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

by Gianmarc Manzione

  “I don’t know,” Schlegel said, “but it hurts!”

  It was the sort of pain generally reserved for two types of people: inmates of seventeenth century asylums in France or people who stand in front of speeding trains. Naturally, then, Schlegel showed up bright and early to endure the fullest extent of this agony day after day. In Gehrmann, Schlegel found a drill sergeant so schooled in the benefits of self-inflicted punishment that his high school gym students became known collectively as “Gehrmann’s Gorillas.” Gehrmann honored their tolerance for pain with a sign outside their workout area that read: “Gehrmann’s Gorillas: Please Do Not Feed the Animals.” Here was a zoo Schlegel eagerly wished to join at a time in his career when an unflattering designation as the PBA Tour’s “greatest non-champion”—the bowler who had earned the most money in PBA Tour winnings without claiming a single title—plagued him. Schlegel was looking to win, and Gehrmann knew it.

  “Greatest Non-Champion.” Nothing softened the sting of that phrase. To be a “non-champion,” great or not, was—in Schlegel’s mind—to be a loser. And to be a loser was to commit to a failure for which he could never forgive himself, the failure to live up to an admonishment from his father that he never forgot all those years ago, when he stood before a judge with a gaggle of pocketbook-snatching kids from his block.

  The word around tour may well have been that Schlegel choked in big matches. But the word inside Schlegel’s head was that he was a winner—a Schlegel. That no one on the PBA Tour could out-bowl him one-on-one—including Roth—and that if he had to die trying to prove it, then Gehrmann and his Gorillas would be happy to help him do just that. If those roads found Schlegel crawling home after a seven-mile run, well, that was how it went when you knocked on the door of the Gorillas’ training ground looking for a spot in their “zoo.” You either did what it took to be great, or you did nothing at all. You may have come within an inch of your life a few days into the first week, but if you somehow lived to see those hard days through, you were already well on your way to overcoming yourself.

  That is certainly how it was for Schlegel each day he jogged the seven-mile trip on his way to another session with the Gorillas. And just to make sure Schlegel was suffering enough, Gehrmann would drive past him on his way to the gym in his maroon Volkswagen Bug with black fenders and honk an ooga horn. Just as Schlegel thought Gehrmann was about to pick him up, Gehrmann would wave, smile, and keep driving.

  That jog was the appetizer to a balanced meal of hardships: squats, bench presses, lifts, every rigor to which Gehrmann subjected his football players. It was those same football players who helped Schlegel survive the difficult hours he spent in their zoo, those same students of Gehrmann’s who swarmed around Schlegel, nearly young enough to be his children, shouting him through that final rep, that one last squat, the extra bench press that would afflict him the next day with a body so sore as to test his willingness to keep coming back.

  But Gehrmann was not just helping Schlegel. Schlegel may not have known it, but he also was helping Gehrmann. As Gehrmann’s Gorillas swarmed around Schlegel to push him through a final rep, they also swarmed around the vision of what Gehrmann told them—that if the dreams they chased meant anything to them at all, then whatever they had to do to attain them would have to be hard, it would have to hurt, it would have to confront the limits of all they thought they could endure.

  Gehrmann had plastered his gym with an array of signs bearing messages to his Gorillas. “If it’s to be, it’s up to me,” one said. “Am I better today than I was yesterday?” another asked. Gehrmann believed it was important to present the kids with a positive image of themselves, and what more positive image of themselves could they encounter than that of a man such as Schlegel who had spent the lion’s share of his life pursuing the right to call himself a champion?

  Schlegel’s favorite sign in Gehrmann’s gym was one that read, “The road to success is always under construction.”

  To Schlegel, Gehrmann’s zoo was a lot like what it was to any of his other students—not a destination, but a means of getting there. Schlegel’s situation differed in at least one regard: It was not his life that awaited him the day he left Gehrmann’s gym. At thirty-six years old, life was now. For Schlegel, Gehrmann’s gym was a stopping-off place between a dream and its realization, between potential and actuality, between struggle and its reward.

