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

by Gianmarc Manzione

  Schlegel had known Takota’s stepmother, Autumn, ever since Schlegel roomed with her father on tour decades ago. When Autumn tragically lost both her father and mother, Schlegel took her and her brothers Jeremy and Jason under his wing. Now he had a new “nephew” to mentor—young Takota Smith, whom he recently had introduced to the sport.

  “He loves those kids like they are his boys,” Cathy told me. “He is Uncle Ernie to them. Jason has a two-year-old now who just goes crazy when she sees him.”

  That is the Ernie Schlegel people know in Vancouver, not the brash kid from the streets of New York. Now he is the “crazy uncle” who is as sure to show up and watch the Saturday morning youth leagues as the parents of the bowlers themselves.

  He is also the grandfather who speaks to his grandson, Zachary Connor, at the same day and time each week by webcam. Amid a recent visit to see his daughter Darlene in Florida on Zachary’s birthday, Schlegel quickly found himself coaching youth bowlers at the local bowling alley there.

  “I just can’t seem to not help kids,” Schlegel told me. “You never know who is going to be the next great one.”

  Schlegel’s interest in affecting youth bowlers with the love for bowling he discovered as a kid himself derives from his concern for a sport that once enjoyed a cultural prominence it has lost over the years. The PBA Tour is a shadow of what it was in Schlegel’s prime due largely to forces beyond the control of its executives. A tour that once brought action to more than 30 cities throughout the United States over the course of a season now hardly visits a handful. Most events it does put on, such as the World Series of Bowling or the Summer Swing, conglomerate many separate tournaments that run simultaneously under one roof to avoid the production and travel costs incurred by a bonafide tour that takes each tournament to a new town.

  Pro bowlers who wish to make a living on the lanes today must consent to be globe-trotters, as competitive bowling increasingly is an international enterprise that takes players everywhere from Russia to Malaysia, Korea to Poland, France to Qatar and all points in between. Those 20 million viewers before whom Schlegel performed on ABC in the mid-1970s have dwindled to as few as 800,000, and the ABC network cancelled its weekly pro bowling telecast after a 35-year run in 1997. Its last show went out with a tearful goodbye from longtime broadcast partners, Chris Schenkel and Bo Burton; their tears reflected the sentiments of many who remembered what once had been.

  Major corporate sponsors that once regularly bolstered PBA Tour events, such as Firestone, Quaker State, or Miller Lite, have long since moved on. The loss of those big-time title sponsors, and the PBA’s ongoing struggle to attract new ones in an economic climate immeasurably more challenging than it was when TV offered a mere handful of channels rather than the thousands available today, continues to impact the PBA Tour—and the bowling industry at large—with adversities that seem nearly insurmountable at times. In 2014, professional bowling’s U.S. Open, an event every bit as prestigious in bowling as it is in golf or tennis that had run annually since 1971, was cancelled. The 2015 event also was cancelled briefly before the event’s long-time sponsor, the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America, inked a partnership deal with the United States Bowling Congress, the sport’s governing body in the U.S., to keep the event alive for at least a few more years. Budgets throughout the bowling industry are leaner than seemingly ever before; executives and journalists who have worked in bowling for decades openly concede they never have seen things as financially tight as they are today.

  None of the PBA Tour’s current ills are due to a lack of effort. Its visionary commissioner, Tom Clark, and his veteran team of bowling lifers such as Mike Jakubowski, Kirk Von Krueger, Dave Schroeder, Jason Thomas, Bill Vint, and Jerry Schneider, among others, continue to battle through grueling circumstances with concepts and programs designed to save costs and turn back at least some of the tide that threatens to submerge professional bowling in the United States. The PBA made its entry into the new media landscape with its subscription-based online streaming product, Xtra Frame, which offers unlimited coverage of live events plus a growing archive of historical content. Clark is the architect of forward-looking concepts such as the World Series of Bowling, which has succeeded in saving costs while providing international players with an unprecedented opportunity to bowl a number of PBA tournaments for a fraction of the cost required in the days when each tour stop was held in a different city. The production of many events and TV show tapings for ESPN in a matter of about ten days requires an ungodly amount of hours from the PBA’s limited staff; it is an undertaking that defines the term “labor of love.” The current woes faced by the PBA Tour—and by the bowling industry at large—have bred a screaming chorus of critics full of hot air about what went wrong and how it can be fixed. Most critics who insist they have the answers have little idea how much work is going into keeping competitive bowling viable despite the adverse circumstances it faces. If they did, they, too, might consider that a minor miracle.

