Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (24 page)

Even today, before every PBA telecast, the finalists are allowed a practice session in which they try different bowling balls, different angles to the pocket, different hand positions to make the ball react in certain ways as it rolls down the lane. The practice session is an opportunity for the players to acquaint themselves with what is called the “oil pattern,” which refers to the volume and distribution pattern of oil that has been applied to the lane.

Lane oil was originally used as a protective coating to help the lanes endure the pummeling they take game after game. Resurfacing or replacing lanes is a great expense to proprietors—an expense they seek to avoid to protect their bottom line. But in the modern era of the sport, lane oil, like a bunker on a golf course, is used to vary the difficulty of the game. Some lane patterns, due to the volume of oil used and where on the lane it is applied, are particularly challenging; others
make the game so easy they practically guide the ball toward the pocket. Some lane patterns are particularly slick or long, which makes it difficult for the ball to curve or hook toward the pocket. Other patterns feature less volume or a shorter length of oil, thereby increasing the amount of friction between the bowling ball and the surface of the lane and making the ball curve or hook much more aggressively.

Schlegel was known for throwing the ball much straighter than other players, relying more on his accuracy than on his ability to hook the ball across the lane to create an extreme angle into the pocket. Very slick lane conditions put him at a significant disadvantage. More powerful players who throw the ball with a lot of hook can overcome the lane pattern, whereas a straighter player like Schlegel struggles to get his ball to the headpin. The players who get lined up in practice—meaning they find a combination of the right bowling ball and the right angle down the lane to consistently strike—are usually the ones who perform well when the show goes to air. The ones who struggle to find a shot they like typically struggle on the show and lose. In the practice session before the 1995 Touring Players Championship went to air, Schlegel was lost. On the specially constructed lanes installed at Sewall Center, Schlegel could not get his ball to hook. He feared he was about to make a damned fool of himself on the show. There was only one man to call: Larry Lichstein.

“Larry, I got nothin’,” Schlegel complained. “I can’t get a wrinkle.”

Lichstein knew exactly what Schlegel meant. In the argot of professional bowling, a player who cannot get the ball to hook will sometimes complain that he “can’t get a wrinkle.”

Lichstein had worked as the Players Services Director for the PBA Tour for decades. After Central Lanes burned to the ground and the action bowling scene began to die down, he
followed his buddies onto the PBA Tour. In 1969, he won the vaunted “Rookie of the Year” award. Two years later, he won his lone PBA title at the 1971 Ebonite Open in San Jose. Soon thereafter, he quit the tour to become the Player Services Director, busing players’ bowling balls from stop to stop on a Greyhound bus he had bought used and renovated to accommodate his business.

Lichstein’s business thrived; he made so much money over the years that players would joke that Lichstein was bowler of the year every year. He easily made more money drilling balls than any player on tour made throwing them. Lichstein drilled thousands of bowling balls for the players—sometimes asking only for a percentage of their winnings as payment for his services—and he soon became the sport’s preeminent mad scientist. Long before the modern-day bowling balls that feature complex physics and chemistry enabling them to perform with far greater power than ever before, Lichstein was experimenting with different ways of drilling bowling balls to make them react in different ways according to a player’s style or preference. He was doing with science what action bowlers did with mercury or lead sinkers back in the 1960s.

Increasingly, bowlers wanted bowling balls with more friction that would cause the ball to hook more aggressively. When Lichstein launched his business in the early 1970s, a bowler who created even a slightly more angular entry into the pocket might slap out a 10 pin on a pocket shot one more time per game than the next guy—an extra strike where a straighter player might have to settle for a spare. Over the course of a week-long tournament, such an advantage could add up to a hundred pins or more.

