As Schlegel and Strampe were led from the locker room to the lanes for that match, Strampe got some hometown love from the fans. They chanted “Strampe! Strampe! Strampe!”
Cathy, nervous and shaking with a desire to see her husband on the show, decided she would start a chant of her own. The hell with this! she thought. She leapt on top of a table, cupped her hands around her mouth, and screamed into the Strampe-loving din.
“Schleee-GEL! Schleee-GEL! Schleee-GEL!” she shouted.
Strampe laughed, and that crack in the legend’s composure was exactly the advantage Schlegel was looking for. He crushed Strampe to make it onto the TV show.
“There’s Schlegel’s wife Cathy, and she’s sure excited,” Burton chuckled as Cathy exploded out of her seat on the show.
Burton, who had surely been there to see her scream Schlegel’s name from a table top the day before, knew as well as anyone just how “excited” Cathy got.
As Schlegel stepped up to bowl the final frame of his match against Coleman, maybe he heard those kids in Gerhmann’s gym crowd around him once again to cheer him through this latest test. Maybe he heard Gehrmann himself telling them about the things a champion does when he is down. Maybe he heard nothing but the silence of his own focused mind.
Schlegel was finishing first, Coleman last. If he threw three strikes he would force Coleman to do the same. Anything less and all Schlegel could do when he was done was sit and hope while Coleman bowled.
Here he was again, staring down sixty feet of wood at the only obstacle between himself and the champion he had planned to become that day he made his first seven-mile jog from home to Gehrmann’s zoo. Just like he did against Curt Schmidt in Baltimore. Just like he did against Steve Wallace in Buffalo. Just like he had done so many times before. But he never made it out of any of those shows a winner. How many more chances would he get to win? How many chances does a professional bowler—anyone—get in a lifetime? More of those questions Schlegel could not answer.
It felt like an eternity passed before Schlegel even looked up at the pins. This time he would bowl on his own terms, fine and all, shot clock be damned. If this was one of those chances he would give away and wonder for the rest of his life where it went wrong, he would be damned before he’d give it away to Harry Golden and the stopwatch police.
The crowd erupted the second Schlegel let the shot go. Schlegel collapsed as he watched the shot, sliding across the approach on his knees. It was a beautiful shot destined for the pocket, and destined, too, to silence that word on tour that he choked in big matches. And that was when he heard them again, those superlatives that stung with their praise, the failure cloaked in compliments from those who knew how many times he had thrown this shot before, how many times he returned to his seat making plans for next week.
“And what a bad break!” Burton insisted. “A tremendously well-controlled shot by Schlegel. When he’s gotten in this position before, he has usually gone high. But this time he stayed down . . . really a super, super shot with all that pressure.”
The ball pounded the pocket like every previous shot he had thrown in the match, and like several shots before that did not strike, he left the right-hander’s nemesis pin, the dreaded 10 pin in the corner that so often stands even on the best shots. For all the things within Schlegel’s control—the curls and squats in Gehrmann’s gym, the pre-show jogs where game plans swarmed his mind like bees—the standing 10 pin in the sport of bowling proves that destiny is beyond the power of any human being to govern.
No one in Sunnybrook Lanes could know it yet, but the match ended the minute Schlegel rose from his knees, flailing his arms in fury at the single pin standing between himself and his dreams.
Mathematically, it still was possible for Schlegel to emerge the winner. In fact, it even was possible for the match to culminate in a tie. But there would be no ties that afternoon, no chances to come back a second time.
Schlegel left another 10 pin on his next shot, which also crushed the pocket to no avail. In fact, every time Schlegel threw a ball he put it right where it needed to be to strike, slamming the pocket each frame, only to leave Schlegel staring at a 10 pin just once too often to win. That was how the dice of destiny rolled.
“A bit discouraged, Ernie Schlegel. That’s the finest game he’s ever bowled on national television,” Burton said. “He’s gonna go home in defeat with a 246.”
