Julie Glassberg for The New York Times  BETTING MAN When the bowling match turns bad, Rocky Salemmo distracts.  FIVE frames into the match, Rocky Salemmo was taking a beating.  He and a partner had challenged a pair of young guns at Showplace Entertainment Center on Staten Island to a doubles bowling match for $50 a man, and now Mr. Salemmo, 48, who was once known as one of the top action bowlers, or betting players, in New York City, trailed by 68 pins. But when Mr. Salemmo’s bowling ball fails, his mouth takes over. He began telling his opponents about the time he jumped out the bathroom window at a bowling alley to avoid losing four grand.  The match stalled as Mr. Salemmo’s stories about the heyday of action bowling — think “Saturday Night Fever” meets “Bowling for Dollars” — in the 1970s and ’80s kept coming.  Each night of the week, a different alley held sway as the top money-playing spot, where spectators and hangers-on made sizable bets on matches, with dice and card games on the side.  Rocky got his first bowling ball at age 11 from his father, who died shortly afterward in a motorcycle crash on Hylan Boulevard. His mother worked the snack bar at Country Lanes on Staten Island, and Rocky played there constantly. During his early teens, he began tagging along with his cousin Lucy, a top money bowler. He fell in with money players with names like Snake, Mike the Crook and the Count.  “We called him the Count because he only came out at night,” Mr. Salemmo said.  Driving together to the lanes, they would hatch that night’s hustling schemes: the secret signal before purposely losing a match; the fake fight to make the group look drunk and beatable; and where to rendezvous if they ran out of money and had to flee a losing bet.  Mr. Salemmo, who is of short stature and bowls lefty, throws a big hook that teeters on the edge of the left gutter before swooping back to the pins. His stories, too — delivered rapid-fire with a thick New York accent — are elliptical but somehow come back to the point: how bowling for bets has supported him for most of his adult life. He added that as well as he bowled, he was equally bad at gambling, and that he would promptly blow much of his winnings on bad bets on horse-racing and other sports.  There are still the occasional matches, but the bowling wagering scene has largely faded in recent years, and Mr. Salemmo has begun driving a stretch limousine for his brother Joe, 47, who runs a limo and D.J. company.  “Right now, I’m back to being a nobody, and that’s exactly where you want to be, as an action bowler,” said Mr. Salemmo, who lives in the Dongan Hills section of Staten Island with his mother and son, Rocky Jr., 22, a barber with a respectable bowling game himself.  To attract bets, Mr. Salemmo said, it helps to look like a chump on the lanes. So he would join leagues and purposely play poorly to keep down his official scoring average. After that, he would show up at a new lane, act a little tipsy, maybe let his wad of money drop all over the floor and accept some challenges from low-stakes players. After weeks or months, he worked his way into high-stakes circles.  “You never want to play the best guys, because if you beat them, no one will play you,” he said. “You make money beating the smaller guys and work your way up.”  It was important to dress down and avoid expensive equipment, he said. An ordinary ball works well enough if you rough it with some sandpaper or soak it in acetone for more traction. Also, embedding fishing sinkers in the right spot helps to increase the hook.  Slipping a bit of lip balm in the thumb hole of your opponent’s ball also might help your chances, he said. “Or you have your friend have the guy paged over the loudspeaker — or, better yet, have his wife’s name paged when his girlfriend is there,” Mr. Salemmo said. “Anything to get him mad. Then you got him.”  Finally, Mr. Salemmo was ready to resume his match at Showplace, where he and his partner, Steve Chiraella, had stalled their opponents — two top local players, Sean McAuliffe, 25, and Kurt Borst, 27 — for 10 minutes now.  The younger men went cold, and Mr. Salemmo surged for five strikes in a row to close out the match.  “That’s how it’s done,” he said, grabbing the pile of bills. “Thank you, gentlemen.”
Rocky Salemmo, who has supported himself for most of his adult life by bowling for bets, can tell you all the sneaky, conniving ways to rattle an opponent, or the best way to flee when youâre losing.