Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (23 page)
Authors: Gianmarc Manzione
O
ne thing Schlegel liked to say throughout his career is that you’re born insane; you have to work your whole life to get sane. At the 1995 Touring Players Championship, a major on the PBA Tour, Schlegel was about to make it clear that he was still working on it. At age fifty-two, fifteen years after he won his first championship, he had qualified to bowl the championship round live on ESPN. During the week’s competition, he had bowled two 300 games and a 299, besting players who were young enough to be his children and who threw the ball with considerably more power and hook than Schlegel ever had. If he won, he would become the oldest player in PBA history to win a major title.
By then, Schlegel had amassed five PBA titles. After waiting twelve years to win his first one at the 1980 King Louie Open, he won his second title just 10 weeks later at the 1980 City of Roses Open in Portland, Oregon. Mount St. Helen’s had just
blown apart, and a layer of ash settled on the lanes. Players’ bowling balls were coming back through the ball return ringed with a stripe of volcanic ash. It seemed the perfect metaphor for a career that suddenly was on fire.
Schlegel came within one ball of winning his first major the following year. He advanced to the title match of the 1981 PBA National Championship, blowing out Dave Davis 245-171, and then defeating legend Dick Weber—the same man who had announced his win the previous year—on his way to a contest with the equally legendary Earl Anthony. By 1981, Anthony, a lefty, had become an indomitable force on the PBA Tour. He already had won the PBA National Championship three times. Schlegel battled Anthony down to the final ball. Needing a strike on the first ball in the tenth frame, Schlegel’s ball just never quite found its way to the pocket, leaving the 2 pin on a light hit and letting Anthony squeak his way to his fourth PBA National Championship victory, 242-237.
Schlegel again surfaced in the title matches of the 1984 Long Island Open in Garden City, New York, and the 1985 Lite Beer Open in North Olmsted, Ohio, respectively, winning them both for his third and fourth titles. He showed up on the 1984 show clad entirely in a fire-engine red outfit, complete with red pants, a red hand towel, a red bowling ball, red shoes, and a red-and-white striped shirt. Cathy called it “color therapy.” The more aggressive his colors on the show, the theory went, the more aggressively he would bowl. For the 1985 show, he donned a violet top with sparkling, gold stripes strung along each side like suspenders and snow-white pants with violet-tinged bell-bottoms that roiled around his shoes as he stepped toward the foul line.
Schlegel savored that latter victory in particular. At the time, the tour featured a triumvirate of tournaments collectively
called the “Lite Slam.” They included the Lite Beer Classic in Miami, the Lite Beer Open, and the Lite Beer Championship in Milwaukee. If the same bowler won all three Lite Beer events, that bowler would win $1 million. Pete Weber had won the first, and made it to the title match of the second. Had he defeated Schlegel, just one more event stood between himself and the jackpot. Schlegel would rather have been crushed by a truck in the street than allow somebody to walk over him on his way to becoming a millionaire.
In 1989, at the Arc Pinole Open in Pinole, California, the lights went out in the bowling alley due to an electrical failure halfway through Schlegel’s semifinal match against Ron Williams. Williams sat through most of the 17-minute delay, while Schlegel earned chuckles and strange looks from spectators by jogging in place on the set. Williams promptly missed a spare coming out of the delay, and Schlegel seized the momentum with two strikes in a row en route to victory. Williams struck out to shoot 254, but Schlegel, too, pounded the pocket the rest of the game for a 258. He then clobbered Dave D’Entremont in the title match, 268-215.
Then the lights went out somewhere else—this time, they went dark in Schlegel’s bowling career. With the exception of the 1993 Masters, where he qualified for the TV show but lost his only match, he failed to make an appearance on a single TV show in the five years following his 1989 Arc Pinole Open victory. His appearance in the championship round of the 1995 Touring Players Championship at age fifty-two, then, was nothing short of stunning. The show would take place before a sold-out crowd at Pittsburgh’s Robert Morris College Sewall Center arena, where bowling lanes had been specially constructed for the event. An arena full of screaming fans was exactly the kind of setting in which Schlegel felt he was born to perform.
One thing few people in that arena or watching at home knew was that Schlegel had someone other than himself or his wife of twenty years to bowl for—someone who could watch only from a hospital bed.
