Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  Shooting a hole in Mr. Mayo-Smith's barn was less humiliating than the years I spent in Language Therapy. At Exeter, poor spelling was unknown -- I mean that little was known about it. It was my dyslexia, of course, but -- because that diagnosis wasn't available in the late 1950s and early '60s -- bad spelling like mine was considered a psychological problem by the language therapist who evaluated my mysterious case. (The handicap of a language disability did not make my struggles at the academy any easier.) When the repeated courses of Language Therapy were judged to have had no discernible influence on my ability to recognize the difference between "allegory" and "allergy," I was turned over to the school psychiatrist.

  Did I hate the school?

  "No." (I had grown up at the school!)

  Why did I refer to my stepfather as my "father"?

  "Because I love him and he's the only father' I've ever known."

  But why was I "defensive" on the subject of other people calling my father my stepfather?

  "Because I love him and he's the only 'father' I've ever known -- why shouldn't I be 'defensive'?"

  Why was I angry?

  "Because I can't spell."

  But why couldn't I spell?

  "Search me."

  Was it "difficult" having my stepfather -- that is, my father -- as a teacher?

  "I had my father as a teacher for one year. I've been at the school, and a bad speller, for five years."

  But why was I angry?

  "Because I can't spell -- and I have to see you" "We certainly are angry, aren't we?" the psychiatrist said.

  "I certainly are," I said. (I was trying to bring the conversation back to the subject of my language disability.)

  An Underdog

  There was one place at Exeter where I was never angry; I never lost my temper in the wrestling room -- possibly because I wasn't embarrassed to be there. It is surprising that I felt so comfortable with wrestling. My athletic skills had never been significant. I had loathed Little League baseball. (By association, I hate all sports with balls.) I more mildly disliked skiing and skating. (I have a limited tolerance for cold weather.) I did have an inexplicable taste for physical contact, for the adrenal stimulation of bumping into people, but I was too small to play football; also, there was a ball involved.

  When you love something, you have the capacity to bore everyone about why -- it doesn't matter why. Wrestling, like boxing, is a weight-class sport; you get to bump into people your own size. You can bump into them very hard, but where you land is reasonably soft. And there are civilized aspects to the sport's combativeness: I've always admired the rule that holds you responsible, if you lift your opponent off the mat, for your opponent's "safe return." But the best answer to why I love wrestling is that it was the first thing I was any good at. And what limited success I had in the sport I owe completely to my first coach, Ted Seabrooke.

  Coach Seabrooke had been a Big 10 Champion and a two-time Ail-American at Illinois; he was way overqualified for the job of coaching wrestling at Exeter-- his teams dominated New England prep-school and high-school wrestling for years. An NCAA runner-up at 155 pounds, Ted Seabrooke was a handsome man; he weighed upward of 200 pounds in my time at the academy. He would sit on the mat with his legs spread in front of him; his arms were bent at the elbow but reaching out to you from the level of his chest. Even in such a vulnerable position, he could completely defend himself; I never saw anyone manage to get behind him. On his rump, he could scuttle like a crab -- his feet tripping you, his legs scissoring you, his hands tying up your hands or snapping your head down. He could control you by holding you in his lap (a crab ride) or by taking possession of your near leg and your far arm (a cross-body ride); he was always gentle with you, and he never seemed to expend much energy in the process of frustrating you. (Coach Seabrooke would first get diabetes and then die of cancer. At his memorial service, I couldn't speak half the eulogy I'd written for him, because I knew by heart the parts that would make me cry if I tried to say them aloud.)

  Not only did Ted Seabrooke teach me how to wrestle; more important, he forewarned me that I would never be better than "halfway decent" as a wrestler -- because of my limitations as an athlete. He also impressed upon me how I could compensate for my shortcomings: I had to be especially dedicated-- a thorough student of the sport -- if I wished to overcome my lack of any observable ability. "Talent is overrated," Ted told me. "That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it."

  A high-school wrestling match is six minutes long, divided into three two-minute periods -- with no rest between the periods. In the first period, both wrestlers start on their feet -- a neutral position, with neither wrestler having an advantage. In the second period, in those days, one wrestler had the choice of taking the top or the bottom position; in the third period, the choice of positions was reversed. (Nowadays, the options of choice have been expanded to include the neutral position, and the wrestler given the choice in the second period may defer his choice until the third.)

