The Man Who Approved Him
The Professional Bowlers Association opened its membership to Ernie Schlegel in 1968. He had been trying to join since 1964. The man who finally approved him was the regional director of the PBA, the official whose sign-off a bowler needed before he could compete on the professional tour. His name was Frank Esposito. When Esposito explained his decision, he said he had approved Schlegel because Schlegel had “straightened himself out.”
The phrase “straightened himself out” does not come from athletic evaluation. It is not drawn from scoring averages or lane-performance metrics or the results of a qualifying tournament. It comes from the vocabulary of parole boards. Esposito chose it to describe the standard for joining a professional sports organization in 1968, and Sports Illustrated published it in 1982 without anyone at the PBA disputing the characterization.
The Alley He Owned
There is a detail about Frank Esposito that the Sports Illustrated piece mentioned and the PBA never repeated. Esposito was not only the PBA’s regional director for the New York area. He also owned Paramus Bowl in Paramus, New Jersey. Before Schlegel could petition to join the professional tour, he had already been barred from Esposito’s alley for almost a year — deemed unsavory by the same man who would be deciding whether he could compete professionally anywhere at all. The gatekeeper and the gate were the same person.
The PBA had been founded in 1958 by a Youngstown, Ohio attorney named Eddie Elias, who believed that bowling had the structure for a viable professional circuit. By 1964, the Professional Bowlers Tour was airing on ABC every Saturday afternoon and pulling millions of viewers per week. Prize money was real. To compete for that money, a bowler needed PBA membership. To get membership, he needed the approval of his regional director. In the New York area, that director was Frank Esposito.
One Gate, No Appeal
Esposito’s dual position had a specific shape. As the PBA’s regional director, he controlled professional membership applications from the most active bowling region in the country. As the owner of Paramus Bowl, he ran a facility in the same market where the tour was drawing its membership. Esposito had already made his own private judgment about Schlegel before the membership application arrived. He had banned him from Paramus Bowl. Deemed him unsavory. Barred him from the lanes.
That decision was Esposito’s to make as a business owner. What happened next is a different kind of decision. The same man who had excluded Schlegel from his private facility was the official with institutional authority over whether Schlegel could bowl professionally anywhere. There was no separation between the private judgment and the professional one. There was no separate appeals process and no second regional director. It was Esposito’s call, and the call was no.
The Market He Controlled
Schlegel had spent the four years since high school building a reputation in the bowling centers of New York City and New Jersey as one of the more reliable action bowlers in the region. Action bowling meant matches for money, arranged between players and backed by men with cash. The best action bowlers in the New York and New Jersey area were the same generation who would stock the PBA Tour’s roster for the next two decades.
Schlegel grew up in Manhattan and came to bowling through Bronx Vocational High School. After graduation in 1960, he moved into the action scene. The geography was specific: Skytop Lanes in suburban Hartsdale, New York; the Dyker Heights alley in Brooklyn; the centers scattered across northern New Jersey. Schlegel described his single best night at Skytop Lanes as $7,800 won in one session. The same generation of New York action bowlers included Johnny Petraglia, who started bowling for money at the Dyker Heights alley at 14 and would go on to win multiple PBA Tour titles. Mark Roth came up through the same competitive world and would win 34 PBA titles starting in 1975. The action scene was producing the PBA’s next generation. The PBA had not yet decided what to do about that.
Four Years of “No”
In 1964, Schlegel made his first attempt to join the professional tour. The application required the approval of the regional director. Frank Esposito said no. From 1964 to 1968, Schlegel bowled action matches across New York and New Jersey while the PBA Tour expanded around him. The players who had gotten in before him were accumulating tour experience while Schlegel remained outside the gate.
