Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (17 page)

Two months later, at the 1976 Fair Lanes Open in a Baltimore suburb called Towson, they made it happen. Schlegel bowled well enough to qualify for the championship round on ABC. It would be his first appearance on national TV as the newly minted the Bicentennial Kid. He and Cathy squeezed into the bowling alley locker room, and with ten minutes to go before airtime, they assembled the superhero Schlegel saw in the mirror back in Buffalo.

Schlegel put on his aviator shades. He stepped into his snow-white pair of pants dotted with a stripe of silver studs strung down the side of each leg from waist to ankle. He pushed his arms into the ruffled sleeves of a V-neck top glittering with white and blue sequins. His collar sparkled with silver stars that converged in the center of his chest, exposing a vague patch of chest hair and a gold necklace as thin as lace. He finished off the costume with a pair of red, white, and blue bowling shoes.

The Bicentennial Kid was born.

“He must have known he was going to make the show, because he was all prepared,” ABC commentator Bo Burton said of Schlegel and his costume on the show that afternoon.

Schlegel did indeed know he would make the show. Now that he had his costume, in fact, he was so certain he would make the show that Cathy hurriedly put the finishing touches on his outfit during the drive to the tournament. Schlegel still had more than forty grueling games of competition ahead of him at that point with no guarantee of even making any
money, no less of making the show. But in his mind, before he threw his first shot that week, he had already vanquished the field. This was a confidence Schlegel never before enjoyed.

Nothing provided Schlegel with a more powerful incentive to succeed than his costume. Not the paychecks he hoped to sign his name to by the end of the week. Not the trophy he hoped to hoist above his head as he smiled for reporters’ cameras. Nothing. It was the clothes he bowled for now, the adrenaline of that moment when he burst on the set with his red and blue sequins sparkling under the lights to the crowd’s ovation. No one in the history of the PBA—then nearly twenty years old—had seen anything like this before. If ratings were what ABC wanted for its weekly bowling show, ratings were exactly what Schlegel would deliver. As it was, pro bowling’s ratings already provided Schlegel with a platform that reached 20 million viewers. In the mid 1970s, PBA’s broadcasts out-rated Major League Baseball, professional basketball, and pro golf’s Masters. They also rivaled college basketball’s NCAA tournament. This was the opportunity Schlegel had envisioned in that motel room mirror as he dreamed his way out of despair, the moment he knew he would share with Cathy before he had even seen her face.

But Schlegel was the fourth seed on the show. If this moment was going to last much longer, he first would have to beat one of the greatest bowlers who ever lived. His opponent in the opening match was fifth seed Billy Hardwick.

Hardwick was a blond-haired California kid who stunned the bowling world in 1969 when he set the record for most titles in a single season—seven. Hardwick had it all by then—starring in television commercials for Miller High Life, thrashing all comers from the United States to Japan and back, and landing enough endorsements to rival the earnings of other stars of the day such as Mickey Mantle.

All the fame and glory that came his way by 1969 turned out to be the dream before the nightmare of his life. Within three years, Hardwick would lose two infant sons—one to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and the other to a complicated pregnancy that culminated in a premature birth from which the baby died. He went the next seven years without a single title, and his life would never be the same. But in 1976, Hardwick was in the midst of a career resurgence that saw him qualify for the televised finals several times that season and come within a single game of winning the coveted Firestone Tournament of Champions title.

When he faced Schlegel from across a ball return to shake his hand before the opening match of the 1976 Fair Lanes Open, no one in Billy Hardwick’s life, least of all Hardwick himself, was smiling. His mother-in-law had just recently been laid to rest, and his wife back home felt scorned by a distant Hardwick’s return to the road as she grieved. By then, Hardwick was a man who knew that any loss he may face on the lanes would be no match for the losses he had endured away from them. He had faced the deaths of his sons and the pieces of himself that died along with them, the death of his once-soaring career, and now the death of his mother-in-law and the fear that his second marriage could be next.

DePace, now Cathy Schlegel, and her costumed husband opened the locker room door to walk the narrow pathway between towering bleachers on their way to the set.

“Are you ready, honey?” Schlegel asked.