  What Coach Seabrooke taught me was that I should keep the score close through two periods -- close enough so that one takedown or a reversal in the third period could win the match. And I needed to avoid "mix-ups" -- free-for-all situations that were not in either wrestler's control. (The outcome of such a scramble favors the better athlete.) Controlling the pace of the match -- a combination of technique, correct position, and physical conditioning -- was my objective. I know it sounds boring -- I was a boring wrestler. The pace that worked for me was slow. I liked a low-scoring match.

  I rarely won by a fall; in five years of wrestling at Exeter, I probably pinned no more than a half-dozen opponents. I was almost never pinned -- only twice, in fact.

  I won 5-2 when I dominated an opponent; I won 2-1 or 3-2 when I was lucky, and lost 3-2 or 4-3 when I was less lucky. If I got the first takedown, I could usually win; if I lost the first takedown, I was hard-pressed to recover -- I was not a come-from-behind man. I was, as Coach Seabrooke said, "halfway decent" as a counter-wrestler, too. But if my opponent was a superior athlete, I couldn't afford to rely on my counter-moves to his first shots; my counters weren't quick enough -- my reflexes weren't quick enough. Against a superior athlete, I would take the first shot; against a superior wrestler, I would try to counter his first move.

  "Or vice versa, if it's not working," Coach Seabrooke used to say. He had a sense of humor. "Where the head goes, the body must follow -- usually," Ted would add. And: "An underdog is in a position to take a healthy bite."

  This was a concept of myself that I'd been lacking. I was an underdog; therefore, I had to control the pace -- of everything. This was more than I learned in English 4W, but the concept was applicable to my Creative Writing -- and to all my schoolwork, too. If my classmates could read our history assignment in an hour, I allowed myself two or three. If I couldn't learn to spell, I would keep a list of my most frequently misspelled words -- and I kept the list with me; I had it handy even for unannounced quizzes. Most of all, I rewrote everything; first drafts were like the first time you tried a new takedown -- you needed to drill it, over and over again, before you even dreamed of trying it in a match. I began to take my lack of talent seriously.

  An imperious Spanish teacher was fond of abusing those of us who lacked perfection with the insensitive (not to mention elitist) remark that we would all end up at Wichita State. I didn't know that Wichita was in Kansas; I knew only that this was a slur -- if we weren't talented enough for Harvard, then Wichita State would be our just reward. Fuck you, I thought: my objective would then be to do well at Wichita State. Ted Seabrooke had gone to Illinois. I didn't suppose that this Spanish teacher thought too highly of Illinois either.

  I remember telling Ted that I'd had two likable Spanish teachers, and one unlikable one. "I wouldn't complain about those odds," he said.

  The Half-Pound Piece of Toast

  My time at the academy was marked by two important transitions in Exeter wrestling under Coach Sea
brooke. First, the wrestling room was moved from the basement of the old gymnasium to the upper reaches of the indoor track, which was called "the cage." The new room, high in the rafters, was exceedingly warm; from the hard-packed dirt of the track below us, and from the wooden track that circumscribed the upper level, came the steady pounding of the runners. Once our wrestling practice was underway, we wrestlers never heard the runners. The wrestling room was closed off from the wooden track by a heavy sliding door. Before and after practice, the door was open; during practice, the door was closed.

  The other wrestling-related change that marked my time at Exeter was the mats themselves. I began wrestling on horsehair mats, which were covered with a filmy, flexible plastic; as a preventive measure against mat burns, this plastic sheeting was modestly effective, but -- like the sheet on a bed -- it loosened with activity. The loose folds were a cause of ankle injuries; also, the shock-absorbing abilities of those old horsehair mats were nonexistent in comparison to the comfort of the new mats that arrived at Exeter in time to be installed in the new wrestling room.

  The new mats were smooth on the surface, with no cover. When the mats were warm, you could drop an egg from knee height and the egg wouldn't break. (Whenever someone tried this and the egg broke, we said that the mat wasn't warm enough.) On a cold gym floor, the texture of the mat would radically change. Later, I kept a wrestling mat in my unheated Vermont barn; in midwinter the mat was as hard as a floor.