  It was the hunger for that reward that took Schlegel down four waist sizes in those grueling summer days among the Gorillas. By the time Gehrmann released Schlegel from his zoo to try his luck on tour, Schlegel was 155 pounds at 5’10” with a size 29 waist. And all those endless runs through the hilly streets of Vancouver had turned his legs as taut as two torpedoes. He wasn’t going to pull a hammy this time around. He was running a six-minute mile.

  Schlegel wanted to be the guy who still had something left fifty games into a tournament while others languished with exhaustion. He wanted to be the guy whose physical conditioning allowed him more easily to summon the skills any player needed to flourish on tour—speed, control, accuracy, mental toughness, an immunity to the distractions that fear and doubt imposed. If he could not beat them with the talent he had, he could beat them with the body he had built. It was a body that would not let him down in the later stretches of tournaments, and especially not on the TV show. Bowling may be stereotyped as the province of beer-bellied, blue-collar workers who otherwise spend their free time on their sofas, but the truth is that professional bowling as much demands athleticism, conditioning, and discipline as any other pro sport.

  The results of Schlegel’s stint with the Gorillas of Vancouver were immediate. Just weeks removed from his days in Gehrmann’s zoo, at the first tournament of the 1979 season—the Miller High Life Classic in Anaheim—Schlegel qualified for the TV show. He finished fourth. The next week, he did it once again, making the show at the Showboat Invitational in Las Vegas and cashing a fifth-place check.

  Four weeks later, at the Dutch Masters Open in Detroit, he made his third TV appearance of the season. If his bowling that week spoke loudly enough of the work he had done back home, his words spoke even more loudly. ABC’s Al Michaels, who was working the show as the play-by-play man, inquired about Schlegel’s desire to replace his motorhome with a full-blown bus in a pre-show interview. The winner would receive $12,000. Schlegel fully expected to take every last penny of it in Detroit that day.

  “Schlegel travels around in a motor home, as most of the pros do. But he wants to buy a bus and reconvert it,” Michaels observed on the show. “It’ll cost him $100,000. He said ‘I’ll pick up the twelve grand here today, there’s the down payment.’ So he’s confident,” Michaels concluded through partner Bo Burton’s laughter in the booth.

  About a year before Al Michaels asked America if they believed in miracles, he had stepped onto that set at Sunnybrook Lanes in Detroit and opened ABC’s telecast of the PBA Dutch Masters Open with a note of amazement: A line of people circled the building in subzero temperatures that February morning to claim a seat at a pro bowling show that would not begin for another eight hours.

  A top bowling pro in 1979 made $80,000—a significant amount of money—and its tour stops drew a significant crowds throughout the country. The people in the crowd had seen the first athlete in history to sign a $1 million endorsement deal in 1964: a pro bowler by the name of Don Carter. They were the days, too, when pro bowlers enjoyed a celebrity reserved for those who had attained the heights of stardom. By 1979, enough people watched PBA telecasts on ABC each week that pro bowlers ran a genuine risk of getting pegged for an autograph while tossing a gallon of milk into their carts at the grocery store.

  The scene at Sunnybrook that frigid day in Detroit confirmed the cultural prominence the sport of bowling enjoyed in America at the time. It was a time when fans crowded the row behind the TV lanes in pressed suits with flowers pinned to their lapels, the ladies among them were dressed well enough to join a wedding party after the sho
w, and ABC sent in the big guns to call the strikes and spares—announcers such as Al Michaels, Pat Summerall, Verne Lundquist.

  When Schlegel went out for a jog the morning of the show, as he now did every day, his watch froze.

  “Holy shit!” he said aloud as he realized his watch read almost the same time it did when he started his jog. “I know I have been running for a while. It can’t be.”

  Then he realized he had no idea what time it was, and that he might be late for the TV show. He made a frenzied dash back to the bowling alley, where he found Cathy screaming “Hurry! Hurry! Where the hell have you been?” Schlegel ran back to the bowling alley so fast, in fact, that he covered a mile in fewer than six minutes. To brave the Detroit cold that morning, Schlegel covered his lips and chin in Vaseline and strapped on a face mask that had lapels to attach it to his coat. The mask, too, had frozen so solid it felt like a slab of ice.

  Schlegel, a masked wild man running faster than the wind with a glaze of Vaseline frosting his face like a donut, later summed up the experience with five words that rang truer that morning than ever before.