They had a lot to be ready for by then: their new life together, the thrills and heartbreaks the PBA Tour life would impart, the unending struggle to make enough money on tour to keep bowling for a living, this show where Schlegel’s costume would make him the hero or the fool. Imagine showing up dressed as bowling’s own Evel Knievel and proceeding to embarrass
yourself by bowling a lousy game before a national audience of millions?

Schlegel ran down the aisle with raised fists. He needed the crowd on his side after Hardwick made his entrance onto the set to be introduced as the fifth seed. They knew Hardwick had made a furious charge to make the show. The man had just roared back from a deficit seemingly too significant to overcome in order to qualify for the championship round. And some knew about the horrors Hardwick had bowled through all these years since that dream season back in ’69. The crowd greeted Hardwick with an ovation. For a moment, at least, Hardwick was the fan favorite.

Only those in attendance saw the boisterous entrances that occurred moments before the show went to air. Those who tuned in later saw an enraptured crowd applauding noisily as play-by-play announcer Bud Palmer struggled against the din to conduct his opening segment. The crowd wasn’t screaming for Earl or Weber or Hardwick. They screamed for Schlegel.

The crowd was speckled with women in beehive hairdos and men in checkered pants and bushy sideburns that placed them unmistakably in the time capsule that was the 1970s. And all of them, hipsters and squares alike, were rapt in the thrill of what they just saw. Clearly, something happened before Palmer took his place in front of the camera. This was something bigger than a bowling tournament, something the writhing crowd in the stands behind Palmer’s head would not soon forget.

Palmer introduced his broadcast partner and PBA champion Nelson “Bo” Burton Jr., who stepped into the camera’s view giggling as if someone told him a bawdy joke on his way over. They were dressed in wool blazers the color of the sun and just as blinding to look at, with wide lapels and ABC’s lower-case insignia emblazoned on the right breast pocket in black lettering. With their sport coats and made-for-TV tans, they
looked like a couple of lemon popsicles melting under the TV lights. Burton’s sideburns reached halfway down his face and the jet-black pile of hair on his head almost resembled the shape of a wasp’s nest. He wore a powder-blue shirt with an auburn tie that had a floral print. His brawny arms highlighted the chiseled figure he cut as a power-lifting gym rat.

Palmer and Burton were in for a show that day. That much, clearly, was certain.

Hardwick showed up in a pair of aqua-blue polyester pants printed with white patchwork squares and an ivory-white vinyl belt around his waist. It was the era of the leisure suit and bushy hair. Hardwick, formerly known at the pinnacle of his glory as “the blond bomber,” sported thick locks of straight, strawberry-blond hair that gushed down the sides of his head. He wore a cerulean polo shirt with a chalk-white collar, a black leather glove with cut-off fingers on his bowling hand, and a glittering Rolex around his left wrist. Plum-dark marks cradled his eyes like a couple of fading half-moons. They sank into his doughy face as he leered threateningly at the pins for his first shot, and held his amber bowling ball chin-high before making his first step toward the foul line. Hardwick may have had a lot to bowl for, but nonetheless he stumbled out of the gate with an eight-count and a spare to open the match.

That was when the show within the show began. Schlegel stepped up for his first shot on national television as the Bicentennial Kid. It was his first shot of the match, but it was also his first shot at the stardom he intended to seize, the first of many appearances he would make on ABC in 1976. More than anything, this was the first shot of the rest of his career. His red and blue sequins sparkled under the lights of the set; they ran straight up the front of his white top in double lines that enclosed a single row of silver stars, then over his shoulders and down his back like a pair of suspenders. His sleeves
were ruffled from elbow to hand and ringed at the wrist with sequins, and the bush of blond hair on his head was so thick it looked like a shrub that had not been sheared in months. The lights of TV cameras cast a glare on his amber shades as he looked up at the pins and took a deep breath with a poker player’s deadpan demeanor.

“And look at this outfit now as we go to Ernie Schlegel,” Palmer noted as Schlegel stood on the approach and inserted his fingers into a jet-black bowling ball with three white dots printed across the finger holes like a string of pearls. “That’s why he calls himself the Bicentennial Kid. It’s a little bit like maybe something Evel Knievel might wear.”

“That’s Evel Ernie, Bud,” Bo Burton said with a chuckle. “Ernie Schlegel.”

