Fortune had intervened for Pedersen; Schlegel found no such luck. He winced as he returned to wait for his ball to come back, and the microphone pinned to his fuchsia shirt documented his disgust.
“Yeah, you didn’t look! Didn’t look at that lousy rack, Schlegel!” he fumed in his Manhattan accent. “Why didn’t you look first! Ernie, Ernie, geez. You didn’t even look at it.”
One game of bowling offers ten frames to end up with a better score than the other guy. To blow one of them on a perfect shot is to tempt fate once too often. Schlegel gathered himself and made the spare, then struck again on his next shot. This time, he turned back disgusted, shaking his head, and still ruminating over “that lousy rack” as he took his seat.
Schlegel may have been in his fifties, but the thing about bowling pins is they do not know how old you are. And neither, apparently, did Schlegel.
The camera spotted a rioting fan in the crowd holding up a sign that said “Ernie’s Army.”
“There’s Ernie’s Army! You remember Arnie’s army! We’re in Pennsylvania, not too far from Latrobe!” Anthony said of golfing great Arnold Palmer’s hometown in southwest Pennsylvania. “We’ve got Ernie’s army, here in the Pittsburgh area!”
Schlegel stepped up in the seventh frame to the crowd’s chants of “Ernie! Ernie!” Pedersen did what he could, but it was Schlegel’s hand this crowd was eating from now. He blasted another strike. Durbin joked that Schlegel had “thrown the left jab . . . now he’s looking for the right cross.” Anthony chuckled. Schlegel delivered the right cross in the eighth frame, another resounding strike that blew the rack of pins violently back into the pit. Then he did it again in the ninth. This time, he trotted back to his seat scowling and pumping a clenched fist. “He’s mine! He’s mine!” he shouted. The arena’s writhing crowd erupted as if they could reach a decibel so high they might steer fate themselves.
The camera panned to Schlegel’s wife and now-grown daughter, Cathy and Darlene, who exploded out of their seats in the crowd after his eighth-frame strike. Darlene had flown in the day before to be there.
Professional bowling is a lonely sport. For all the legends who may have left their fingerprints on Schlegel’s character back in the days of pre-dawn bets and gangsters, for all the fist pumps fans may perform in unison with him, the only way to win in bowling is to stand on the approach alone and go. First, he had to sit through Pedersen’s ninth-frame shot. It was a perfect strike—perhaps his best of the match—after which Pedersen performed his best Hulk Hogan. He cupped his hand to his ear to elicit the crowd’s praise as he turned to take his seat. That was the last strike he would throw.
Schlegel stared down the pins through his wide-lens glasses, gulped a mouthful of air and exhaled hard from somewhere deep within himself. Somehow, amid all the frenzy and bombast, his mousy hair still sat neatly parted on his head. The TV lights glimmered off of his receding hairline. He looked down at his ball once more and adjusted his stance slightly, then looked back up at the pins with his mean mouth and narrowing eyes, his gnarled nose still striped with an ivory Breathe Right strip.
“Biggest shot of the match, right here,” Anthony said.
And as Schlegel ran to the opposite lane pumping his fist after blasting the pocket yet again for a strike, Anthony asked the question many in the arena surely were pondering by now.
“How can he do it any better than that?” Anthony says. “Fifty-two years old, and he’s running them out!”
Schlegel’s strike on his last ball in the tenth frame forced Pedersen to strike on his next shot or go home a loser. The cameras caught Pedersen mumbling to himself in his seat as he stared down the ten pins that stood between him and $40,000.
“One shot,” he seemed to say to himself. “One time.”
The golden smile of the kid from San Marino once known on tour as “Captain Happy” was noticeably missing when Pedersen took the approach. Now he wore the stormy poker face of a man with nothing on his mind but the business before him—throw a strike and sign the back of that $40,000 check. Anything less and you lose.
“Well, it’s all up to Randy Pedersen,” Anthony said. “One ball, and we’ll know if we’ve got a winner or a loser right here.”
Pedersen got the shot off quickly. Anthony had hardly finished that last sentence before the ball was halfway down the lane.
The shot was every bit as perfect as his last three, each of which crunched the pocket for no-doubt strikes.
Pedersen was about to be reminded that in bowling, as in life, sometimes perfect is not good enough.
