Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (26 page)

Schlegel and his buddies holed up in a penthouse suite to—what else?—play Texas hold ’em for money. The names of those around the table were not so much the names of people as they were the names of memories—Mickey Kennedy, Jerry Markey, Matty Lynch, Billy Jones, Joey Keane, Mike McKeon, Eddie O’Brien, Danny Breheny, Pat Jacoby, Helayne Van Houten. They all had come to Vegas to see what had become of their old friends since the days when Schlegel was a no-name kid at 42 Sickles Street waiting for his life to begin.

The room’s one window stretched from wall to wall and offered a view of wheat-brown mountains and valleys that seemed to stretch to the edge of the world. With its thousands of rooms and abundance of glassy windows that glow like gold in the sun, the South Point is an imposing edifice at the south
end of Las Vegas Boulevard—about a $40 cab ride from the action at the heart of town. Its remoteness amid the yawning backdrop of desert that surrounds it casts its gaudy splendor in a particularly absurd light. Few spots in town do more to magnify the artificiality of a vacant desert blemished with that false jewel of a city.

Schlegel and the boys soon had other matters to tend to, matters so pressing they achieved the highly unlikely feat of wrenching these men away from their cards. They headed downstairs to the Silverado Steakhouse, where they lifted their drinks in tribute to the ones who ought to have been there with them.

The Silverado is a slim rung shy of the sort of place where bowtied busboys rush to sweep the tablecloth of crumbs while your Veal Francaise arrives with a side of sautéed morels. As waiters whizzed by in their vests amid a chic ambience of dimmed chandeliers, high-backed booths, and walls lined with murals, Schlegel’s lifelong friend, Mickey Kennedy, stood and held his glass in the air.

“To those we lost in Vietnam,” Kennedy said, “to those who died too young, to those we loved and did not tell, to those we admired and kept our silence, to all who were part of our lives, we raise our glasses and toast to you.”

The restaurant’s windows flickered with the glow of lights from nearby slot machines as Kennedy and the gang clinked glasses. A rollicking casino in Vegas may seem like an odd setting for a eulogy, but only to those who were not there for games of high-stakes cards in Schlegel’s room or those bad nights of betting against the wrong kind of crowd down in Philly. To remember their fallen friends anywhere else would be to dishonor them.

And anyhow, Schlegel would not have it any other way. He hunted for the first craps table he could find the second he
stepped out of the Silverado, raving about the quality of their eggplant parmesan and holding his belly with both hands as if it might burst.

“Every Sunday during football season, Ernie’s up in his cave watching the games. He always has a couple of bets, and when he roots and screams the entire house shakes,” Cathy told me. “I just go downstairs and try to stay calm.”

Schlegel cut through the Del Mar Lounge where smokers twirled their cocktails with cigars pinched between their fingers. He zeroed in on a table. The boxman eyed the chips, the base dealers collected their debts, and the stickman raked in the dice. Just as he did so many times on TV over the years, Schlegel found center stage at the head of the table and performed. The handful of gamblers nursing their Captain & Cokes around the table did not know it yet, but it was time for the Ernie Schlegel Show—and they were the audience.

“Four to one for the poor one, baby!” Schlegel shouted as he took the dice and rattled them in his fists. “I’m on Social Security here, OK? I’m on welfare! Gimme a hard eight!”

His wild, blue eyes almost seemed to tremble in his face like the dice in his hands as he came unhinged. He gritted his teeth and scowled with the look of the Other Ernie. His jowly face may have betrayed his age by then, and his broad-lensed glasses and button-down shirt tucked neatly into his Dockers may have conveyed the image of a docile nine-to-fiver. But even at age sixty-six, there still was something feral in him.

He raved at the head of the table until a few hours shy of sunrise, possessed by the narcotic adrenaline of windowless casinos where time is measured in the number of tugs it takes a slot machine to bleed your pockets dry.

“When I was at the craps table last night it started to feel like the old days,” Schlegel told me the next day. “I wanted to jump across the table and snap that guy’s neck,” referring to a
twenty-something wise guy who looked on in displeasure at Schlegel’s monopolization of the table.

Just like the old days indeed.

