Kingpin : Pro Larry Gray Bowls Better Since He Got a Job--and Life Stopped Leaving Splits

It was 1985 when Larry Gray walked into his job interview at Hughes Aircraft Corp. with little confidence and no experience.

Eleven years of professional bowling--and only $140,000 in prize money--obviously had not qualified him for a job in the electro-optical division, so he had to wonder whether the man interviewing him would laugh in his face.

“I figured: ‘How is this guy gonna hire me? I have no experience,’ ” Gray remembered during a recent lunch break. “The manager looks at my resume and goes: ‘Ah, I see you’ve been doing what you wanted to do all your life. Now you gotta get a real job, huh?’ ”

Humbling, yes, but 2 1/2 years later Gray is still at Hughes in El Segundo. And he is two notches up the promotion ladder with a title--production control specialist--that makes him sound important.

Around the South Bay, however, Gray, 34, is better-known by a title he includes under the “Honors” section of his resume: youngest and newest member of the Southern California Bowling Hall of Fame.

From 1974 to 1985, Gray tried to earn a living as a pro bowler. Time suggests that he succeeded. But he knows better. He didn’t make a profit.

Oh, there were laurels. He is a two-time Southern California Bowler of the Year, 14-time titlist of the Pro Bowlers Assn. West Region, nine-time Pro Coast Bowlers titlist and three-time Pro Coast Bowler of the Year. For eight consecutive years in the 1980s he’s been a Southern California All-Star. And today he maintains: “I feel I am as good as any guy out on tour.”

What hurt him, Gray said, were lane conditions designed for power bowlers and sponsors intent on seeing a quick return on their investments.

Gray, a 6-2, 160-pound right-hander with more accuracy than hook or power, said he often bowled into the lead of a prestigious tournament only to see the lanes oiled differently the next day to favor bowlers with big hooks in their deliveries. Oh, he’d finish high enough to “cash.” But knowing he could have won more money and worrying that his sponsor would ask him to come home, he seemed to be fighting himself more than opponents.

“I never relaxed,” he recalled. “Every time I went out on tour, I was always asking myself, ‘Am I gonna be here in six months?’ ”

Gray’s father, Eddie, was a stock-car racer for the first eight years of Larry’s life. In those years all Larry knew, or wanted to know, was racing. But when Eddie got Larry a quarter-midget race car, the woman of the house informed her husband that she could not stand more than one racer in the family.

“So Eddie turned to Larry,” remembered Lura Wallace, wife and mother of the Gray family, “and said, ‘Well, I guess your racing career is over.’ ”

Larry was disappointed but not crushed. He was content to bowl in junior leagues in the late 1960s.

More painful for him was the fatal heart attack his father suffered in 1969 at Riverside International Raceway, where Eddie had won the track’s first stock car race 11 years earlier. The loss seriously troubled Larry, according to his mother. But not enough to douse his competitive flame. A year later, he collected his first junior singles title in San Francisco and was hooked.

“I wanted to go pro,” Gray said. Four years later, in 1974, Gray turned pro after being named Southern California Junior Bowler of the Year.

The Gardena High School graduate majored in math for two years at Cal State Dominguez Hills beginning in 1972. But bowling was his priority, so he quit school in 1974 and tried to secure a sponsor who could pay his expenses on the pro tour.

He bowled in his first national tournament in 1975 and earned a little money. But a sponsor didn’t surface until 1978, so Gray bowled only in the PBA’s West Coast tournaments in the interim and made money some of the time.

The first PBA event in 1978 was at Gable House Lanes in Torrance. On what he felt was his home turf, Gray bowled well enough to reach the televised portion of the tournament but was knocked out three matches from the championship round.

“It was my biggest thrill and biggest disappointment at the same time,” he said.

Jack Cogan, father of Indy race car driver Kevin Cogan and still the owner at Gable House, offered to sponsor Gray that winter. Gray bowled in 10 tournaments around the country and felt successful, but by summer he had lost his sponsor.

“We sponsored him because he was one of the local boys who we thought had a chance to break through into the national ranks,” Cogan said. “He seemed to just get bad luck when he was on tour. He would do well and then poorly. He didn’t always have it. He had some serious potential, and why nothing happened, I don’t know.”

Gray moved on to another sponsor that summer, bowled all of the 1978 tour and “cashed eight tournaments in a row and could still lose money because it would cost me $500 a week to live, and I would sometimes get only $300 in prize money.”

In 1979, it got worse. He bowled in 15 tournaments without winning prize money, had his equipment stolen, got sick, lost his sponsor and returned to Torrance feeling as if he never wanted to finger a ball again. “That’s how gruesome it is on the road when you aren’t doing well,” he said. “I was miserable, and it seemed like everything was a problem.”

Though he worked as a lane man locally, he was 25, without a day job and seemingly without a future. He spent many hours bowling alone late into the night.

“That bothered me,” said Lura Wallace, who teaches Latin at Gardena High. “He didn’t know what to do with himself during the day. I didn’t think it was right.”

All of the practice seemed to pay off, however. Gray won a regional tournament in 1980 and had his best year as a pro between May, 1981, and April, 1982, becoming the first Southland bowler to win a total of eight PBA and PCB tournaments in 12 months. He was named 1981 Southern California Bowler of the Year.

He found another sponsor that year. But after bowling in the first three PBA tournaments in 1983 without success, he again lost his sponsor, who suggested that Gray bowl locally until he felt ready to tour again. Six weeks later, he was back on tour. He made a slight profit, but his sponsor asked him to come home.

“I was crushed,” Gray recalled. “The guy didn’t have enough faith in me to send me out for two more events.”

Gray bowled well locally through 1985 but quit the tour. He felt that power bowlers were passing him by, since the spin they applied to the ball made them effective even when lane conditions hindered them.

“I felt like I had to bowl twice as good as the hookers to do as well as they did,” Gray said. “I came home from the tour with my tail between my legs. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t have any money, I felt like I couldn’t compete on tour and I didn’t know if I wanted to get a job. That’s when I talked to a friend at Hughes.”

The friend was Randy Neal, a former pro bowler who toured in 1978 and ’79. Neal asked Gray if he could commit for at least two years to Hughes. Gray said he could and soon found himself in that manager’s office wondering why anyone would hire him.

The irony of his years on tour is that Gray believes he bowls better now that he is not bowling for a living.

“I wasn’t pressured to put money in my pocket once I started working, and that’s why I started bowling well,” he explained. “Before, I had to bowl well just to survive. With the job, I had that steady paycheck and could bowl and relax and enjoy it more.”

Gray now bowls in about 30 tournaments a year on the West Coast. And his 1987 Southern California Bowler of the Year award indicates that he can still win. Joining the 9-to-5 world “was a lot easier than I thought it would be,” Gray said, so it’s OK if he doesn’t always win.

Probably few of Gray’s contemporaries could pinpoint why he never was a consistent money winner. Rotten luck is one explanation. When he did win, though, Gray often overcame flimsy sponsorship and antagonistic game conditions with his intelligence.

“Larry has always been an unusual bowler because he is a very cerebral player,” said Tim Albin, a former pro who earned good money in an early 1960s pro league before touring in the ‘60s and ‘70s with about as much success as Gray. “He is tall and thin but very sharp.”

Gray, Albin said, just never had enough sponsors to relax.

But, Gray said: “I spent 31 years of my life beating the system, so I don’t think I made the wrong decision in turning to pro bowling. I got to be a kid much longer than most kids.”