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

Author:Gianmarc Manzione [Manzione, Gianmarc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2014-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Wallace gave Schlegel a chance to seize the lead when he left two pins standing on his next shot and converted the spare, but suddenly neither man could do enough to give the match away. Schlegel fumbled with a split on his next shot, then came so close to converting it that the crowd erupted with shrieks as he collapsed to his knees like a boy in the midst of desperate prayer. It was exactly the kind of misfortune that any budding champion stomped on, but instead Wallace left a split of his own. He cast an anxious glance at the scoreboard overhead to survey the damage done. He sighed, slumped his shoulders, and dropped his head.

“This is really the tell-tale shot, you might say, of this match,” Welu explained as Schlegel rubbed his gloved right hand on his pants, stepped up to the approach, and inserted his fingers into his ball for the next shot. “Ernie Schlegel needs this strike to put the pressure on young Steve Wallace.”

Wallace may have been young, but the kid had game. And Schlegel knew it.

It was shots like these that Schlegel had thrown so many times before, dancing on the razor’s edge of a match with nearly enough money on the line to support a family for a year. But that was back in the poorly lit and seedy bowling alleys of New York City. Here in Buffalo under the TV lights, he would have to learn to close the deal under the glare of millions of viewers.

Schlegel stood and stared down his target with those narrowing eyes and began his shot, falling to one knee at the foul line as soon as he let the ball off his hand. He looked like a kid who was about to spring a diamond ring on the woman he meant to marry. He threw the ball harder than any shot he had made. It was the shot of a man who was not just looking to win; he was looking to kill. The ball blew through the pins, and then Schlegel got his first taste of the sting he would have to learn to savor if he was ever going to make it on tour. A single pin withstood the pounding.

“Well, it looked good!” Jackson said, baffled.

“Yes it did, Keith,” Welu says. “The only thing is he might have had a little too much roll.”

A little too much roll. Five years of waiting aimlessly on the streets of Inwood and soaping down AC units in Hackensack to enter the most revered arena the sport had to offer—the nationally televised finals of a PBA tournament—and all it took was “a little too much roll” to nudge him back onto the sidelines of his dreams. Now he was merely a hopeful onlooker again, merely another dreamer.

Wallace went on to clobber the next two bowlers, including Billy Hardwick, who was then in the midst of one of the most sensational winning streaks the PBA had ever seen, winning a total of seven titles in 1969 alone.

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