Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  I called their friends in Massachusetts, where they'd spent the previous night; to my surprise, my mother answered the phone. The sleet that was falling at West Point was snow in New England. My mom and dad had to wait out the storm. Whether I won or lost in the semifinals, I would be wrestling the next day -- either in the finals or in the consolation matches that could lead to a third or a fourth-place finish. My parents would see me wrestle at West Point tomorrow, either way. It was a long trip for them, from New Hampshire; they'd never missed a match of mine at Exeter, and I began to feel a little pressure -- to win for them. That's fatal, too -- the wrong kind of pressure is fatal. You have to want to win for you.

  I wasn't distracted by the discovery that Max, our taxi driver, was nowhere to be seen; he might not have been as interested in watching us wrestle as he'd claimed. It was later that evening when I learned that some of my fellow wrestlers had been robbed; they'd left their wallets or their wristwatches in the locker room, either forgetting or neglecting to put that kind of stuff in the team's "valuables box." I immediately suspected Max. In retrospect, I thought he had the perfect combination of instant charm and compulsive deceit that I associate with thieves; yet his terror of the night, and of the multitude of trees, could never have been feigned -- not unless I have underestimated his thespian skills.

  The Semifinals

  As for the semifinals, I was what Coach Seabrooke always said I was -- I was "halfway decent" -- but the other guy was good. He was a kid from Cornell, and the favorite to win the weight class; he was the number-one seed. In the absence of a coach who knew me -- Mr. Carr, given the greater abilities of his own son, generously overestimated my potential -- I wrestled the kind of careful match that Ted Seabrooke would have recognized as the only kind of match I could win against a better wrestler. I even got the first takedown. But the Cornell kid escaped immediately -- I couldn't manage to hold him long enough to gain any riding-time advantage -- and he scored a slick takedown at the edge of the mat, just as time was running out in the first period; I had no time to get an escape of my own. I was trailing 3-2 going into the second period, and the choice of position (a flip of the coin) was mine; I chose down. I finally escaped for a point, but the Cornell kid had ridden me for over a minute. It was 3-3 on the scoreboard but I knew he had a riding-time point, which made it 4-3 in his favor starting the third -- unless I could keep him on the bottom long enough to erase his riding-time advantage. He got away from me in less than 15 seconds, which made it 4-3 on the scoreboard -- in reality, 5-3 (with riding time). I knew that the two-point difference was a possible gap for me to close in the final period.

  Then I got lucky: my butterfly bandage was soaked through -- my eyebrow was bleeding on the mat. The referee called a time-out to wipe up the blood, and I was given a quick rebandaging. However few cigarettes I'd been smoking, I was tired; it's not unreasonable to blame my tiredness on my lack of sleep, or on a dawn spent running up and down the stairs (into a wall) -- but I blame the cigarettes. The mainstay of what had made me "halfway decent" as a wrestler was my physical conditioning; now a time-out for bleeding had given me a much-needed rest. (In those days, a college wrestling match was nine minutes long; in prep school, I had been used to six minutes. A three-minute period feels a lot longer than a two-minute period. Nowadays, a college match is only seven minutes overall -- divided in periods of three, two, two -- and the high-school or prep-school match is what it always was: six minutes, in periods of two, two, two.)

  And I got lucky again: the referee hit the Cornell wrestler with a warning for stalling. It was a questionable call. With the score 4-3 on the scoreboard (5-3 with riding time), I knew that a takedown could tie it; a takedown could win it for me, too -- if I could stay on top long enough to negate his riding-time advantage. The stalling warning against my opponent would hurt him in a tie; in the rules of that tournament, there was no overtime, no sudden death -- a draw would mean a referee's decision. I was sure that my opponent's warning for stalling would give any referee's decision to me -- I thought a tie would win it.

  I don't remember my takedown -- whether it was Warnick's arm-drag or Johnson's duck-under, or whether it was a low, outside single-leg, which was my best takedown from Exeter -- but there were less than 20 seconds showing on the clock, and the scoreboard said 5--4 in my favor. The Cornell kid had the riding-time point locked up -- I couldn't erase his advantage in less than 20 seconds -- and so the match would be a draw, 5-5, if I could just hold on.

