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

bowling’s most inimitable characters performed with subtlety and style.
    Ralph Engan, who then was nearly forty while most other action bowlers were in their teens and twenties, was renowned for his smooth delivery and deadly accuracy. To beat Ralph Engan—the elder statesman of the action bowling scene—was to beat the best. Being known as “the best” was a double-edged sword, however; bragging rights are great, but ultimately they are only as good as the money that comes with your next win. It is awfully hard to win when no one can find the courage to bowl you, and that is why con men like Iggy Russo were on to something. Why blow people away with your skill when youcan fool them into thinking you had no skill at all? Engan was no Iggy Russo; he wanted to bowl you man to man and beat you with his best. But he also wanted to make money, and after spending too many nights sitting through hours of action waiting for challengers who never came, even Engan had to use some wiles. Sometimes he headed out to bowling alleys beyond the five boroughs, places where he could be reasonably sure people did not know of him. He would plant his bowling ball among the regular house balls on the ball racks. Then he would feign cluelessness as he fumbled through them while his prospective opponent prepared to wager any amount of money on a match against a bum who owned no ball of his own. Engan always seemed to find exactly the same ball on the rack—his own. And when he did, the match was his before anyone threw a shot.
    Engan, in fact, was the guy who first tutored Ernie Schlegel in the art of the out-and-out hustle. One night Schlegel kept hearing Engan complain about how tired he was, and a chance to seize the largesse that surely would accompany a victory over the great Ralph Engan was one Schlegel could not pass up. Ralph bowled Schlegel all night, telling him how tired he was all along, until Schlegel passed out from exhaustion. Engan won big. It was a lesson Schlegel never forgot.
    But by the mid-1960s, Schlegel himself was dishing out far more lessons than he received. He was no longer the green rookie who scoured Philadelphia for fish. Some even considered him the greatest action bowler they had ever seen. Now in his early twenties, he was bowling every night of the week and making more money in a month than his parents made in a year. He had sharpened his game to the point where he felt ready to take a shot on the PBA Tour. For now, however, he still was catching enough fish to be content with his life as an action bowler. The tour would come, but only when he found himself having toresort to Engan’s antics to get somebody to bowl him. Schlegel did not mind rubbing bourbon behind his ears or faking the gout now and then, but when things got desperate enough for him to pretend he had never seen a bowling ball in his life, well, that was when he would know the time to move on had come. Schlegel considered himself a businessman before he considered himself a bowler. For him, Gun Post was a kind of crooked accountant’s office he would happily occupy as long as the money kept coming in. As the gamblers of Gun Post would learn, Schlegel’s version of a businessman was one who feared nobody and stopped at nothing to protect his cut.
    One night Schlegel had a score to settle with a man named Psycho Dave, who had conned him out of $600 in a game of Gin Rummy. Psycho Dave had trounced Schlegel and his buddy Stevie, only for them to find out later that Psycho Dave had been cheating. So Schlegel took Stevie out looking for Psycho Dave one night. Stevie, a scrappy guy who stood 6’1” and 190 lbs., was the kind of buddy you bring out when you needed to issue non-refusable offers to those who owed you. They found Psycho Dave up in the Bronx at a place called All-Star Lanes. Stevie walked up to Psycho.
    “Where’s my money?” he asked.
    “What money?” Psycho Dave replied.
    Then Stevie round-housed him hard enough to send him