  “There ain’t nothing like running,” he said.

  There also ain’t nothing like winning, and by the time he threw his final shot in Sterling Heights that afternoon, Schlegel planned to know that first hand. He threw two straight strikes to open the match and celebrated with a fist pump and gritted teeth.

  A mouse-gray pair of bell-bottom slacks clung to Schlegel’s taut legs so tightly they might as well have been made of Saran Wrap. A half-melon of hair curtained his clammy forehead under the sizzling lights of the TV cameras, and his bowling shoes glistened a sparkling shade of gold. Ernie Schlegel understood that fashion was a form of entertainment, and people watched the PBA tour to see a great show.

  “That’s what the game is all about,” Schlegel would say. “It’s like a boxing match. People don’t want to watch a bunch of stiffs bowl.”

  The PBA’s overlords at the time—Joe Antenora and Frank Esposito—made no room for visionaries on the PBA tour. You showed up in polyester slacks and wooden hair or you paid a fine on your way out the door. Antenora and Esposito knew only the world where people showed up for bowling tournaments dressed like maître d’s. Had they allowed Schlegel to have his way, he would have been wearing velvet tuxedos and silver lamé jump suits whenever he made it onto the TV show. When the bosses got wind of Schlegel’s planned regalia, they told him to show up dressed like everybody else or not bother showing up at all. They had had enough of the Bicentennial Kid; that episode tested the limits of their tolerance.

  They would learn that in Schlegel’s world no one tells him what to do—that inside, Schlegel was still the brash kid from the streets of New York who once fashioned a neck tie out of licorice and ate it in front of his teacher in defiance of school dress code. And it was that Ernie Schlegel, incensed by the PBA’s assumption that it had the authority to tell him what to wear on television, who put in a phone call to PBA Commissioner Joe Antenora to suggest that he wear a tuxedo instead. It was the first of many thinly veiled “fuck you” phone calls Schlegel would issue to the PBA over his long career.

  The fact remained that nothing could remove from Esposito’s mind the smudge of cigarette ash in the new carpet of his Jersey bowling center years earlier, the laughing and foul-mouthed crew of kids responsible for it, their association with the man whom Esposito subsequently kicked out and banished from the PBA for years thereafter—Ernie Schlegel. Esposito may have opened the gate to Schlegel’s dreams since then, but that did not mean he had to like the guy. Schlegel could not turn back time to change the events of that fateful night back in Jersey or the lost years he endured in its aftermath, and he was powerless to stop Esposito from being just as tyrannical as he pleased now.

  Schlegel tried in 1978, when he threatened to pull out of a TV show he was set to bowl at a tournament in Kissimmee, Florida. Esposito told him he could not wear his lamé jump suit, a getup for which he had paid $250. So Schlegel told Esposito to go fuck himself. Then he decided he would pull out of the show altogether. Upon further reflection, he thought he would still show up to bowl and wear costume anyway. What were they going to do about it? John Mazzio, a former IBM employee from Chicago and now an Alcoholics’ Anonymous counselor whom Schlegel had brought on as his “mental game advisor,” tried to talk some sense into him.

  “No, I don’t give a fuck!” Schlegel told him. “That’s what I am wearing!”

  Then Cathy talked to him, and ultimately Schlegel bowled the show dressed in the plainer attire Antenora and Esposito preferred. To Schlegel, his clothes were everything; they were his incentive to shine on the show. To Schlegel, removing the costumes from his act felt like removing a champion golfer’s favorite club from his bag at Augusta. Even though Schlegel relented in Kissimmee, Esposito and friends held the incident against him anyway.

  Another way they cramped Schlegel’s style was by timing his approach and fining him if he took longer to throw a shot than they preferred. Schlegel was so notorious for the slow pace at which he bowled that some called him “the human rain delay.” One writer joked that Schlegel’s approach “probably could be timed by sundial.” Funny or not, that was the only way he knew how to do it. Forced to quicken his pace, he was not the bowler he needed to be. So Harry Golden, the PBA Tournament director who worked under Antenora and Esposito, started busting out a stopwatch whenever Schlegel bowled on television, tapping him on the shoulder between frames to hurry him up as he tried to focus on games worth tens of thousands of dollars. Golden’s militant enforcement of the PBA’s slow bowling rule—which allowed bowlers 15 seconds to make a shot once they stepped onto the approach—was dubbed “The Great Stopwatch Controversy.” The rule forced Schlegel into the uncomfortable situation of having to bowl while always looking over his shoulder, waiting to be told he was taking too long. And every time he took too long for Golden’s liking, Golden charged Schlegel a fine.

