Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (16 page)

The toughest-looking kid in my weight class was a guy from the Coast Guard Academy; he was very slick on his feet, and he liked the high-crotch series for takedowns — my best defense, my whizzer, was worthless against a high-crotch. I knew I would have trouble with the guy from the Coast Guard, but I made the mistake of looking ahead, in the brackets, to my match with him; I overlooked the guy I had to wrestle in the next round.

He was someone in the military. He told me later he'd been stationed in Germany and had wrestled a lot of Greco-Roman matches over there; at the time, I think, he was stationed somewhere in New Jersey. I had my mind on the guy from the Coast Guard Academy, an error in concentration — and further indication, to me, that it was time to be a coach and not a wrestler. I gave up a couple of avoidable takedowns in the first period. Trailing by only three points in the second, I panicked too early and took an out-of-position shot at a takedown; he countered me to my back. When I fought off my back, I was trailing by seven points. Now it was time to panic. I managed an escape before the end of the period, but I couldn't complete a takedown before the buzzer; starting the third, I was six points behind. I got another escape, and a takedown, and he was hit with a penalty point for stalling; I rode him out, in the final period (I picked up another point for riding time), but I was aware of myself as a 36-pounder trying to turn a 49-pounder — he was too big to turn. I lost by a point. It was a respectable match, but I'd given it away in the first period. “Mental mistakes,” Coach Seabrooke would have told me.

I dropped down into the consolation brackets and was pinned in my first match. I had scored with a snap-down in the first period — I was leading 2-1, because the guy had escaped from me following my takedown, when I got caught in a nice upper-body move: a bear hug with an inside trip. I was pinned before I could get my breath back. When I went to the training room, to get untaped, I saw that my left pinky finger was pointing straight up from the back of my hand; it was dislocated at the big knuckle joint again, but I was unaware of when or how it had happened. The trainer popped the finger back in place.

I was sitting on the training table, with my left hand packed in ice, when my opponent from the second round — the guy who'd been stationed in Germany and who was still in the military in New Jersey — came into the training room to ice his neck. He'd run into the guy from the Coast Guard Academy in the semifinals — he'd lost — and he wanted to know about the guy who'd just pinned me; he was a boy from Springfield College. I told the military man to watch out for the bear hug with the inside trip.

I still wasn't thinking that this was my last tournament; I didn't feel bad, although I was angry at myself for getting pinned. Then the military man and I shook hands, and I wished him luck the rest of the way; since I'd been eliminated from the tournament, and my children were there, I thought it was time to take the children home. I felt like having a beer, and eating as much as my shrunken stomach would hold.

In parting, the military man said: “Nice match, sir.”

That was all. That was it. He meant me no harm. But the damage was done. He was probably 24, and I was 34, but when he called me “sir,” I felt older than I feel now, at 53; I felt ancient. It was time to be a coach, but not a wrestler.

Later, I phoned Ted Seabrooke. (At the time, Ted's death was four years away; he'd been sick, but I had no idea how bad things were going to get for him — I doubt that he knew either.) I gave Ted the results of the tournament, and I told him that I'd decided to call an end to competing as a wrestler — I told him the “sir” story.

“Johnny, Johnny,” Coach Seabrooke said. “If the guy's in the military, he calls
everyone
‘sir.'” Incredibly, that hadn't occurred to me. But the damage had been done.

It was the last time I would weigh in. Only a week before the tournament, I'd weighed 138 pounds. At the tournament, I'd weighed 147 — in all my clothes. When I weighed myself after Easter dinner, that same spring of ‘76,1 weighed 165 pounds — my “natural” weight. (I weigh 167 pounds today.)

I remember that, 12 days after Brendan won the Class A title at 135 pounds, we were in a gym in Anguilla in the British West Indies. I was riding the stationary bike and Brendan was fooling around with the treadmill, making it go as fast as it could — and then trying to jump on it, and stay on it, while it was running. There were scales in the locker room; before we went for a swim, Brendan stripped down and weighed himself. Only 12 days earlier, I had seen him weigh in at 134V2 pounds — now he weighed 152. That was six years ago. It was only yesterday that I called Brendan in Colorado.