  There was a scramble, a mix-up of the kind that Coach Seabrooke had warned me against; fortunately, for me, we both rolled off the mat. When the referee brought us back to the circle, there were 15 seconds on the clock; I had to ride him for only 15 seconds. This is a drill in every practice session in every wrestling room in America. Sometimes the drill is called "bursts." One of you tries to hang on, the other one tries to get away.

  I don't remember how my opponent escaped, but he got free in a hurry. I had less than five seconds to initiate a desperation shot at a takedown; I wasn't close to completing a move when the buzzer sounded -- I lost 6-5. I couldn't bear watching the Cornell kid in the finals; I don't know if he won the weight class or not -- or, as I say so often, I don't remember. All I know is, that kid would never have gotten away from Sherman Moyer -- not even in 15 minutes.

  Point by point, move by move, you never know how close you are to getting into the finals of a tournament until you don't get into the finals. I called my parents in Massachusetts and told them to be at West Point early in the morning; the consolation rounds would start early. If I lost my first consolation match, I'd be eliminated from the tournament -- I'd be a spectator for the rest of the day. If I won, I could keep wrestling; I could place as high as third, if I kept winning.

  My next opponent was an Army boy -- a home-crowd favorite of the West Point fans. I remember all those cadets in gray, leaning over the mats from the wooden track above the gym; I remember them screaming. It was a larger teacup than the pit at Exeter, but it was the same teacup effect -- except that these were his fans, not mine. I'd wrestled as good a match as I could against the Cornell kid. Possibly it was the effect of the cadets, or maybe I was trying to impress my parents with everything I'd learned at Pitt; for whatever reason, my match against Army was not the kind of match Ted Seabrooke would have recommended for me. It was one mix-up after another; it was all a scramble. I knew from the beginning that I wouldn't win a free-for-all.

  To be fair to myself, I not only lost the first takedown but I was thrown to my back and lost three points for a near-fall in addition to the takedown points. When I reversed him, I was still behind 5-2; he immediately reversed me, and I immediately escaped. When I had a second to look at the score, I saw I was losing 7-3 and the first period had just started. You can't slow down the pace when you're losing 7-3, and so that was the kind of match I was in -- a free-for-all. I kept scoring, but he kept scoring back; whenever I checked the score, I was always no more than 5 but no fewer than 3 points behind. The cadets were screaming, not only because their West Point boy was winning; it was the kind of match a crowd loves -- any crowd loves a free-for-all. I don't remember the final score: 15-11, 17-13. ... Ted Seabrooke would have told me -- indeed, Ted had told me -- that I would never come out on top of a score like that. It was my last match in a Pittsburgh uniform, which I had worn for all of two days.

  Whether they were disappointed or merely underimpressed, my parents were kind enough not to say. My mother was shocked to see how thin I was. I'd gotten much stronger in the wrestling room at Pitt, but I was nonetheless smaller than I'd been at Exeter; unlike Larry Palmer, I'd stopped growing when I was 15. My mom was worried about my weight. To that end, I was able to get some money from her -- so that Caswell and Lee Hall and I could eat all the way back to Pittsburgh. I don't think I told my parents about the hundred-dollar taxi ride; I know I didn't tell them that I'd made up my mind to leave Pitt -- I still didn't know where I would go.

  I don'
t even remember if Lee Hall won the Freshman Easterns or if he lost in the finals; it wasn't like Lee to lose, but I vaguely recall that he had a difficult opponent -- a Lehigh kid, as I remember him, but I'm on record for not remembering much. For example, I don't remember how Caswell did; in the end, like me, I think he won a couple of matches and lost a couple -- I know he didn't make the finals, but he might have placed. (Caswell did everything in such a friendly, efficient, uncomplaining way; that's probably why I can't even be sure of his name.)

  Back in Pittsburgh, I will never forget telling Coach Peery that I'd spent all the pocket money.

  "You took a taxi?" Rex kept saying.

  I had so much respect for Rex I couldn't tell him why I was leaving Pitt: specifically because I couldn't bear being a backup. Instead, I made up a story about missing a girlfriend back home; I thought this sounded more human -- hence more forgivable. I didn't have a girlfriend "back home," or in Pittsburgh.

