Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (18 page)

A gifted, left-handed action bowler who turned to gambling when his parents abandoned him at the age of eleven after they divorced, Jacks became known for walking with a cane and sporting pinkie rings and diamond cufflinks by age nineteen. By then, he had accomplished the near-impossible feat of winning three titles in a single PBA season. Some say the money came to Jacks too soon, but for Jacks it could not come soon enough. He was known as much for his brilliance on the lanes as for his lengthening rap sheet, doing stints in jail for writing bad checks.

The Bobby Jacks who stared across a ball return in Baltimore to shake hands with Schlegel for game two had traded his pompadour hairdo for a bushy perm long ago. A thick, black mustache obscured his upper lip, and the ravages of a hard-luck life left him with the leathered face of a man well beyond his twenty-nine years. A blood-red polo shirt and checkered pants replaced the suit and tie he sported on the streets of New Orleans back when he was the star and the world was his jazz joint. But here in Baltimore he was just the guy who had not won a title in ten years. It was Schlegel’s world he inhabited now.

Schlegel stepped up and leered at the pins through his aviator shades for the first shot of the match. With his ruffled sleeves and sequined suit, Schlegel looked like someone who guided tigers through flaming hoops on the evening shift at Circus Circus. Some called him a clown; others called him crazy. But those who knew Schlegel best saw that he walked a fine line between lunacy and genius, a line he hoped to walk straight to the bank.

“When a player gets into what we call a ‘dead stroke’ on tour he can do almost anything,” Burton said “But Schlegel’s got a tough tiger on his hands with Bobby Jacks.”

Tough as that tiger may have been, this was only his second time bowling a PBA telecast in the last ten years. It was a decade in which Jacks had lived many lives: The star in the making, the scared kid on the lam after going AWOL from the army, the fraudster in the pen after writing one too many bad checks. What memory he may have had of how to win was obscured by the haze of so much circumstance. And as he fell off balance and left two pins standing on his first shot, it seemed for a second that Jacks had no memory at all of the cocky kid with the pinkie rings and greased pompadour.

But a single frame does not a whole game make. Jacks collected himself for the second frame and splintered the rack for a strike. When he did it again in the fourth frame, taking the lead over Schlegel with his most devastating strike yet, Jacks seemed well on his way to leaving the past behind him.

Schlegel responded with three strikes in a row and Bo once again expressed his amazement at the Bicentennial Kid.

“Schlegel is bowling beautifully out there, Bud,” Burton said. “Nobody has maintained a stroke like this all week. This is the way all the matches have gone most of the week, seesawing back and forth, very competitive.”

Jacks never was much interested in seesaws. You don’t get a lot of time in at the playground when you’re thrown to the streets of New Orleans at age eleven, but you do learn what it takes to survive. That is precisely the statement Jacks made with his next shot, yet another thunderous strike that blew the pins into the pit so violently they seemed to dissolve before the viewer’s eyes. Jacks was feeling it, the adrenaline that pushed him through three titles in a single summer back in ’66, the memory of what it took to make more money in
that handful of weeks than he had ever seen in his life. He would need the full measure of that moxie now, leading the match by three pins in the tenth frame and three strikes away from locking Schlegel out altogether.

With potentially $8,000 riding on the next shot—the prize he would bank if he won the title—Jacks decided to try his luck with some psychological gymnastics. He complained to PBA Tournament Director Harry Golden that the pins were not aligned properly and requested a re-rack. In pro bowling, a re-rack request is equivalent to calling a timeout as the field goal kicker’s foot is a about to strike the football in the final few moments of a tied-up NFL game. Jacks may have seen a problem with the pins or he may have been full of it, but either way Schlegel had to sit through the delay and think a little longer about the high-pressure shot he had to make. What Jacks may not have understood, however, is that they may play those games down in New Orleans, but they invented those games up in New York City.

As tutored in the art of psychological warfare as any seasoned PBA player, Burton could not help but chuckle at the spectacle.

“The pins are probably in the same spot now as they were before the re-rack,” he joked as the match resumed, “but in his mind they’re different, and that’s all that counts right now.”

Maybe so. Or maybe the disastrous six-count Jacks got on his next shot revealed that the only guy he psyched out was himself. Despite Jacks’s whiff in the tenth, Schlegel would still be loading up his car after this game if he failed to strike on his next shot. His last few shots on the lane where he must perform or go home had been poor—an open frame earlier in the game followed by a few spares.