That morning, he headed off to the bowling tournament he had come to compete in, the United States Bowling Congress Open Championships. He promptly dropped $600 cash on “brackets”—a form of side-gambling that pits bowlers in head-to-head against each other. Brackets can net you thousands of dollars if you make your bets wisely and the pins fall your way. Cathy, hearing of the amount that Ernie wagered, looked as though she had swallowed a fly.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very special bowler in our midst this afternoon,” a tournament official announced to the crowd, “1996 USBC Masters champion, seven-time PBA titlist and Hall of Famer, Ernie Schlegel!”

Schlegel won that USBC Masters title mere months after becoming the oldest player ever to win a major on the PBA Tour at the 1995 Touring Players Championship. (As of this writing, that record still stands.) By then, John Mazzio had succumbed to heart disease, and Schlegel tearfully dedicated the title to his former mentor during the check and trophy presentation following the title match.

Schlegel took a drawn-out bow with a wave of his hand as the venue erupted with applause, a tuft of thinning, dirty-blond hair falling over his face as he lowered his head. It was the applause he had heard somewhere inside those long-ago dreams of the day he would make it big.

Schlegel may have been in his sixties by then, but it took him only one game to demonstrate that he still had it. He came out steaming and recorded a first game in the 230s—full of the fist pumps and gritted teeth for which he was known.

Shortly before bowling that tournament myself, I practiced with Schlegel. He gave me some tips, particularly on how to
properly convert a 10 pin spare. He coached me on how to manipulate my hand position to ensure that any ball I threw would take a direct path to the 10 pin.

“I try to throw it straight, Ernie,” I told him. “It’s hard sometimes.”

“Yeah?” he said. “You ever try to get a hard-on? We don’t try; we do.”

And so he did. He converted one 10 pin spare after another, often dumping the ball almost at the foul line and throwing it so perfectly straight that it seemed to sail up the first board for nearly the entire sixty feet of the lane to convert the 10 pin. That is incredible precision and control; Schlegel still possessed both in abundance.

Later that year, the Schlegels were kind enough to welcome me into their home in Vancouver for almost a week. I spent that time going to various area bowling alleys with him, meeting various bowlers, and listening to the Schlegels’ stories—both Ernie’s and Cathy’s.

One thing a retired Ernie Schlegel did not need to do was get up early on a Saturday morning to cheer on bowlers at a local youth league, yet that is exactly what he did during my visit. I accompanied him to Allen’s Crosley Lanes in Vancouver, where he joined twelve-year-old Takota Smith for a round of practice.

Schlegel was up to his old tricks. He heaved his ball straight up the 7 board and guided it toward the headpin with flailing arms and a swinging fist. As the pocket collapsed for a strike, he turned to Takota and playfully gave him the business.

“I’ll squash you like a grape!” he said in his still-potent Manhattan accent. He shared a chuckle with the boy’s father, who had also joined the action.

Schlegel had known Takota’s stepmother, Autumn, ever since Schlegel roomed with her father on tour decades ago. When Autumn tragically lost both her father and mother, Schlegel
took her and her brothers Jeremy and Jason under his wing. Now he had a new “nephew” to mentor—young Takota Smith, whom he recently had introduced to the sport.

“He loves those kids like they are his boys,” Cathy told me. “He is Uncle Ernie to them. Jason has a two-year-old now who just goes crazy when she sees him.”

That is the Ernie Schlegel people know in Vancouver, not the brash kid from the streets of New York. Now he is the “crazy uncle” who is as sure to show up and watch the Saturday morning youth leagues as the parents of the bowlers themselves.

He is also the grandfather who speaks to his grandson, Zachary Connor, at the same day and time each week by webcam. Amid a recent visit to see his daughter Darlene in Florida on Zachary’s birthday, Schlegel quickly found himself coaching youth bowlers at the local bowling alley there.

“I just can’t seem to not help kids,” Schlegel told me. “You never know who is going to be the next great one.”

Schlegel’s interest in affecting youth bowlers with the love for bowling he discovered as a kid himself derives from his concern for a sport that once enjoyed a cultural prominence it has lost over the years. The PBA Tour is a shadow of what it was in Schlegel’s prime due largely to forces beyond the control of its executives. A tour that once brought action to more than 30 cities throughout the United States over the course of a season now hardly visits a handful. Most events it does put on, such as the World Series of Bowling or the Summer Swing, conglomerate many separate tournaments that run simultaneously under one roof to avoid the production and travel costs incurred by a bonafide tour that takes each tournament to a new town.