  Most of our dual-meet matches were also held in the cage, but not in the wrestling room where we practiced. An L-shaped wooden parapet extended like an arm off the wooden track. From this advantage -- and from a loop of the wooden track itself -- as many as 200 or 300 spectators could look down upon a less-than-regulation-size basketball court, where we rolled out the mats. There was barely enough floor space left over for a dozen or more rows of bleacher seats; most of our fans were above us, on the wooden track and parapet. It was like wrestling at the bottom of a teacup; the surrounding crowd peered over the rim of the cup.

  Where we wrestled was appropriately called "the pit." The smell of dirt from the nearby track was strangely remindful of summer, although wrestling is a winter sport. What with the constant opening of the outside door, the pit was never a warm place; the mats, which were so warm and soft in the wrestling room, were cold and hard for the competition. And, when our wrestling meets coincided with track meets in the cage, the sound of the starting gun reverberated in the pit. I always wondered what the visiting wrestlers thought of the gunfire.

  My first match in the pit was a learning experience. First-year wrestlers, or even second-year wrestlers, are not often starters on prep-school or high-school wrestling teams of any competitive quality. In New Hampshire, in the 1950s, wrestling -- unlike baseball or basketball or hockey or skiing -- was not something every kid grew up doing. There are certain illogical things to learn about any sport; wrestling, especially, does not come naturally. A double-leg takedown is not like a head-on tackle in football. Wrestling is not about knocking a man down -- it's about controlling him. To take a man down by his legs, you have to do more than knock his legs out from under him: you have to get your hips under your opponent, so that you can lift him off the mat before you put him down -- this is only one example. Suffice it to say that a first-year wrestler is at a considerable disadvantage when wrestling anyone with experience -- regardless of how physically strong or well-conditioned the first-year wrestler is.

  I forget the exact combination of illness or injury or deaths-in-afamily (or all three) that led to my first match in the pit; as a first-year wrestler, I was quite content to practice wrestling with other first-year or second-year wrestlers. There was a "ladder" posted in the wrestling room, by weight class; in my first year, I would have been as low as fourth or fifth on the ladder at 133 pounds. But the varsity man was sick or hurt, and the junior-varsity man failed to make weight -- and possibly the boy who was next-in-line had gone home for the weekend because his parents were divorcing. Who knows? For whatever reason, I was the best available body in the 133-pound class.

  I was informed of this unwelcome news in the dining hall where I worked as a waiter at a faculty table; fortunately, I had not yet eaten my breakfast -- I would have had to vomit it up. As it was, I was four pounds over the weight class and I ran for almost an hour on the wooden track of the indoor cage; I ran in a ski parka and other winter clothing. Then I skipped rope in the wrestling room for half an hour, wearing a rubber suit with a hooded sweatshirt over it. I was an eighth of a pound under 133 at the weighins, where I had my first look at my opponent -- Vincent Buonomano, a defending New England Champion from Mount Pleasant High School in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Had we forfeited the weight class, we could not have done worse: a forfeit counts the same as a pin -- six points. It was Coach Seabrooke's hope that I wouldn't be pinned. In those days, a loss by decision was only a three-point loss for the team, regardless of how lopsided the score of the individual match. My goal, in other words, was to take a beating and lose the team only three points instead of six.

  For the first 15 or 20 seconds, this goal seemed feasible; then I was taken down, to my back, and I spent the remainder of the period in a neck bridge -- I had a strong neck. The choice was mine in the second period: on Coach Seabrooke's advice, I chose the top position. (Ted knew that I was barely surviving on the bottom.) But Buonomano reversed me immediately, and so I spent the better part of the second period fighting off my back, too. My only points were for escapes -- unearned, because Buonomano let me go; he was guessing it might be easier to pin me directly following a takedown. One such takedown dropped me on my nose -- both my hands were trapped, so that I couldn't break my fall. (It's true what they say about "seeing stars.")