“He can bowl for the next five weeks with the money he could make on this one shot,” Burton said.

Money is nice, but respect is priceless. Winning is the only avenue to respect on the PBA Tour, and that is something no amount of money will buy. Schlegel gathered his ball and stepped up to the approach. He let out a huge sigh as he prepared to throw one do-or-die shot. A strike and the match was all but his. Anything less and the Bicentennial Kid would clear the stage for the Comeback Kid.

Finally, Schlegel took the first step of his shot after a long, focused pause. Someone in the crowd slammed a door; a loud squeak and slam pierced the crowd’s hushed silence. Schlegel let the ball go nonetheless. It was a solid shot. Unlike the previous few he threw on this lane, this one seemed to have a chance when it cleared the arrows. Down went nine pins, while the ten pin in the corner only tilted slightly to the left. Then, as if blown over by a sudden breeze, it fell. Strike.

Schlegel scowled and swung his arm through the air in celebration as the crowd roared. But the first thing on his mind when he turned around to settle down for his next shot was that clueless bastard who slammed a damned door midway through the most important shot of his career. Schlegel squinted into the distance to spot the trouble, clearly consumed now by a baffling combination of rapture over the strike and utter rage at the perpetrator of the noise that almost snatched it from him.

With a nine-count and a spare, Schlegel would edge out Jacks’s 214 game with a score of 215 and move on. But Schlegel stepped up and did one better—yet another strike for a 225 to vanquish Jacks and welcome PBA journeyman Curt Schmidt into the lion’s cage Schlegel had paced in for two games now.

Jacks packed up and vanished into another decade of obscurity. He would resurface one last time in the TV finals
of the 1986 Miller High Life Challenge, then disappear for good.

Schmidt and Schlegel belonged together about as much as a monk belongs in a brothel. The son of a Lutheran Minister, Schmidt was born in a town called Pekin, an obscure hamlet in upstate New York where the road signs outnumber the people; Schlegel was born in the biggest city in the world. Schmidt grew up bowling in an eight-lane center in Woodlawn, Indiana, where his family moved when he was twelve; Schlegel grew up bowling in every alley in New York City. Schmidt pitched horse shoes when he was not bowling; Schlegel’s only experience with horses was throwing down a wad of cash on the trifecta at the racetrack. Schmidt spoke in a subdued Midwestern drawl that sounded as though he were falling asleep as he talked; Schlegel spoke in a tough Manhattan accent that sounded as though he were spitting nails. Schmidt loved to croon the Jim Nabors hit “Back Home in Indiana” at karaoke joints on the road; Schlegel grew up blasting Isley Brothers tunes at pot parties on the bad side of Broadway.

Yet it was the minister’s son from Indiana, and not the hardnosed kid from tough streets, who already owned two PBA titles. Schlegel was just another winless dreamer and Schmidt was the battle-tested pro. With his receding hairline, obtrusive forehead and angular face, the five-foot-six Schmidt so closely resembled Ray Walston of
My Favorite Martian
fame that everyone on tour knew him only as “The Martian.” But when he stepped onto the set in a pair of tan slacks and a lime polo shirt, buttoned to the chin, to shake hands with the foe in the sequined suit, the gaunt and graying forty-three-year-old looked more like the bewildered grandfather of a boy who had become the family outcast.

Schmidt’s bewilderment turned to sheer incredulity when his first shot blew out the pocket, only to somehow leave a
stunned corner pin standing. When it happened again and then yet again in the third and fourth frames, he slumped his head and sighed like a man who just got sacked from his job. This was neither bewilderment nor disbelief now. This was utter resignation.

Schlegel knew he had a match on his hands, maybe the toughest of the afternoon. He left splits in consecutive frames after a sloppy strike to open the game. The 256 he shot against Hardwick in game one felt like it had happened a year ago. He leaned off to the side with his legs crossed and one arm draped over the seat beside him, a casual manner that obscured the disgust contorting his mouth—the only outward expression of adversity he allowed. He cloaked any other evidence of emotion behind his aviator shades and that mop of strawberry-blond hair crouching around his head. It was the countenance of a poker player so skilled in masking the slightest uncertainty that he might as well be a pillar of stone.