“What do you weigh?” I asked him. (Wrestlers always ask this question.)

There was a pause while Brendan left the phone to weigh himself, and I overheard the O. J. Simpson trial on CNN — all the way from Colorado. (I was phoning from Vermont.) Then Brendan came back to the phone.

“One-fifty-two,” he told me.

(As of this writing, my third son, Everett, who was born in Rutland, Vermont, in October of ‘91, is three-and-a-half years old; he weighs 31 pounds. It is my observation that Everett is tall for his age, and his weight is slightly below average for his height. His hands look large, compared to the rest of him. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say he looks like a future middleweight.)

My involvement with wrestling has been widely misunderstood, even among my friends. John Cheever was a friend to me when we both taught at Iowa; he was a fan of Italian cooking, as I am, and we used to watch Monday Night Football at my house in Iowa City over a dish of pasta. Cheever once wrote a letter to Allan Gurganus in which he said: “John has always struck me as having been saddened by the discovery that to have been captain of the Exeter wrestling team was a fleeting honor.”

Mr. Cheever was terribly correct, and often right about many things: he once warned me that it was a weakness in my writing that I described sexual acts and people consuming food, for these things were best enjoyed when not described; yet he mistook whatever had “saddened” me for the wrestling, the honors of which were never “fleeting” to me. Long after I stopped competing — and after I stopped coaching, too — the discipline remained. (My life in wrestling was one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline. I believe that my life as a writer consists of one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline, too.)

Nor am I inclined to complain about my wrestling-related surgeries — both knees, my right elbow, my left shoulder. Of the four operations, only the shoulder was major; a detached rotator-cuff tendon is no fun. But even the injuries that led to these surgeries are of lasting (not “fleeting”) honor to me. My first knee (torn cartilage) was injured when I was fooling around with J. Robinson in the workout room at the Meadowlands Arena, during a break between sessions at the 1984 NCAA tournament; my other knee was hyperextended when I was wrestling with one of Brendan's teammates at Vermont Academy in ‘88 — a good kid named Joe Black. (Joe was a three-time New England Class A Champion at l60 and 171 pounds.) Sometime between the knee injuries, my elbow was hyperextended at the New York Athletic Club — I was working out with Colin. And my shoulder succumbed, more gradually, to an accumulation of separations and rotator-cuff tears; what finally detached the supraspinatus tendon from the humerus wasn't a wrestling injury at all — rather, I fell off a children's slide with Everett in my arms (he was two), and in an effort to cover him up, and not land on him, I landed on my bad shoulder. Everett, who landed on my chest, was fine. (Had Coach Seabrooke been present to observe the fall, he would have reminded me that my standing side-roll had always been better executed to the right than to the left.)

I have no doubt that I have learned more from wrestling than from Creative Writing classes; good writing means rewriting, and good wrestling is a matter of
redoing
— repetition without cease is obligatory, until the moves become second nature. I have never thought of myself as a “born” writer — anymore than I think of myself as a “natural” athlete, or even a good one. What I am is a good rewriter; I never get anything right the first time — I just know how to revise, and revise.

And for me to continue coaching wrestling, when there was no longer any financial need, was not a strain; coaching was never as time-consuming as teaching. At the prep-school level, where I chiefly coached, wrestling is a seasonal sport; and neither my presence in the gym nor the hours riding on the team bus took anything away from that part of me that was a writer — on the contrary, wrestling was an escape from writing; it was a release — whereas
talking
about writing, as one must to “teach” it, exercised many of the same muscles I needed for my own work.