Burton, himself a PBA titlist many times over, knew that no shot was “super” that left you a loser. The only thing that kept you out on tour was a wish to erase your name from the list of “great” non-champions. Not when your resentment of that foil crown was so great it compelled your wife to leap onto a tabletop and shout the name of the man who wore it as if she could scream it off of his head. Not when you had chased a dream for ten years and had only this image of yourself crumbling to the ground on national TV to show for it. Soon, the reward Schlegel and his wife pursued from town to town in their motorhome would come to them.
7
SHRUGGING OFF THE MONKEY
By 1980, Schlegel was still waiting for the elevator in the lobby of his dreams. Nelson Burton Jr. already occupied the penthouse on the top floor. Burton would enter the Hall of Fame in a year’s time. He claimed his first PBA title in 1964 at age 22 and made six shows that year alone. Schlegel, meanwhile, had spent the early ‘60s nursing the bitter blow of his banishment from the PBA, falling asleep behind the counter of the watch store his mother worked in, loading soda trucks in the muggy heat of a New York City summer, or repairing AC units in Hackensack.
In his school days, Burton was the kind of kid who captained the baseball team to a city championship, the high school wrestler and all-around jock who made girls blush in the hallway. He went on to fly his own private Cessna from tour stop to tour stop, make news when he flew it down to the Florida Keys and yanked a 190-pound tarpon out of the sea, and win several majors on tour before Schlegel had won at all.
Bowling fans knew him as “Bo.” He was the man whom broadcasting pioneer Roone Arledge—creator of Monday Night Football and Wide World of Sports—had tapped to do color commentary alongside Chris Schenkel for PBA telecasts on ABC. But he still bowled tour stops when he felt like it, and occasionally someone had to fill in for him in the broadcast booth because he still bowled his way onto the TV show now and then. As professional bowling’s popularity waned in the years to come, Burton’s name would become symbolic of the sport’s golden era—a time when millions of viewers tuned in to watch Burton and Schenkel call the strikes and spares each Saturday on ABC.
To the action bowlers who crossed paths with him back in the early 1960s, Burton’s name was symbolic of only one thing: losing your money. He showed up unannounced and unknown one night in 1961 at a place in Chicago called Miami Lanes. Most locals swore the place was run by mobsters, and everybody swore it housed some of the greatest action bowlers in the country. That was the curious thing about Burton: Many bowling alleys claimed to have the country’s greatest action bowlers until he showed up to adjust their definition of “great.” He had one such adjustment in store this night in Chicago.
“I have a young man here who says he will bowl anybody in the house,” the manager said on the PA system. Johnny Campbell, then a local action player of modest notoriety, found that rather unusual.
Anyone who is going to come in here and make a statement like that has some real balls, he thought to himself.
A dark-haired, nineteen-year-old Burton emerged in a crew cut and a button-down white shirt and dark slacks. He looked like a polished kid reporting to the office for his first day of work. Then he started bowling. After trouncing his opponent for six straight games, Campbell, who was keeping score, realized Burton may have looked like a kid, but he bowled as well as any grown man. Burton did not bowl a single game under 240. Then Campbell wrote down his name—Nelson Burton Jr.—and it hit him.
“Oh, my God!” Campbell said. “This is Nelson Burton’s son!”
Burton’s father, Nelson Burton Sr., was one of the greatest bowlers in the history of the sport. And so, it seemed, was his kid.
Nearly twenty years later, when Burton Jr.’s path crossed Schlegel’s at King Louie Lanes in Kansas City for the 1980 King Louie Open title match on TV, he had fifteen titles to Schlegel’s zero. His last one had come weeks prior at the Fair Lanes Open in Baltimore. As a commentator, his made-for-TV tan, full head of bushy, black hair and sculpted biceps bulging in the arms of his ABC Sports coat established him as the media darling one writer called “the PBA’s answer to Robert Goulet,” referring to the actor who scored a breakout role as Lancelot in the Broadway musical Camelot.
Yes, by this point in his career, Burton was bowling royalty. How fitting, then, that he was bowling the finals of an event called the “King Louie Open” in a pair of golden bowling shoes with his cocky strut and square jaw. A beltless pair of pressed, beige slacks was buttoned up over his navel. The sleeves of his red-and-black striped polo shirt with a cotton-white collar tightened around his biceps every time he lifted his ball for another shot. The shirt clung tightly to his sculpted abdomen. With his slender legs and chiseled arms, he cut the figure of a trained athlete in a sport more commonly perceived as the refuge of beer-bellied hustlers and degenerates.