In 1973, a bowler named Don McCune somehow got wind of an idea that changed the game forever: If he placed his bowling
ball over a bucket full of a chemical solvent called butanone (also called methyl ethyl ketone), which is much like the acetone found in nail polish remover, the solvent would soften the surface of the bowling ball. This imperceptible softening of the ball’s shell—a practice called “fuming”—would increase the friction between the bowling ball and the surface of the lane, enabling the ball to “grab” the lane more aggressively and generating much more hook than a ball with a harder surface could muster. McCune did this from tour stop to tour stop, keeping the secret to himself while blasting his way to six PBA titles that season alone and ultimately grabbing Player of the Year honors. Legend has it that some of McCune’s fellow players got McCune drunk one night and kept pestering him to spill the secret of his success. This was an especially relevant question in McCune’s case, because McCune, like Schlegel, was known to throw one of the straightest balls on tour. How, then, was he now hooking the ball more than anyone else out there, crushing the pins with such force that some of them went flying across the pin deck as though they had been blasted by a grenade? Eventually, McCune let that purring cat out of the bag.

The trick spread across the tour like wildfire, and bowlers began filling the bathtubs and toilets in their hotel rooms with the highly flammable chemical and soaking their bowling balls overnight. Others would leave their bowling balls over buckets full of the stuff under exterior staircases around the hotel grounds. The fumes permeated the air, and there was enough solvent to blow any hotel sky-high if a spark from somebody’s cigarette happened to drift toward one of the buckets. Bowling balls subjected to this method of alteration became known as “soakers,” and when PBA executives caught on to the phenomenon, they swiftly banned the practice on tour.

Meanwhile, chemists at bowling ball companies also caught on and began mixing chemicals into the compounds they used to create bowling balls that essentially added “built-in hook.” These balls became known as “bleeders,” because they left a bit of condensation in the plastic bag the manufacturers packed them in before sealing them in a box and shipping them off to pro shops. Pros would hound pro shops from one tour stop to the next, digging through their stockpiles of balls to find the ones that had the greatest amount of condensation in their packaging. The ones with the most condensation also happened to be the ones with the softest shell—that is what the bowlers believed, at least. Pros would pay a pro shop manager $100 for a ball that normally cost $40 if its bag contained more condensation than others. The PBA once again had to step in. They began “testing” bowling balls with a device known as a durometer, which measures the softness of the bowling ball’s outer shell. Balls that registered lower than 75 were banned as “too soft.” Chemists at the ball manufacturing companies honed their science to produce bowling balls that struck a reading of 75 on the dot, ball after ball; their quality control eventually achieved a precision the sport had never seen before.

Yet another way to alter the surface of a bowling ball was to rub it with sandpaper. This method became particularly popular by the early 1980s, a time when the hissing sound of sandpaper striking ball surfaces throughout the bowling alley made the place sound like it was inhabited by a gigantic snake. Some bowlers would pat their bowling balls with rosin bags, small sacks of chalk-like powder that dried their hands to ensure the ball would not slip off their fingers at the release. The rosin helped the ball grab the lane more aggressively and created the hook that players were looking for—an edge that could mean the difference between a major
payday and a major disappointment. This, too, soon became illegal on tour.

Later, The Brunswick Corporation released a ball called the LT-48, which was a Johnny Petraglia signature ball. It featured Petraglia’s signature etched in white print. Petraglia then had become one of the tour’s biggest names; in 1980, he won the coveted Triple Crown by winning the tour’s triumvirate of majors—the U.S. Open, The PBA National Championship, and the Tournament of Champions. The LT-48 had crushed almond shells mixed into the ball surface, so that it would grip the lane hard right out of the box. The rough texture made sandpaper less of a necessity. Proprietors of the bowling alleys that hosted PBA Tour events became incensed. At some stops, the damage done by sanded-down balls and exotic products such as the LT-48 forced them to resurface their lanes out of pocket.

Schlegel knew these various techniques as well as Lichstein did; they both had lived it out on tour over the years. To that extent, the advice he got from Lichstein when he placed his desperate call during practice at the Touring Players Championship made some sense.

“Take the shittiest ball in your bag, one you absolutely know you will not use on the show, and sand it down until it is as white as chalk,” Lichstein advised. “Then throw that one right up the first arrow for the rest of the practice session.”

The first arrow was the arrow nearest to the gutter, the five board, on the extreme outside portion of the lane. Schlegel had heard of sanding the surface of a bowling ball, of course, but why would he do this to the ball he absolutely would not use on the show? What was the point of that? Lichstein had the answer; but for now all he needed Schlegel to do was shut up and listen. He told Lichstein he would do it and hung up the phone.