  When they stop a wrestling match to stop bleeding, there's no clock counting the injury time; this is because you can't fake bleeding. For other injuries, a wrestler is allowed no more than 90 seconds of injury time -- accumulated in the course of the match. In this case, they weren't timing my nose bleed; when the trainer finished stuffing enough cotton up my nostrils to stanch the flow of blood, my dizziness had abated and I looked at the time remaining on the match clock -- only 15 seconds! I had every confidence that I could stay off my back for another 15 seconds, and I told Ted Seabrooke so.

  "It's only the second period," Seabrooke said.

  I survived the 15 seconds but was pinned about midway into the third period -- "With less than a minute to go," my mother lamentably told me.

  The worst thing about being pinned in the pit was the lasting image of all those faces peering down at you. When you were winning, the fans were loud; when you were on your back, they were quiet, and their expressions were strangely incurious -- as if they were already distancing themselves from your defeat.

  I was never pinned in the pit again; the only other loss I remember there was by injury default -- I broke my hand. When the trainer offered me the slop bucket -- I needed to spit -- I saw the orange rinds and a bloody towel in the bottom of the bucket, and I promptly fainted. Aside from that misfortune, and my first-ever match -- with Mount Pleasant's Vincent Buonomano -- I associated the pit with winning; my best matches were there. It was in the pit that I wrestled New England Champion Anthony Pieranunzi of East Providence High School to a 1-1 draw. I was not so lucky with Pieranunzi in the New England Championship tournament, where he beat me two years in a row; despite two undefeated dual-meet seasons, I never won a New England title.

  My years at Exeter were the final years when the winner of the New England tournament won a truly All-New England title; 1961 was the last year that high schools and prep schools competed together in a year-end tournament -- I was captain of the Exeter team that year. After that, there were separate private-school and public-school tournaments -- a pity, I think, since high-school and prep-school wrestlers have much to learn from each other. But, by '61, the New England Interscholastic tournament, as it used to be called, had alread
y grown too large.

  I remember my last bus ride with the Exeter team, to East Providence -- to the home mats of my nemesis, Anthony Pieranunzi. We'd checked our weight on the scales in the academy gym at about 5:00 in the morning; we were all under our respective weight classes -- in some cases, barely. The bus left Exeter in darkness, which near Boston gave way to a dense winter fog; the snow, the sky, the trees, the road -- all were shades of gray.

  Our 121-pounder, Larry Palmer, was worried about his weight. He'd been only a quarter of a pound under at Exeter -- the official weighins were at East Providence. What if the scales were different? (They weren't supposed to be.) I'd been a half-pound under my 133-pound class; my mouth was dry, but I didn't dare drink any water -- I was spitting in a paper cup. Larry was spitting in a cup, too. "Just don't eat," Coach Seabrooke told us. "Don't eat and don't drink -- you're not going to gain weight on the bus."

  Somewhere south of Boston, we stopped at a Howard Johnson's; this is what Larry Palmer remembers --- I don't remember the Howard Johnson's because I didn't get off the bus. A few of our wrestlers were safely enough under their weight classes so that they could risk eating something; most of them at least got off the bus -- to pee. I'd had nothing to eat or drink for about 36 hours; I knew I didn't dare to eat or drink anything -- I knew I couldn't pee. Larry Palmer remembers eating "that fatal piece of toast."

  Just the other day, we were remembering it together. "It was plain toast," Larry said. "No butter, no jam -- I didn't even finish it."

  "And nothing to drink?" I asked him.

  "Not a drop," Larry said.

  (Lately, we're in the habit of getting together at least once a year. Larry Palmer is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; one of his kids has just started wrestling.)

  On the scales at East Providence, Palmer was a quarter-pound over 121. He'd been a sure bet to get as far as the semifinals, and maybe farther; his disqualification cost us valuable team points -- as did my loss to East Providence's Pieranunzi, who was tougher at home than he was in the pit. In two years, Pieranunzi and I had wrestled four matches. I beat him once, we tied once, he beat me twice -- both times in the tournament, where it counted most. All our matches were close, but that last time (in East Providence) Pieranunzi pinned me. Thus, the two times I was pinned at Exeter -- my first match and my last -- I was pinned by a New England Champion from Rhode Island. (Exeter failed to defend its New England team title in '61 -- our '60 team was arguably the best in Exeter history.)