While Schlegel got in his practice shots during the commercial break, Burton talked baseball with fans in the front row as if to make sure they saw he was not sweating this, that he had been here before and come up a winner fifteen times more than Schlegel had, and he knew it.
“This is going to be a match of psyching,” play-by-play man Chris Schenkel said as the match began, “because Ernie Schlegel, the tournament leader, is just full of that type of ‘action,’ and Bo Burton is not a slouch, either.”
“Not a slouch” indeed. The Burton whom Schenkel spoke of picked up blackjack and poker at the ripe age of six. His father gave him an itch for action so fierce that the nuns he had for schoolteachers prized his penchant for numbers as if it were a divine math miracle. The nuns did not know the unsavory source of his propensity for arithmetic: learning when to hit or when to stay in a game of blackjack. That taught Burton more about numbers than any nun’s math ever would.
Bowling was the one hand of cards he knew would never fail him. Not that night in Chicago, not the time he shot up his thumb with Novocaine to bowl a tour stop after thirty-eight games of action the night before, not the time he was stripped of his stripes as an Army Sergeant for reporting to duty late after another long night on the lanes.
“They tossed me in the guardhouse for twenty-four hours, and I went back to private for a while,” he remembered years later. “I didn’t mind much, because I figured I had made the equivalent of a year’s pay in those matches.”
Burton’s days of banging heads with bowlers in the mob haunts of Chicago were the memories of another man’s life by 1980. With a cushy TV gig that paid in one year what he used to make in one good night on the lanes, the checks he bowled for amounted to little more than beer money. Burton never again would depend on his ball and shoes to pay the bills, but money is not the thing that feeds the ego of a born competitor. Only winning does that, and then the next win, and the next. When Burton looked across the ball return and shook hands with Schlegel to start the final match of the King Louie Open, he did not see a man or a fellow bowler. He saw his next win.
Schlegel’s raiment struck a balance between Frank Esposito’s dated taste and Schlegel’s urge to dazzle. He tucked a steel-gray, V-neck shirt into a beltless pair of violet slacks whose bottoms roiled around his ankles as he shuffled toward the foul line. He wore a yolk-colored baseball glove under the blue Dick Weber wrist support most bowlers Velcroed around their wrist on TV to rake in some endorsement dough. His thick bush of bowl-cut, dirty blonde hair looked like someone halved a pumpkin, painted it the color of honey, and plopped it on top of his head.
The packed crowd behind the lanes erupted with exclamations of “Come on, Ernie!” as he glided into his first shot and blasted the pocket. It was a strike, the first of many he would throw that afternoon.
Cathy sported an emerald silk, emerald shirt in the crowd, her pale cheeks stunned with a subtle flourish of rouge. A shock of permed, auburn bangs obscured her forehead and hovered over her wide-lens glasses. Beside her sat Sy Marks, a buddy of Schlegel’s from the old neighborhood, with a trimmed, dark goatee and a sharkskin suit. To the Schlegels, Sy’s presence made everything feel like yesterday.
“There, you see he’s five-eleven, one-fifty-five, and can you believe it? He’s looking for his first title,” Schenkel said as Schlegel’s stats appeared on screen. The stats documented the twelve years he had spent on tour, the quarter-of-a-million dollars in earnings he had bagged over that time, the goose egg where his number of PBA titles ought to have been.
“It’s very hard for our pro members to believe that he is looking for a title for the first time,” said Dick Weber, filling in for Burton, of the gaping zero, “because he is an excellent bowler.”
Weber calling you an excellent bowler was like Wilt Chamberlain telling you that you’re a hell of a basketball player. Bowling’s Mount Rushmore began with Dick Weber’s face. With twenty-six PBA titles and accolades strung across nearly half a century of bowling, the man was the sport’s marquee legend.
Burton greeted Schlegel’s opening strike with an even more convincing one of his own. He wasted little time strutting back to the ball return with a vaguely annoyed expression on his face, as if no non-titlist had any business burdening him with the need to show up in a championship match. For the rest of the afternoon, Burton would perceive Schlegel the way he had perceived so many other challengers over the years—as a fruit fly he meant to swipe off his armor in a joust.