The clearest account of what happened in those four years appears in Sports Illustrated from March 1, 1982. The piece was written as a personality profile, not an institutional investigation. The Esposito material surfaces almost incidentally. The article reports that Schlegel was “deemed unsavory in certain quarters, particularly at Paramus Bowl, from which Esposito barred him.” It quotes Esposito directly on why the approval finally came in 1968: that he had approved Schlegel because Schlegel had “straightened himself out.”
“Straightened Himself Out”
The standard Esposito used — “straightened himself out” — is not measurable. It does not point to a minimum scoring average, a qualifying finish, or any documented reform of anything specific. It is an opinion. And it operated without review. There is no published PBA record of what criteria regional directors used to assess membership applicants in the 1960s. Johnny Petraglia’s professional career does not include a documented four-year freeze on application grounds. Mark Roth’s entry to the tour does not come with a regional director quoted in Sports Illustrated providing a character explanation for a delayed approval. In the available record, the gate that Esposito applied to Schlegel was Esposito’s gate, applied because Esposito decided to apply it.
Schlegel’s method in his action-bowling days involved more than mechanical skill. Before a match, he would have a drink and pour a shot of bourbon on his head or down his neck. At the bowling center, he smelled like a man who had been at a bar all afternoon. The men he was about to beat tended to bet accordingly. After a while, everybody in the New York area knew him and the trick stopped working. Whether Esposito’s objection was specifically to that reputation or to something else is not a question the 1982 Sports Illustrated piece answers directly, and the PBA never addressed it at all.
What the Record Never Addressed
Schlegel joined the tour as a rookie in 1968 at age 25. What followed was twelve years of not winning. Through the 1976 season, he had bowled in 202 PBA Tour events without a title. In 1976, he declared himself the Bicentennial Kid and had his wife Cathy sew him a bowling outfit for televised events — white shirt, long billowing sleeves, red and blue sparkles. He wore it to the five-man PBA televised finals in Baltimore. He lost the tournament.
April 11, 1980. The King Louie Open. Ernie Schlegel was 37 years old, and it was his birthday. He faced Nelson Burton Jr. in the title match and won, 246 to 214. Twelve years and over 300 events after joining the tour. In 1987, the PBA membership elected Ernie Schlegel president of the organization. The man Frank Esposito had required to demonstrate his reform before granting him entry was now running the institution that had made him wait.
After a six-year drought, Schlegel won the 1995 Bayer Brunswick Touring Players Championship in Pittsburgh at age 52, his first major title. The following year, he won the 1996 ABC Masters at age 53, becoming the oldest player at that time to win a PBA Tour major championship. In 1997, the PBA inducted Ernie Schlegel into its Hall of Fame. Seven PBA Tour titles. Two majors. Two terms as the organization’s president.
Frank Esposito’s 1968 approval was not a reform decision. It was a rebranding decision. The PBA in the late 1960s needed to manage what the action scene had produced. Managing it meant absorbing the talent while shaping the image. Schlegel got in when Esposito decided he looked right for the part — not when his bowling warranted it. A regional director held simultaneous authority over professional membership and over a privately owned facility in the same regional market. He applied a character standard he never defined publicly to an applicant he had already excluded from his own business. The standard had no minimum score attached, no appeals process, no written criteria. It produced a four-year delay on the professional career of a bowler who would eventually win seven titles, serve as the organization’s president, and enter its Hall of Fame. Frank Esposito’s explanation for why it took four years to get there is the only official account of what the standard ever was.
Chapters
- 0:00 The Man Who Approved Him
- 1:25 The Alley He Owned
- 2:50 One Gate, No Appeal
- 4:30 The Market He Controlled
- 6:40 Four Years of “No”
- 8:15 “Straightened Himself Out”
- 10:00 A Standard With No Criteria
- 11:40 What the Record Never Addressed
Sources
- Sports Illustrated, “Licorice Is Out, Snails In,” March 1, 1982 — Esposito quote and Paramus Bowl ban
- PBA Hall of Fame — Ernie Schlegel inducted 1997
- USBC Hall of Fame — Ernie Schlegel profile