Another factor, the videocassette recorder, has entered the world of coaching — the coaching of
any
sport. To my knowledge, there is no such handy tool available for Creative Writing classes. For example: my 189-pounder walks dejectedly off the mat, once more a loser, and once again because every time he stands up to escape from the bottom position his elbows are flailing a foot away from his rib cage — therefore, he is easily tight-waisted and thrown to his face. When I would invariably point out to him that even an object as large as his head could have passed through the space left between his elbows and his ribs (during his feeble standup attempt), he would say, “My elbows were tight to my sides, Coach — he just
did
something to them!”

But then would come the next day's film session, where, in front of his snickering teammates, I would show my 189-pounder the footage of his pathetic standup (with his elbows flapping as far from his body as a chicken's clipped wings in mock flight). I would slow-motion it, I would rewind it and slow-motion it again; in later years I could freeze-frame it, too — and that would be the end of arguing with him (until, naturally, he did it again). But I had a backup: the camera made my criticism valid.

There is no such indisputable backup in Creative Writing classes; frequently the student who perpetrates the deeply flawed story is adored and supported by his or her peers. A teacher's triumphs are few. You say: “When the father drops dead with an apple in his mouth while urinating on the front fender of his mother-in-law's car… uh, well, I just had trouble
seeing
it.” Whereupon the student breaks into tears and confesses that this actually happened to her own father, in exactly the way she described it; and there then must follow, always unsatisfactorily, the timeless explanation that “real life” must be made to
seem
real — it is not believable solely for the fact that it
happened.
The truth is, the imagination can select more plausible details than those incredible-but-true details that we remember.

This is a tough sell to students rooted in social realism, and young writers without the imagination to move beyond autobiographical fiction — namely, to that host of first novelists who treat a novel as nothing but a thinly masked rendition of their lives up to that point.

Nor are the earliest efforts young writers make to
escape
autobiographical fiction necessarily successful. A student of mine at Iowa — a brilliant fellow, academically; he would go on to earn a Ph.D. in something I can't even pronounce or spell — wrote an accomplished, lucid short story about a dinner party from the point of view of the hostess's fork.

If you think this sounds fascinating, my case is already lost. Indeed, the young writer's fellow students worshiped this story and the young genius who wrote it; they regarded my all-too-apparent indifference to the fork story as an insult not only to the author but to all of them. Ah, to
almost
all of them, for I was saved by a most unlikely and usually most silent member of the class. He was an Indian from Kerala, a devout Christian, and his accent and word order caused him to be treated dismissively — as someone who was struggling with English as a second language, although this was not the case. English was his first language, and he spoke and wrote it very well; the unfamiliarity of his accent and the cadence, even of his written sentences, made the other students regard him lightly.

Into the sea of approval that the fork story was receiving, and while my “but…” was repeatedly drowned out by the boisterous air of celebration in the class, the Indian Christian from Kerala said, “Excuse me, but perhaps I would have been moved if I were a fork. Unfortunately, I am merely a human being.”

That day, and perhaps forever after,
he
should have been the teacher and I should have given my complete attention to him. He is not a writer these days, except on the faithful Christmas cards he sends from India, where he is a doctor. Under the usual holiday greetings, and the annual photograph of his increasing family, he writes in a firm, readable hand: “Still merely a human being.”

On my Christmas cards to him, I write: “Not yet a fork.”

(I used to say this to my students in Creative Writing: the wonderful and terrifying thing about the first page of paper that awaits the first sentence of your next book is that this clean piece of paper is completely unimpressed by your reputation, or lack thereof; that blank page has not read your previous work — it is neither comparing you to its favorite among your earlier novels nor is it sneering in memory of your past failures. That is the absolutely exhilarating and totally frightening thing about beginning— I mean each and every new beginning. That is when even the most experienced teacher becomes a student again and again.)

And what about the fork author — where is he today? In Boston, I believe; more pertinent, he's a published novelist — and a good one. I much admired his first novel, and was overall relieved to see that the characters in it were human beings — no cutlery among them.