right out of the gate.

Wallace hurried through two more poor shots and converted his spares as Jackson noted a suspicion that “at nineteen years of age he feels the pressure perhaps a little bit more than some of the veterans.” Perhaps. Or maybe Wallace didn’t get his degree in the game of survival from the same school that Schlegel attended as a kid—the school where you won the match you were betting on or you couldn’t pay the rent tomorrow, where a quarrel over twenty bucks was enough to get you a knife through the chest. Maybe those were the lessons Schlegel applied when he stepped up for his third shot of the match and sent the pins scattering across the deck as if they were just a fistful of dice.

He demolished the pocket yet again on his next shot, but this time left the right-hander’s nemesis: the ten pin off in the corner, which is famous for withstanding the best shot a bowler can throw. He winced as he returned to wait for his ball to come back. One game of bowling offered ten chances to end up with a better score than the other guy. To blow one of them on a perfect shot was to tempt fate once too often. But Schlegel gathered himself and made the spare.

And with that the telecast broke for a trip through the commercial wilderness of late 1960s America. There, the brand new 1969 Lincoln Mercury Cyclone was loaded with a 428ci V8, STP
Motor Oil was stronger even than Rocky Marciano, and the BIC pen took another savage pounding and “writes first time, every time.” You could get one for just 19 cents—unless you wanted the BIC fine point. That would set you back an entire quarter.

The $6,000 check that had the winner’s name on it at the end of the PBA Greater Buffalo Open show was enough to buy two of those Lincoln Mercury Cyclones, enough to keep a man on tour for years to come. It was just a couple grand less than the average median income in 1969, in fact, and enough to put 50 percent down on the total cost of the average house. No one knew what motive flashed through Steve Wallace’s mind when he came out of the commercial break to treat the crowd to the two finest shots they had seen all afternoon, blowing the pins straight back into the pit as if struck by a Tom Seaver fast ball. Maybe he had his eye on that Cyclone; maybe he planned to blow pins back into the pit on tour for as long as he could. Or maybe six-thousand bucks was no motive at all to a nineteen-year-old whose parents had the dough to bankroll any dream he had. Perhaps that was the reason for the observation Jackson shared about just how at ease Wallace seemed before the cameras rolled that afternoon.