  My ex-girlfriend was from Connecticut; she was spending the year in Switzerland. The only Creative Writing I'd managed to do at Pitt was a diary I kept; I was imagining that I would show my ex-girlfriend my diary -- and thus win her back. Everything in the "diary" was made up; I hadn't exactly had the kind of year that made me want to write about it. I didn't know this at the time, but I had begun a traditional writer's task -- namely, I was in the process of inventing myself. Before I could invent anything else, I needed to practice.

  A Brief Conversation in Ohio

  In Pittsburgh -- notwithstanding my disappointment in my wrestling -- it had been a defeat of a deeper kind to be abused in Freshman English, where I received the grade of C-and was told by an instructor with less of a beard to shave than my own that my overuse of the semicolon was archaic. I shall call him Instructor C-, and if he is reading me still, which would surprise me, there is no telling what he makes of my semicolons today; if they were archaic in 1962, they must be antiquated beyond redemption now.

  But I stopped neither writing nor wrestling as a result of these discouragements. I retreated to my home state of New Hampshire, not necessarily to lick my wounds. Even with my unimpressive grades at Pitt, the University of New Hampshire was obliged to admit me because of my in-state residency, and it was there that I took my first Creative Writing class by name. The teacher was a Southern novelist named John Yount -- an engaging, good-humored, and good-hearted man who didn't bat an eye at my semicolons.

  At the same time I became an extra coach in the wrestling room at Exeter, and I competed "unattached" in various "open" wrestling tournaments around New England and New York State; the University of New Hampshire had no wrestling team.

  The competition in so-called open tournaments was a mixed bag: some of the entries were the better, more mature high-school wrestlers; there were lots of college freshmen and nonstarters on college teams; and always a few older, postcollege competitors -- some of these wrestlers were very good, often the best in such tournaments, but others were ... well, too old, or simply out-of-shape. I was in halfway-decent shape -- not in Pittsburgh shape, but this wasn't Pittsburgh.

  Although I was not attached to any team, I competed in my old Exeter uniform -- with Ted Seabrooke's blessing. For takedowns, I had fair success with Warnick's arm-drag and Johnson's duck-under and with my own low, outside single-leg; defensively, on my feet -- in the neutral position -- I had a pretty good whizzer. Sherman Moyer had taught me the value of hand control; on top, I was hard to get away from but I was no pinner, and on the bottom I was difficult to hold down -- although Moyer had managed to ride me until the clock ran out.

  In lieu of cutting weight, I started lifting weights: if I couldn't make the cut to the 130-pound class, I would make myself strong enough to wrestle at 137 or 147. (In the open tournaments, the weight classes varied between collegiate and freestyle -- sometimes I wrestled at 136/2 or 137, other times at 147 or 149&) A factor in what I weighed was beer; I turned 21 in the middle of the '63 wrestling season -- at about the same time I gave up cigarettes, I took up beer.

  Not surprisingly, the writers (and would-be writers) at the University of New Hampshire all smoked and drank; that I drove 45 minutes every day from Durham to Exeter for wrestling practice, and that I traveled on many weekends to wrestling tournaments, struck both me and my new writer friends as exceedingly unliterary. It was my earliest indication that my writing friends and my wrestling friends would rarely mix; for a brief period of time, I would give up the mixture myself -- I was convinced that I could be a wrestler or a writer, but not both.

  That March of '63, Ted Seabrooke and I drove out to Kent State University in Ohio to see the NCAA tournament. From the stands, I watched my old teammates at Pitt become All-Americans: Jim Harrison won the championship, Mike Johnson lost in the finals, Timothy Gay placed fifth, and Kenneth Barr was sixth. (I believe that the NCAA Division I tournament is the toughest in wrestling; it is both mentally and physically a tougher tournament than the Olympics -- first of all, because of the tremendous pressure college wrestlers put on themselves to become Ail-Americans, but also because of how evenly matched many of the competitors are. In the 1995 tournament, there were six returning national champions; only two of them managed to defend their titles -- and, out of 10 weight classes, only four of the number-one seeds finished first.)

  A year away from Pittsburgh, I saw how far I stood from the top level of competition; it depressed me -- I was 21, but I felt I'd failed at the one thing I'd been any good at. Worse than "failed" -- I had quit. On our way home from Kent State, Ted told me that he'd talked with my Pitt coach, Rex Peery; Rex had been kind to me, as always -- he had expressed his hope to Ted that I'd solved my "girlfriend problem."