Burton’s next shot sailed left of the headpin. A single pin remained. He sauntered back to retrieve his ball, shrugged, and sighed. He stared down the lane as if the pins had to be kidding him. His next shot sailed left again and nearly missed the spare. Burton paused at the line in disbelief. It seemed, for a moment, as if bowling’s golden boy might not be so golden this time around.
It is customary for a bowler on a PBA show to stay put in his seat until the opposing player completes his shot. Schlegel had never been much for custom, and as a jolt of adrenaline coursed through his body after watching Burton nearly miss an easy spare and stiffen with embarrassment, he launched out of his seat before Burton even turned away from the foul line. There was an urgency about him, the mildly angry desperation of a man determined not to let this afternoon join the many bad memories he had made in this spot before.
Adrenaline is a fickle assistant. In moderation it may be the edge you need, but let it consume you and it can easily mean your demise. Schlegel leered at the pins with his reptilian squint, ball in hand. He rushed to the line and the ball seemed to drop from his hand as he let it go. He fell off balance to his right and watched the ball whiff the headpin and leave four pins standing.
Schlegel’s next shot was a strike, but the damage was done. To miss a spare in a championship match against a bowler of Burton’s pedigree was to leave a trace of blood in shark-infested waters. It was merely a matter of time before you were destroyed. Burton swaggered into position to throw his next shot, cradling his ball in his arms as he adjusted his blue and white bowling glove and holding his hand over the air blowing out of the ball return. If you did not know he was bowling for a top prize of $11,000 dollars, you might have thought he was preparing for a walk to the post office. His placid demeanor could not have struck a starker contrast to Schlegel’s jittery intensity.
Burton fired his ball into the pocket, left a 10 pin standing, and converted the spare with the textbook aplomb for which he was known. When the camera honed in on Schlegel, he was crouching over the ball return and holding a knife in plain view of Burton, who was gathering himself for his next shot. Schlegel picked up his ball and took it back to his seat with his knife, the blade twi
ce as long as his index finger, and began fidgeting with the thumb hole in his ball. No image could possibly be more emblematic of a match between the prince groomed for glory and the former gangster.
Weber attempted to explain away the sight as typical of bowlers so fraught with nerves the blood rushes out of their fingers and makes the finger holes feel bigger, a problem only another piece of thumb tape can fix.
Ostensibly, the knife helped Schlegel stuff a piece of tape into the thumb hole of his bowling ball, but if Burton happened to be thinking about Schlegel’s knife when he set up for his next shot, well, call that a bonus. This may have been Kansas City, but this also was a game Schlegel picked up in the shady haunts of Brooklyn or the Bronx—a game as much of the mind as of anything else.
It was Schlegel’s mind Burton was after when he stuffed his next ball into the pocket for his finest strike of the match—a shot aimed at Schlegel’s gamesmanship. Burton already was walking back to his seat when the camera found him again seconds after his shot, poker-faced and unfazed. In this psychological standoff between Schlegel’s knife and Burton’s moxie, Burton’s moxie had won. Schlegel’s antics may have earned him his share of money back home, but here in Kansas City, opposite one of the greatest bowlers the tour had ever seen, he would have to win with his score alone.
Schlegel buried his next three shots for strikes, chomping furiously on a piece of gum. Burton struggled into his sixth frame—a spare here, a bad shot followed by an open frame there. The slow-motion replay captured Burton wincing and turning away from the pins with the stiff manner of a stunned man. Maybe he got away with a lousy shot now and then that long-ago night in Chicago, where Johnny Campbell noted the name of the cocky kid in the button-down shirt who never bowled a game under 240. Those were matches against men whose names no one remembered; this was a match against a man who someday would join him in the most elite club the sport has to offer—the Hall of Fame. The far-away look in Burton’s eyes as he took his seat after blowing a spare betrayed the surrender of a champion who knew he was running out of time. In all likelihood, he may have already coughed up the title on the kind of spare he converted a thousand times a year.
Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion Page 16