If he betrayed no fear as he sat and waited for Schmidt to finish his shots, he damned sure would not let Schmidt see any sign of it as he bowled. Schlegel set up for his next shot, stared down the pins and promptly threw his finest shot of the game—“no doubt about that one!” Bud Palmer said—then strolled back to his seat as if he had merely dropped a letter in the mail.

An exasperated Schmidt, clearly still brooding over the brutal breaks of the past two frames, responded with two errant shots for spares. He turned, shaking his head, ripped his towel from the ball return, and seethed as he waited for his ball to come back between shots, his lead slipping away.

With a chance to take the lead with a strike, Schlegel nearly left another split and turned clutching his chest with a gasp as Burton and Palmer chuckled at his desperation. He picked
up a rosin bag used to keep bowlers’ hands dry during competition, and slammed it back down onto the ball return, gesticulating wildly in a fit of self-loathing. It was the body language of a man who knew that the longer you leave the door open for a pro the more likely he will be to walk right through it without so much as a “thank you.” With a top prize of $8,000 on the line—a decent chunk of change in 1976—there was absolutely no room for error, no time for close calls and gasps.

Schmidt stepped up in the ninth frame with the game virtually tied. He threw a strike, twirled around and pumped his fist toward the ground on one knee like it was a bayonet he meant to jam through the gut of an enemy soldier. The streets may be meaner in New York City than they are in Indiana, but out on tour, every moment was a mean street where the money was scarce and the only way to get any was to fight for it. Every shot on tour was a cliff you dangled from. Everyone you faced was eager to push you over the edge.

If it was a boxing match Schlegel craved on the lanes, that was exactly what Curt Schmidt gave him now. Schlegel found himself playing Muhammad Ali to Schmidt’s Joe Frazier, the flashy maverick tangling with the straitlaced grinder. As a huge fan of Ali, Schlegel knew there was a night when Frazier sent Ali home a loser, and the memory of that infamous fight came back to him now. Schlegel himself had lived through his own version of that night more times than he cared to remember—nights when he too went home the loser, when the one bad shot or tough break that did him in replayed itself in his mind like a bit of bad news he refused to believe. He did not want a night like that tonight.

It was too late for Schlegel to shut out Curt Schmidt now. The two splits he left early in the game made it mathematically impossible for him to lock Schmidt out completely, even
if he threw nothing but strikes from now on. The game was Schmidt’s to win or lose. But if Schlegel could find that same magic somewhere within himself that he found the night he threw the three best strikes Johnny Campbell ever saw, he would at least force Schmidt into needing a strike on his next shot to win. As Campbell learned that night, and as Bobby Jacks witnessed in Baltimore that afternoon, there was something about pressure that flipped a switch in Schlegel’s mind, something about the adrenaline of the do-or-die shot that dissolved his fear. That was the Ernie Schlegel with whom Schmidt got acquainted now as he watched Schlegel throw his finest shot of the match on the first ball of the tenth frame. It was a flawless and explosive strike.

“Once again, Ernie Schlegel dynamic in the clutch,” Burton says. “He has to have this next strike.”

So here it was again. One more “has-to-have” moment behind him and another on the way. He wiped the lane oil off of his ball and breathed, his red and blue sequins sparkling under the TV lights.

Schlegel struck and twirled around with both arms flailing through the air. He collapsed onto one knee and swung his right hand across his body as if backhanding someone who had crossed him.

“Just a tremendous performance!” Bo Burton exclaimed as the crowd roared. “Schlegel has always been an aggressive player, and he’s shown it right here. He has now forced Curt Schmidt to strike on his first ball of the tenth frame. He’s thinking about eight thousand bucks right now. Ernie Schlegel—they’re gonna call him ‘Evel Schlegel’ after today!”

All of those in attendance at Fair Lanes would remember the rebel in sequins and shades who threw strikes whenever circumstances required him to do so—and that, after all, was Schlegel’s goal.

The applauding crowd whistled and shouted like front-row fans at an arena rock concert, begging the band for an encore. Whatever happened from this moment on, it was clear that something big had gone down at Fair Lanes—something the PBA never had seen before, something that promised to wrench professional bowling out of its world of pressed slacks and parted hair and into a future where attitude would become the new normal. If the future had a name, its name was Ernie Schlegel.