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 legen
dary 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?
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.
Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion Page 13