In 1976, Schlegel and Cathy met John Mazzio in a diner up the block called The Dog House. The name of the place was particularly appropriate; Schlegel had just concluded a miserable round in a PBA tournament. Mazzio was a former IBM employee out of Chicago who more recently had become an Alcoholics’ Anonymous counselor. He also happened to be a fair bowler himself, and he had a way with psychology. It was Mazzio who would complete a stage in Schlegel’s self-improvement project that even Gehrmann could not address: controlling the Other Ernie. The Other Ernie was the person who pulled a knife on Mike Ginsberg, and the one whom Jerry Markey spotted outside of a Boy Scouts meeting trying to shoot a kid in the face with his zip gun over a petty slight. The Other Ernie was dangerous; he was a part of him that Schlegel did not like. Mazzio knew Schlegel needed help finding a way to run from that piece of himself.
Mazzio’s penchant for psychology enabled him to tinker with the crossed wires of Schlegel’s mind and see what might come of it. The bizarre prescriptions he concocted proved to be the remedy Schlegel needed. They included, among other things, beating motel beds with a tennis racket in a screaming rage between rounds on tour. A terrified Cathy waited it out in the next room while her husband went berserk.
Schlegel almost always bowled better in the round following a rage session. Here was a way of relieving tension that Schlegel understood. Beating things, screaming—Schlegel knew how to do that. Mazzio would take Schlegel on mile-long walks, talking the whole time, nudging him to quit smoking and smudge the Other Ernie out of his soul. All Schlegel needed,
it turned out, was a generous supply of tennis rackets, a motel bed sturdy enough to take the beating, and some honest self-analysis.
As people watched this “greatest non-champion” embark on a sensational season under Mazzio’s guidance in 1976, one filled with telecast appearances and a fattening wallet to show for it, Mazzio soon acquired some monikers of his own. Bowling magazines called him “The Exorcist,” “Shrink to the Stars,” “a gestalt therapist.” One published an illustration depicting Schlegel with a necklace of skulls, a horned mask, and a crow’s head clutched in his fist.
By 1984, Schlegel told one journalist, “I’m forty-one years old now, and I’m no longer a raving lunatic.”
Now, on the eve of the 1995 Touring Players Championship, Mazzio was in the hospital suffering from late-stage heart disease.
Schlegel and Cathy, devoted vegetarians, both knew of the history of stroke and diabetes in Mazzio’s family. Mazzio figured he knew one ailment or the other would be his demise, but fate had a third possibility in mind—the heart attack from which he had suffered months earlier. Mazzio shared his doctor’s admonishments with Cathy over dinner not long after that—the exercise he was not getting, the foods he should not be eating, the life he may not be living much longer. Then he promptly ordered a large steak. Cathy saw no point in preaching the gospel of vegetarianism. Mazzio, the sidekick with whom Schlegel and Cathy had created so many memories traveling the country together on tour over the years, would go out his way.
Mazzio’s health problems had diminished his influence in Schlegel’s life by then, and that fellow known as the Other Ernie started showing his face more often. Only Mazzio had managed to quell the menace Schlegel contained within
himself and without his constant presence, Schlegel found himself once again resorting to the less savory means of conflict resolution he had practiced on Ginsberg back at Manhattan Lanes.
Back home at a bowling alley earlier that year, management informed him of their decision to halt their longstanding policy of allowing him to practice for free as their “house pro.” Schlegel was none too pleased, and he let them know about it. Then he left. But his godsons persuaded him to return to the establishment weeks later, when a young, local bowler, sitting nearby in the company of some girls he wished to impress at Schlegel’s expense, quipped about a distinction between pros and has-beens. He asserted that Schlegel fell squarely in the latter camp. Schlegel told the local it was funny that he had anything to say about either pros or has-beens, since he was not good enough to be either one.
The guy followed Schlegel into the restroom. Out of the corner of his eye, Schlegel saw the guy coming at him from behind and stepped aside. Schlegel slammed him up against the wall and jammed his thumbs into his eyes. Then he made a request.
“Tell me when your eyeballs hit your fucking brain,” he said.
Schlegel pressed his thumbs into the guy’s skull as he screamed in pain.