Pro bowlers who wish to make a living on the lanes today must consent to be globe-trotters, as competitive bowling
increasingly is an international enterprise that takes players everywhere from Russia to Malaysia, Korea to Poland, France to Qatar and all points in between. Those 20 million viewers before whom Schlegel performed on ABC in the mid-1970s have dwindled to as few as 800,000, and the ABC network cancelled its weekly pro bowling telecast after a 35-year run in 1997. Its last show went out with a tearful goodbye from longtime broadcast partners, Chris Schenkel and Bo Burton; their tears reflected the sentiments of many who remembered what once had been.

Major corporate sponsors that once regularly bolstered PBA Tour events, such as Firestone, Quaker State, or Miller Lite, have long since moved on. The loss of those big-time title sponsors, and the PBA’s ongoing struggle to attract new ones in an economic climate immeasurably more challenging than it was when TV offered a mere handful of channels rather than the thousands available today, continues to impact the PBA Tour—and the bowling industry at large—with adversities that seem nearly insurmountable at times. In 2014, professional bowling’s U.S. Open, an event every bit as prestigious in bowling as it is in golf or tennis that had run annually since 1971, was cancelled. The 2015 event also was cancelled briefly before the event’s long-time sponsor, the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America, inked a partnership deal with the United States Bowling Congress, the sport’s governing body in the U.S., to keep the event alive for at least a few more years. Budgets throughout the bowling industry are leaner than seemingly ever before; executives and journalists who have worked in bowling for decades openly concede they never have seen things as financially tight as they are today.

None of the PBA Tour’s current ills are due to a lack of effort. Its visionary commissioner, Tom Clark, and his veteran team of bowling lifers such as Mike Jakubowski, Kirk Von Krueger,
Dave Schroeder, Jason Thomas, Bill Vint, and Jerry Schneider, among others, continue to battle through grueling circumstances with concepts and programs designed to save costs and turn back at least some of the tide that threatens to submerge professional bowling in the United States. The PBA made its entry into the new media landscape with its subscription-based online streaming product, Xtra Frame, which offers unlimited coverage of live events plus a growing archive of historical content. Clark is the architect of forward-looking concepts such as the World Series of Bowling, which has succeeded in saving costs while providing international players with an unprecedented opportunity to bowl a number of PBA tournaments for a fraction of the cost required in the days when each tour stop was held in a different city. The production of many events and TV show tapings for ESPN in a matter of about ten days requires an ungodly amount of hours from the PBA’s limited staff; it is an undertaking that defines the term “labor of love.” The current woes faced by the PBA Tour—and by the bowling industry at large—have bred a screaming chorus of critics full of hot air about what went wrong and how it can be fixed. Most critics who insist they have the answers have little idea how much work is going into keeping competitive bowling viable despite the adverse circumstances it faces. If they did, they, too, might consider that a minor miracle.

Clark also succeeded in returning the PBA to its former glory on ABC in 2011, when the storied Tournament of Champions returned to the ABC network with a special appearance by beloved announcer Bo Burton; Chris Schenkel had passed away in 2005 at age 82. That event awarded the richest top prize in PBA Tour history, $250,000, which went to PBA Tour veteran, Mika Koivuniemi. Koivuniemi bowled a 299 in the semifinals of that TV show, falling a pin short of a televised perfect game while his opponent, Tom Daugherty, infamously
bowled a score of 100. That outcome marked the greatest discrepancy between two combatants in the history of the PBA Tour’s televised finals, and it made for some of the greatest drama in recent pro bowling memory. The show opened with a live performance by punk-pop band, Bowling for Soup, who used the opportunity to introduce their catchy new single, “S-S-S-Saturday,” to a national TV audience. On the women’s side of professional bowling, the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America has produced the championship finals of the U.S. Women’s Open in exotic settings such as outdoors under the arches in Reno on specially constructed lanes or inside the palatial Cowboys AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Some argue that these one-off events do more to convey desperation than they do to solve the problems pro bowling faces because they do not cultivate a sustained, returning audience. But even critics have to at least admit that these events demonstrate the bowling industry’s resolve to never give up at a time when it would be easy to do so.