  Esposito and friends may have banished flamboyance in favor of wool slacks and wooden smiles, but the hip pants and golden shoes Schlegel sported on the 1979 Dutch Masters Open show—a subtle echo of the man once known as the Bicentennial Kid—proved that they could never banish soul.

  Schlegel’s opponent, Bill Coleman, opened the game with a strike of his own, pounded the pocket for another, and then another in the third frame when his ball crossed over to the wrong side of the headpin but put all ten pins in the pit once again. A 6'2" 205-pounder out of Eugene, Oregon, Coleman looked like someone put a man’s clothes on a bull. He had a rib cage built like a two-car garage and legs as thick as trees. A faintly blond mustache bushed his upper lip, and his broad forehead and balding pate shone under the television lights. His several rings glittered each time he took his ball from the rack to set up for his next shot.

  Coleman had at least one advantage over Schlegel: a lone PBA title. He understood how to win in a way that Schlegel did not. And thus he had that edge of confidence Schlegel, for all his clothes and flamboyance, still lacked.

  Schlegel responded with two more perfect strikes as they began the match with a combined seven consecutive strikes between them. Again, he paused at the foul line to accentuate his latest double—a vaguely frothy gritting of the teeth, a fist pump more ferocious than the last. Just as it was back at Central, it was all about the hustle here in Detroit.

  Schlegel was hardly the only opponent Bill Coleman faced each time he stepped up to the approach. In Schlegel, Coleman faced all the hustlers from the Manhattan of Schlegel’s youth whose legends endured in his scowls and fist pumps, the Kenny Barbers and Richie Hornreichs whose thousand-dollar matches in the middle of the night were as tough as any match he would have on tour. They were the men who long ago taught Schlegel that a scowl was worth as much as any score if it became the thing his opponent thought about, that the opponent’s mind was a room he could ransack as long as he tried the right key.

  Coleman stepped up in the eighth fra
me to demonstrate with another explosive strike that the only thing he planned to think about was beating Ernie Schlegel.

  “We’re dead even through eight!” Michaels shouted.

  “Al, as we expected, tremendous scoring and tremendous competition,” Burton said.

  Coleman struck yet again for four strikes in a row, or what pro bowlers call a “four-bagger.”

  That was when another opponent stepped in: Schlegel’s wife Cathy, who lunged from her seat and shouted after Schlegel returned Coleman’s strike with a clutch strike of his own in the ninth frame, a crucial moment known as the “foundation frame” for its importance as the foundation of the final frame of the game.

  A pair of 1970s shades with lenses as wide as wall clocks obscured her rouged face. Cranberry-red lipstick stunned her powdery complexion with a flourish of color as fiery as the outburst with which she celebrated Schlegel’s strike. She tossed thick waves of red hair back behind her shoulders and took several emphatic breaths as she leered out from under her brow, fuming somewhere inside herself. She glared out of the corners of her eyes to see if anyone had a problem with it, perfectly prepared to give them some problems of their own if they did. Then she gathered her composure again, pulling in the sides of her coat and adjusting her seat.

  Any wife of a PBA pro knows that no pressure their husbands feel on the lanes compares to the agony with which a wife endures moments like these. Schlegel was the one with the ball in his hands, but Cathy could only watch and hope.

  Detroit was the hometown of the man Schlegel had to beat in a Friday-night “position round” match to make it into the Dutch Masters Open show the following day: Bob Strampe, Hall of Famer, one of a very few men to bowl a perfect game in each of five decades. Strampe was a man whose prime was long behind him, but his will to win was beyond the power of age to diminish. Sunnybrook Lanes was Strampe’s home bowling alley. The locals loved him like a hero. That match was the moment Cathy became what Schlegel would later describe as “a raving lunatic.”