  Clark also succeeded in returning the PBA to its former glory on ABC in 2011, when the storied Tournament of Champions returned to the ABC network with a special appearance by beloved announcer Bo Burton; Chris Schenkel had passed away in 2005 at age 82. That event awarded the richest top prize in PBA Tour history, $250,000, which went to PBA Tour veteran, Mika Koivuniemi. Koivuniemi bowled a 299 in the semifinals of that TV show, falling a pin short of a televised perfect game while his opponent, Tom Daugherty, infamously bowled a score of 100. That outcome marked the greatest discrepancy between two combatants in the history of the PBA Tour’s televised finals, and it made for some of the greatest drama in recent pro bowling memory. The show opened with a live performance by punk-pop band, Bowling for Soup, who used the opportunity to introduce their catchy new single, “S-S-S-Saturday,” to a national TV audience. On the women’s side of professional bowling, the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America has produced the championship finals of the U.S. Women’s Open in exotic settings such as outdoors under the arches in Reno on specially constructed lanes or inside the palatial Cowboys AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Some argue that these one-off events do more to convey desperation than they do to solve the problems pro bowling faces because they do not cultivate a sustained, returning audience. But even critics have to at least admit that these events demonstrate the bowling industry’s resolve to never give up at a time when it would be easy to do so.

  Perhaps the saddest episode to occur amid the struggles that have dogged professional bowling in recent years was the dissolution of the women’s pro bowling tour in 2003 due to financial woes. For more than forty years, the women’s pro bowling tour had provided many great female competitors the chance to make a living on the lanes. Even though the women’s tour has been defunct for more than a decade now, a crop of phenomenally talented, young women bowlers has emerged at a time when they may never know what it is like to have a tour of their own. When Kelly Kulick became the first woman bowler to win a PBA Tour title after defeating PBA Tour superstar Chris Barnes in the title match of the 2010 Tournament of Champions, the victory did as much to move women’s professional athletics forward as it did to highlight the irony that some of the most talented woman bowlers who ever lived have reached their competitive prime at a time when they have little to bowl for.

  Ernie Schlegel believes one way to possibly reverse pro bowling’s downward trend is to cultivate a new generation of young, passionate and competitive bowlers who can ensure its relevance in the decades to come. He concedes that bowling is the thing that saved his life. His suspicion before Esposito allowed him on tour in 1968 that the life of a bum awaited him was no exercise in paranoid conjecture; it was very real. If bowling can do for any other kid what it did for him in his youth, Schlegel wants to make it happen. It is a difficult endeavor, as competition in the children’s sports marketplace is heated. Pop Warner football, little league, soccer, hockey, basketball, lacrosse, martial arts and a host of other activities
have combed the ranks of once-flourishing youth bowling leagues and left them with many fewer participants today than they enjoyed even fifteen years ago. Nonetheless, it is a fact that high school bowling ranks among the fastest-growing sports in the United States, and that college bowling, too, is thriving.

  The Ernie Schlegel who wakes up early on Saturday mornings to coach youth bowlers may be a softer version of the one who proclaimed himself “The Greatest” on ESPN, but the Other Ernie showed up during my time in Vancouver as well. The day after heading off to Crosley Lanes together, Schlegel bowled a tournament at another local center. He showed up five minutes before the practice session was set to start, and one diminutive, twenty-something bowler made the mistake of saying something.

  “Maybe we could actually get some practice if Ernie would show up on time,” the kid said loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  “Don’t make me come down there and make you smaller than you are!” Schlegel shouted. “Guys like you I used to squash and put them in my back pocket. I think I still got one back there.”

  In case anyone who heard him dared to doubt the truth of what he said, Schlegel rode consecutive 250 games into first place with two games to go in a field of bowlers young enough to be his children.