  "What 'girlfriend problem?" Ted asked me.

  I had to confess to Coach Seabrooke that I'd lied to Coach Peery about my reasons for leaving Pittsburgh. Mike Johnson had just finished second in the nation; yet I'd quit the Pitt team because I couldn't accept the role of spending four years as Johnson's workout partner. Far less honorable than being a backup to Mike Johnson was that I'd lied to Rex -- I had made up a girlfriend, of all things.

  "Johnny, Johnny," Ted Seabrooke said to me. (We were standing side by side at a urinal, still in Ohio.) "You don't have to give up wrestling because you're not the best wrestler," Ted told me. "You can still do it. And you're always going to love it -- you can't help that."

  But I didn't know that then. I had room in me to do, and to love, only what I thought I could be the best at, and John Yount had told me I could be a writer.

  "So do it," Coach Seabrooke said.

  It was Ted's idea that I should get out of New Hampshire; that I shouldn't be living at home and hanging out in the wrestling room of my old school -- that if I were going to give up wrestling, I should give up more than that. I should get away -- far away. Pittsburgh, of course, had been "away," but not far enough.

  A Year Abroad

  It was with John Yount's encouragement that I applied to a study-abroad program; as it turned out, the Institute for European Studies in Vienna admitted me. I went off to Europe feeling, for the first time, "like a writer."

  I took 12 tutorial hours of German a week, but to this day I can speak the language only haltingly; I can barely understand German, when I'm spoken to, and reading German only serves to remind me of my dyslexia -- all those verbs lurking at the end of the sentence, waiting to be reattached to the clauses they came from.

  My favorite courses at the Institute for European Studies were taught by an Englishman named Edward Mowatt, with whom I studied (not necessarily in this order) Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein and Greek Moral Philosophy. I also studied the Victorian Novel with Herr Doktor Felix Korninger from the University of Vienna. Professor Korninger was an Austrian who'd once taught at the University of Texas; he spoke English with a most original Texan-Austrian accent -- a kind of conflation of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Arnold Schwartzenegger.

  In Vienna, I shared an apartment on the Schwindgasse, next to t
he Polish Reading Room, with a fellow American named Eric Ross; he was from Chicago. Eric was tall and athletic, with honey-colored, curly hair; on skis, especially, he was a picture of Aryan perfection, but of course he was Jewish -- and most savvy of the myriad, insidious forms of anti-Semitism in Austria. I knew nothing about anti-Semites, but I learned. I was short and dark and my last name was Irving -- a Scots name, but common enough as a Jewish first name so that several Viennese anti-Semites were confused. (This is on a level of intelligence with thinking that John Milton was Jewish because of Milton Friedman, but -- as Eric Ross was wise to point out -- no one ever said anti-Semites were smart.) Eric and I developed a routine for exposing anti-Semites. Whether I was mistreated by a waiter or a shopkeeper, or by a fellow student at the University of Vienna, it was only necessary for the faintest hint of an anti-Semitic slur to emerge; I would not infrequently miss the slur -- my German being as flawed as it was -- but Eric, whose German was much better than mine, would instantly alert me to the insult.

  "You're being treated like a Jew again," Eric would tell me.

  Whereupon, pointing to Eric, I would deliver my well-rehearsed line to the offending anti-Semite: "He's the Jew, you idiot." ("Er ist der Jude, Du Idiot") Eric always had to help me with the correct pronunciation, but we usually got our point across: Jew baiting was not merely distasteful -- those with the inclination to do it were also stupid enough to think that they could tell who was Jewish and who wasn't.

  Eric and I traveled to Istanbul together, and to Athens; we often went skiing together, too -- in Kaprun. But while we both loved the experience of being on our own in Europe, we did not love -- we do not love -- Vienna. It is a small town; its notorious anti-Semitism is only part of a mean-spirited provincialism -- an overall xenophobia, a suspicion (leading to hatred) of all outsiders. "Das geht bei uns nicht," the Austrians say -- "That doesn't go with us." "Auslander" -- a "foreigner" -- is always a derogatory word. Viennese Gemutlichkeit, a tourist attraction, is the false sweetness of basically unhoflich people.