Schlegel had his caddy, Chris von Krueger, sand down the surface of one of his bowling balls as much as possible and hand it back to him. Then he began to throw it. The coarsening of the ball’s surface made it begin to hook as soon as it touched the surface of the lane. It hooked so much, in fact, that it curved clear across the entire lane and ended up in the left-hand gutter. This happened on shot after shot. Schlegel was puzzled. What the hell was Lichstein thinking? He called Lichstein back.

“Larry, it’s hooking off my hand. Every ball ends up in the left gutter. What the hell is going on?”

“Perfect,” Lichstein said. “Now, just keep doing it and call me back in ten minutes.”

Schlegel hung up and went back to throwing gutter balls. As the time to air drew nearer, he started getting nervous. With five minutes left to spare, he called Lichstein again.

“Larry, it’s five minutes before the show and I’m still watching my ball go into the left gutter,” Schlegel explained. “I have no shot.”

“OK, now get the ball you know you want to use on the show, move in to the second arrow, and throw the ball straight up the boards.”

Lichstein was advising that Schlegel move five boards left and throw the ball straight up the lane rather than throwing it away from the pocket and waiting for the ball to hook back, which increasingly was the way the younger players bowled. Schlegel did not realize what he had done, but Lichstein had just coached him on how to manipulate the lane condition for his own advantage. By following Lichstein’s instructions, Schlegel had just created his own “track” shot, the one he coached Lemon to take advantage of back at Gun Post Lanes all those years ago. The ball he threw during the practice session had been sanded down so much that it was actually sucking
the oil off the surface of the lane, creating a “dry spot” that would allow Schlegel to get that “wrinkle” he previously could not find. Schlegel unknowingly had completely altered the lane pattern to his liking. From that moment forward, the lanes were his. Schlegel knew plenty about how to manipulate the ball surface, but this was something new to him. For all he knew, no player ever done something like this before. This practice would become commonplace on tour in the years ahead. Here again, Lichstein was ahead of his time.

The four other finalists accompanying Schlegel in the practice session were Brian Himmler, David Ozio, Brian Voss, and Randy Pedersen, the top seed. In the opening match, Voss, a PBA Hall of Famer, destroyed Himmler, 264-164. In the next match, Voss bested Ozio, another PBA Hall of Famer, by a score of 280-247. Schlegel, the second seed on the show, then squeaked by Voss, 226-218. Voss needed to strike on his first ball in the tenth frame to win and move on to the title match against Pedersen. Instead, he threw an errant shot and left a split. That left Schlegel and Pedersen to battle it out for the top prize of $40,000.

Pedersen stepped up amid the din of the arena’s boisterous crowd to open the game. With his sparkling smile and Hollywood looks, he cut the figure of some blond Don Johnson. Years later, as his competitive career wound down, those looks would earn him a gig as the PBA’s color analyst on ESPN, a position he would hold for more than a decade. For now, he was the cocky kid from San Marino who joined the tour at age eighteen and bought a brand new Chevy Camaro Z-28 after winning his first PBA title six years later. When he cradled his ball on the approach to make his first shot, he did it with the self-assured smirk of one who had no doubt he would do today what he had always done in this spot before—take the money home. Pedersen had bowled six prior title matches
from the top-seeded position in his career. He won every time.

Two wobbly pins withstood his first shot. For a second it seemed they might both remain and leave Pedersen with the disastrous prospect of a split in the opening frame. Then, somehow, they drowsily peeled away from each other and keeled over. The crowd roared. Pedersen, with his cropped blond hair stiffened with gel and his golden complexion gleaming under the lights, looked to the roof to perform the sign of the cross, shot Schlegel a sheepish look, and took his seat.

Pedersen’s stroke of luck armed Schlegel with precisely the kind of psychological ammunition he needed. Here he was, a fifty-two-year-old man who had made it this far by pounding the pocket all week against kids half his age, and he had to sit through a lousy shot and a lucky break in the opening frame of a match for forty grand?