  “I wonder how long he can keep this up?” Cathy said to me as we watched Schlegel compete.

  Schlegel placed third and left the place with more cash in his pocket than he had when he arrived. Just like the old days. It seemed clear to me then that he would keep it up for as long as he wanted to.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The writing of this book has been the most challenging thing I ever have done in my life. Years ago, I read something by Norman Mailer in which he described the experience of writing a book as “physically debilitating.” I was a kid then afflicted with the unfortunate dream of becoming a writer—a doomed aspiration I wish on no one—and I thought I knew what Mailer was talking about. I did not. Not even close. Writing this book has indeed proven physically debilitating. At times, I felt like the star of the myth of Sisyphus, rolling this boulder uphill only to watch it slide back down and do it all over again. But just as Mike Limongello says he would not trade his memories of the old action days for anything, I myself would not trade an ounce of the sweat I poured into this book for anything. I have made lasting friends who have welcomed me into their homes and treated me as though I were their son, opened their lives to me, and given me so much more than the good stories for which I initially pursued them. My gratitude is boundless.

  That I somehow managed to finish this book is a miracle for which I have many people to thank. But there is one person in my life who had to endure the writing of this book, and that person is my amazing wife, Brittni. Her patience, support, and understanding got both of us through the most trying moments we experienced together over the past five years. And toward the end of that five-year period, on December 5, 2013, she gave me the greatest gift I ever have received, as our beautiful daughter, Ellianna, was born that day.

  As someone who grew up watching Ernie Schlegel bowl on TV as a kid, the fact that I ended up telling his story years later is a twist of fate I never could have foreseen and never will believe. The Schlegels rank among the sources for this book who began as sources and ended up as lifelong friends. Their hospitality, compassion, and friendship throughout the arduous process of this book’s creation provided a galvanizing source of fortitude and inspiration over the years.

  Steve Harris is a source for this book who quickly turned into something more like a father figure. He is one of the most impressive human beings I ever have encountered. His success in business comes despite never acquiring a college degree. The streets of New York taught him the art of the hustle, and, like many former action bowlers, that was all the learning he needed to live on his own terms. It did not take long for me to realize that he is a guy worth listening to about things well beyond the stories I tell in this book. Harris always eagerly and warmly welcomed my repeated questions over the years—so many of them redundant—and his patience is a big reason why this book even was possible to write.

  One of my favorite sources for this book is Toru Nagai. I met Nagai briefly at a diner in Las Vegas in my 2009 trip to see and bowl with Schlegel during his 50-year reunion with cherished friends from the old days. Nagai then was well into his 80s, and he still had all of his faculties about him, including a razor-sharp sense of humor and a precise, vivid memory. Nagai enjoyed ribbing Schlegel as we had lunch. Schlegel is a man who loves to talk. PBA Hall of Famer Barry Asher jokes that when he calls Schlegel, he does not have to say anything. He just listens. That tends to be how it is when talking to Schlegel on the phone; it is one of the man’s many peculiar charms. When I met Nagai, he joked that a five minute walk often took an hour with Schlegel, because Schlegel would stop him every few seconds to begin a new line of conversation.

  My favorite moment having lunch with Nagai and Schlegel out in Vegas came when I busted out a laptop to show them one of the TV shows on which Schlegel appeared in the 1980s. At one point in the show, after Schlegel had thrown a clutch strike late in a match, the camera panned to Cathy in the crowd. She lunged out of her seat with gritted teeth to pump her fist as her crimson hair roiled over her ivory-white forehead. Schlegel loved it.

  “That’s my mama!” he said. “Look how mean she is!”

  About a year-and-a-half after first meeting Schlegel, I found Kenny Barber. I say “found” because Barber was not the kind of guy you looked up in the White Pages; he made sure of that. Over the time I knew him—approximately three years, from early 2009 to late 2011, when he died—I believe he changed his phone number at least a handful of times. That was due partly to an ongoing paranoia that no distance from his past could diminish, and partly to the chorus of bill collectors who blew up his phone on a daily basis.