“He says he doesn’t come from any town, just the good ol’ U.S.A.,” Palmer noted.

Palmer and Burton’s bemusement traced a fine line between disbelief and derision, precisely the line Cathy in particular hoped to avoid as she helped Schlegel into his costume in the locker room. She didn’t want him to bowl a bad game. She was scared. She knew he could make or break their future in one game.

The only thing Schlegel broke when he threw his first shot was the rack of pins he stared down as Palmer and Burton exchanged quips about his raiment. Schlegel threw a perfect shot to blow all ten pins off the deck as if they were made of smoke. The crowd Schlegel owned the second he stepped onto the set went berserk. Then he stepped up and did it again. His second shot buried the pocket with such force that one pin tomahawked another in the opposite corner and sent it flying.

Hardwick may have called California home as a kid, but in 1976 he hailed from Louisville, Kentucky, a residence that
inspired its host of monikers just as California did back when he was known as “the boy with the golden claw.” Now he was known as “Bluegrass Billy.”

His blond hair fluttered over the gush of air blowing out of the ball return while Burton described him for the TV audience as “quite a performer.”

A performer Hardwick may have been, but after two more bumbling shots that prompted commentary from Burton on how low the scores had been all week, it appeared as if he may have forgotten his script back in his hotel room.

Then the show within the show resumed. Schlegel returned to the approach for his third shot.

“We’ve got a real hot pistol here in the Bicentennial Kid. I just love that outfit! You have to be some kind of an extrovert to wear that!” Palmer said as Burton burst into laughter. “I’d like to buy one for you if you would wear it.”

“Well, I wish I could get on the show to wear it, Bud!” responded Burton, a legendary bowler himself.

The top Cathy had tried to lengthen with sequins now exposed Schlegel’s lower back as he bent at the foul line to deliver his third shot of the match. Right off his hand the ball appeared to be left of his target, meandering over to the wrong side of the headpin. For a second it seemed Schlegel had thrown an errant shot to give Hardwick a breather, and that was when he dazzled the crowd with an improbable strike. The ball crossed over to the left pocket and wiped all ten pins off the deck for a lucky break. It was his third consecutive strike to open the match. The crowd unleashed a deafening roar. He then stepped up and devastated the pocket in the third and fourth frames. Four shots, four strikes. He did it again in the sixth frame and found himself halfway home to a rare, televised perfect game, swinging
his fist so hard as he returned to his seat that his mop of blond hair quaked over his forehead. He grabbed his ball rag off the ball return and took his seat as Hardwick rose for his next shot. The camera panned the crowd and spotted Cathy. She applauded and laughed, nodding her head as if she simply could not believe what she was witnessing. A subtle shade of rouge reddened her ivory cheeks to match her wine-red hair. She sported a patterned, sepia shirt with the top button undone to expose a necklace of brown and beige beads clinging to her neck. It was an elegance one would expect more of an artist on her way to a Soho fashion show in New York City than someone in attendance at a bowling tournament. But this was the 1970s, when people dressed as well to board a plane as they did to attend a friend’s wedding, and even the men who showed up in suits and ties for a seat behind the lanes were not out of place. A dear friend of the Schlegels, U.S. Air Force Officer, Larry Plecha, sat beside her in the stands. His presence there was the only thing in the house that could calm her racing pulse.

Schlegel proceeded to demolish Billy Hardwick, winning the match with a final score of 256. A single pin withstood another pocket shot in the seventh frame to blow his chances for a perfect game, but nothing could withstand the onslaught Schlegel delivered throughout the match. Not even that thoroughbred, Billy Hardwick. Hardwick gathered his ball and shoes and headed for the door, quipping along the way that the red-hot Schlegel needed “a saliva test.”

Then a doomed former prodigy in the midst of a comeback stepped up to challenge Schlegel in the next match: Bobby Jacks, the third seed, and the pro tour’s ultimate lost soul.

The first time anyone outside his native New Orleans heard of Bobby Jacks, he was lighting himself a cigarette somewhere
in the pages of a mid-’60s issue of
Bowlers Journal
, on his way into a Bourbon Street Jazz club. A headline under the photo read “A Star in the Making,” and with his pompadour hairdo and slick black tie, who could argue otherwise?