Seconds after Pedersen got the shot off, he collapsed to the ground in a fetal position. His face turned as red as a beet as he buried it in his hands. Like everyone else in the building, he could not believe what he had just seen. His ball angled violently toward the pocket the way it had so many times before in this game. But this time, a single pin in the back row—the 8 pin—remained standing. In professional bowling, it is a break so devastating it has its own name; pro bowlers call it “the stone 8.” The ball cleared the pins off the deck so violently that none remained to give this one the kind of fortuitous nudge from which Pedersen benefited earlier in the game. It was as alone on the pin deck as Pedersen was on the floor, the arena roiling with the screams of a disbelieving crowd.
Schlegel came unhinged.
“I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!” he shouted as he lunged out of his chair flailing his fists. “Unbelievable!
Thirty years earlier, in an action match against Mike Limongello, Schlegel needed a strike in the tenth frame to shut out Lemon. He threw a clutch shot that seemed destined to hammer the pocket when Cliff Burgland, another bowler who happened to be betting on Lemon, screamed “somehow!” loud enough to be heard from one end of the bowling alley to another. He knew Schlegel’s shot was a strike; he screamed out of a desperate hope that somehow the perfect ball Schlegel had thrown would leave a pin standing. Schlegel’s ball plowed through the pocket only to leave the dreaded stone 8 pin, losing the match and lining Burgland’s pockets. Schlegel had that match in mind when he watched the ball clear Pedersen’s hand in the tenth frame, thirty years from that match with Lemon. He screamed Somehow! inside his head. And, somehow, it happened—Pedersen left the very stone 8 that had doomed Schlegel that long-ago night against Lemon. Quite literally, Schlegel could not believe it.
Pedersen gingerly picked himself up off the floor.
“For the old people!” Schlegel screamed. “I am the greatest! Muhammad Ali!”
Later, some would take that reference as an arrogant suggestion that he was Ali’s equal; in fact, Schlegel meant it merely as an homage to his idol.
Schlegel continued running from one end of the set to the other, reveling in his glory.
“Well, let’s hope Ernie doesn’t have any heart problems,” Anthony said, “because he is flying!”
Schlegel’s heart made it through fine. It was Pedersen’s heart that broke.
There would be no shortage of opinions about the way Schlegel handled his good fortune that night. Many would say Schlegel could have been more graceful about it, that they themselves never would have reacted that way, that Schlegel should have acknowledged, at least, the great but doomed shot he had thrown in that clutch moment.
Years later, Schlegel had his own take.
“Hey, half a million people may love me, half a million people may hate me, but that’s a million people who are gonna watch me.’”
EPILOGUE
I first met Ernie Schlegel at a senior pro bowling tournament called the Treasure Coast Open at Stuart Lanes in Stuart, Florida, in January 2007. I went to see the guys I loved to watch on TV when I was a kid. I had no idea Schlegel would be there, and I was thrilled to see that he was. I was also thrilled to see other legends in attendance, including Mark Roth and Johnny Petraglia. Unsurprisingly, both Petraglia and Schlegel made the championship round of the Treasure Coast Open, although neither man went on to win the title that
week. That went to another Hall of Famer named Dale Eagle.
As I squeezed my way through the crowd to watch the action, I struck up a conversation with Cathy, still as elegant as ever. I told her how much I enjoyed watching Schlegel bowl on TV when I was a kid. She soon introduced me to the man himself.
He looked right at me and said, “I’m the greatest hustler who ever lived.” I expected nothing less. Schlegel did not know then that I grew up watching him on TV. I was mesmerized by his performance on the 1995 Touring Players Championship show, which I watched the day it aired. For months afterward, when I would go bowling with my best friend, Dominic Perri, at Melody Lanes in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, I would leap, scream, rant, and rave in the manner of the man who had captured my imagination—Ernie Schlegel.
In March 2009, I headed out to Las Vegas to spend some time with the Schlegels. Ernie planned to attend a fiftieth reunion at the South Point Hotel, Casino and Spa with buddies from the old neighborhood. Vegas remains one of the world’s premier destinations for elite bowlers to compete for good money. The city has hosted some of the greatest events in the history of the PBA, such as the Showboat Invitational, the Tournament of Champions, and the World Series of Bowling. As long as its casinos throb with the glittering din of slot machines, the outbursts of gamblers waving fists full of betting sheets at football scores and horses, and the shrieks of players wielding royal flushes at poker tables, it will be the only place on earth where Schlegel and his posse from the old days will want to kick back and remember how it was.
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.
Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion Page 19