  Schlegel had an old number of Barber’s laying around. He gave it to me one day and I dialed. I got an answering machine with no message or greeting. Just a tone and the silence into which I spoke my uncertain inquiry about a guy named Kenny Barber I wanted to talk with, and was the person at this number the man himself? Barber was screening his calls. He must have quickly surmised that I was neither a bill collector nor a gangster looking to settle some long-ago grievance that had gone unresolved, because he rang my phone seconds after I hung it up.

  The instant he spoke, I knew it had to be the one and only Kenny Barber. There it was—the Queens accent; the lisping speech that made him sound like he had a mouth half-full of water as he spoke; the ghost of Rodney Dangerfield somewhere off in the distance of his gruff voice. (Barber did a hell of a Dangerfield impression.) It was him; he was still alive. The Rego Park Flash, the clown of Gun Post Lanes, the guy who collected for Crazy Vito. In the flesh. I wanted to know everything, and he was happy to give it to me, so desperate was he by then for somebody to care about who he was, where he had been, and the mess he had made of his life.

  That mess comprised stories of New York City pro shops that went belly-up when their shady financiers left him holding the bag, a failed attempt to start over out in L.A. at a place called El Dorado Bowl, bad decisions and the things he would give to take them back. There were stories of defrauded creditors he eluded when he left New York, court dates, and a bitter nostalgia that ached more sorely with each passing year.

  A lot of things ached in Barber’s life by the time I met him: the cirrhotic liver he described as “ninety percent dead”; the new knees he needed; the carpal tunnel that so many years of bowling brought on; the ex-wife who phoned from jail to berate him for not accepting collect calls from her mother.

  I later went to meet him at a McDonald’s in Cape Coral, Florida, where he lived at the time. He slammed a battered cardboard box onto the table. I did not yet know it, but this box would haunt me for years to come. He nudged open a single flap to reveal its contents, and the box burst open, pregnant with seemingly every instance in which Barber’s name appeared
in the local bowling news. At this time, he was 65 years old; he had kept this collection of clippings on hand for nearly half a century.

  The Styrofoam cup of coffee he lifted to his mouth cloaked his sun-bronzed face with a flash of steam.

  “I can’t believe I still have all this!” Barber exclaimed as his jewel-green eyes widened over his treasure. “I haven’t looked at this stuff in years!”

  Each paper he pulled from the box tugged him a little deeper into a moment in his life when he felt most fully alive. The names he read off of the standings sheets of long-ago tournaments read like the names of hustlers chalking their cues somewhere in the corner of a Jackie Gleason movie—Sis Montovani, Doc Iandoli, Nunzio Morra, Mike Limongello, Vinnie Pantuso. They were names of men who had long since disappeared into their lives.

  The one name Barber lingered over more than any other was the name of Ernie Schlegel. Schlegel’s achievements taunted Barber. Barber grew up a dreamer, too, when he and Schlegel were kids and the mere mention of money ignited an addiction to adrenaline only gamblers know. Schlegel’s dream made it to the Hall of Fame; Barber found his in a box he had not dug into for decades, a wild nest of aging papers that contained the comprehensive detritus of his life.

  Barber hardly mentioned his box full of press clippings and tournament standings sheets again. How could I have known that he pushed his life across the table at McDonald’s that day because he already was thinking about leaving it behind? In December, 2011, Barber took his own life.

  I called him up weeks before then, in November, 2011. Things sounded bad, and I did not know what to do. The last thing I said to him was, “You’ve got to hang in there for me, Kenny.” I had a feeling that the time when he finally would enjoy the recognition he so desperately craved was coming soon. I had been working feverishly on the research for this book for years. I had no clue whether the book ever would see the light of day—no agent, no editor, no publisher. Nothing but hope and a story I had fallen in love with. By the end of 2011, after having nearly given up, I had a feeling something was going to break soon. A year later, it did. My story, “When Thugs and Hustlers Ruled Dark Alleys,” appeared in The New York Times in November, 2012, complete with a photo of Barber and some of his stories. Part of me was proud as hell that I was able to get his name out there; the rest of me hated the fact that he never would know it. And now, here he is in this book. I told you so, Kenny.