Then some things occurred to him, things he never thought of before Mazzio came around. Things like consequences. Like the possibility that the reason this tough guy provoked Schlegel into a fight was to have a reason to sue him. Things like Schlegel’s fear that he might kill the poor bastard, as he had come within inches of doing to Ginsberg. Jail was not exactly the kind of place where he wished to spend his retirement. So he let the guy go and turned toward the urinal. All he wanted to do, after all, was take a piss in peace. The local was not
about to walk away with those girls waiting on the other side knowing he had gotten his ass kicked by a fifty-two-year-old man. So he snuck up behind Schlegel and smashed him into the wall, cracking one of Schlegel’s ribs. The two fell to the floor, and Schlegel displayed the knife he always carried on him in case some stupid bastard coaxed the Other Ernie out of his dormancy. He had such a stupid bastard on his hands now.
“I’ve got a knife in my hand, and I am going to count three seconds,” Schlegel told him. The guy got off of him and left.
At the Sewell Center arena in Pittsburgh months later, Schlegel knew he may not get another chance to win one for Mazzio. Schlegel and his wife may have been the only two people in the world who believed he still had another title in him. Making the show at his age was itself a feat to behold. Winning the tournament outright? That would be too much to believe. The fact that a victory would make him the oldest player in PBA history to win a major was testimony to its unlikelihood.
Those were the thoughts on Schlegel’s mind at the Touring Players Championship in Pittsburgh that night. With history to be made and $40,000 on the line—which would be the largest single paycheck of his professional bowling career—there were many more thoughts he wished to plant in the minds of his opponents. He wanted them to memorize the scowl gashed across his face as he burst down the aisle of the packed and frenzied auditorium to be introduced to the crowd. He wanted them to understand why the announcer labeled him professional bowling’s “Iron Man,” the bowler who held the record for most PBA tournaments bowled at 741.
When he stepped up to the approach to make his first televised shot in years, many Schlegels stood there with him—some he did not want to know, others he knew too well, and all of them inescapable. The Schlegel who cradled his best buddy
in his arms on the roof of an apartment building in upper Manhattan, watching him die of the same heroin overdose that robbed his youth of so many friends; the Schlegel who shoved the blade of a belly-puncher in Mike Ginsberg’s chest outside Manhattan Lanes; the Schlegel who showed up with an overnight bag for an unannounced stay at the house of the woman he had just met, fully intending to propose to her. The Ernie Schlegel who was about to entertain a sold-out arena in Pittsburgh was many men whose lives he had lived and never left behind. They were angels and killers, lovers and madmen, salesmen and suckers. None of them, though, was a loser.
In the twilight of a career nearly everyone presumed dead, with the hot lights of TV cameras oiling his face just as they did at his first TV appearance so many years ago, Schlegel was still up to his old action tricks. He wore a Breathe-Right strip across the bridge of his gnarled nose, a thick pair of wide-lens glasses over his squinty eyes, and the slender build he maintained over the years. He looked more like a substitute teacher in your kid’s chemistry class than the flashy comic book character with the strawberry-blond bangs he called the Bicentennial Kid in younger days. It was hardly the image of a man to be feared—exactly the kind of disarming facade he discovered in a ruffled sleeve or a whiff of bourbon so long ago.
The golden days of action bowling were long-dead by 1995, but the most eccentric and incorrigible character of the action bowling era—Ernie Schlegel—was still very much alive and well. The screaming fans who filled the Sewall Center were about to reawaken his action bowling instincts. His opponent, Randy Pedersen, was younger than Schlegel by nearly twenty years. Though Pedersen did not know it yet, ESPN was about to bring the peculiar spectacle of action bowling a prominence it had never previously enjoyed. And it would do so at his expense.
The first obstacle Schlegel faced had nothing to do with the opponent he would bowl on the show. It had to do with the lanes themselves. The specially constructed lanes installed in the arena presented a completely different playing environment than the one the finalists faced in competition throughout the week. They had bowled the tournament in a traditional, bowling alley setting at a place called Olympic Lanes in Harmarville, Pennsylvania; now the finalists would have to bowl on a completely different lane surface. What worked for them at Olympic Lanes would not necessarily work for them now. These lanes had significantly less wear on them, having been bowled on a lot less frequently than the lanes in a bowling alley that hosted leagues nearly every night of the week and recreational bowling in the meantime. Schlegel, like all other competitors on the show, probably would have to find a different way of attacking the lanes than he had used as he battled his way into the championship round.