by John Irving
There can be 11 or 12 or 13 weight classes in a high-school wrestling tournament. Nowadays, in the New England Class A tournament, the lightest weight class is 103 pounds -- there are 13 weight classes, ending with the 189-pounder and the heavyweight (under 275). But in high schools there is occasionally a 100-pound class -- in some states today there is also a 215-or 220-pound class, in addition to 189 and 275 -- and in Maine in '65 the heavyweight class was unlimited. (The weight class used to be called Unlimited.)
In the first three weight classes, Cliff and I gave out half a dozen penalty points for the illegal headlock -- apparently a feature of Maine life -- and Cliff bestowed one disqualification: for biting. Some guy was getting pinned in a crossface-cradle when he bit through the skin of his opponent's forearm. There was bedlam among the fans. What could possibly be more offensive to them than a no-biting rule? (There were people in the stands who looked like they bit other people every day.)
That night in Maine, Cliff Gallagher was 68. A former 145-pounder, he was no more than 10 pounds over his old weight class. He was pound-for-pound as strong as good old Caswell from Pitt. Cliff was mostly bald; he had a long, leathery face with remarkable ears -- his neck and his hands were huge. And Cliff didn't like the way the crowd was reacting to his call. He went over to the scorer's table and took the microphone away from the announcer.
"No biting -- is that clear enough?" Cliff said into the microphone. The fans didn't like it, but they quieted down.
We had a few more weight classes (and a lot more illegal headlocks) to get through; we kept alternating the matches, between referee and mat judge, and we kept blowing our whistles -- in addition to the headlocks without an arm, there were over-scissors and full-nelsons and figure-four body-scissors and twisting knee-locks and head-butts, but there was no more biting. In the 177-pound class, I called the penalty that determined the outcome of the match; I thought the fans were going to rush me on the mat, and the coach of the penalized wrestler distinctly called me a "cocksucker" -- normally another penalty, but I thought I'd better let it pass.
Cliff conferred with me while the crowd raged. Then he went to the microphone again. "No poking the other guy in his eyes over and over again -- is that clear enough?" Cliff said.
It was Cliff who refereed the heavyweights, for which I was -- for which I am -- eternally grateful. The boy who'd been thrown on the scorer's table, and had thus been victorious in the semifinals, was a little the worse for wear; his opponent was a finger bender, whom Cliff penalized twice in the first period-- patiently explaining the rule both times. (If you grab your opponent's fingers, you must grab all four -- not just two, or one, and not just his thumb.) But the finger bender was obdurate about finger bending, and the boy who'd been bounced off the scorer's table was already ... well, understandably, sensitive. When his fingers were illegally bent, the boy responded with a head-butt; Cliff correctly penalized him, too. Therefore, the penalty points were equal as the second period started; so far, not one legal wrestling move or hold had been initiated by either wrestler -- I knew Cliff had his hands full.
The finger bender was on the bottom; his opponent slapped a body-scissors and a full-nelson on him, which drew another penalty, and the finger bender applied an over-scissors to the scissors, which amounted to another penalty against him. Then the top wrestler, for no apparent reason, rabbit-punched the finger bender, and that was that -- Cliff disqualified him for unsportsmanlike conduct. (Maybe I should have let him be thrown on the scorer's table without penalty, I thought.) Cliff was raising the finger bender's arm in victory when I spotted the losing heavyweight's mother; it was another easy gene-pool identification -- this woman was without question a heavyweight's mom.
In Maine that year -- only in Maine -- I had heard us referees occasionally called "zebras." I presume this was a reference to our black-and-white-striped shirts, and I presume that Cliff had previously heard himself called a "zebra," too. Notwithstanding our familiarity with the slur, neither Cliff nor I was prepared for the particular assault of the heavyweight's mom. She lumbered manfully to the scorer's table and ripped the microphone from the announcer's hands. She pointed at Cliff, who was standing a little uncertainly in the middle of the mat when she spoke.
"Not even a zebra would fuck you," the mom said.
Despite the crowd's instinctive unruliness, they were as uncertain of how to respond to the claim made by the heavyweight's mother as Cliff Gallagher; the crowd stood or sat in stunned silence. Slowly, Cliff approached the microphone; Cliff may have been born in Kansas, but he was an old Oklahoma boy -- he still walked like a cowboy, even in Maine.
"Is that clear enough?" Cliff asked the crowd.
It was a long way home from the middle of Maine, but all the way Cliff kept repeating, "Not even a zebra, Johnny." It would become his greeting for me, on the telephone, whenever he called.
That winter I took every refereeing job that I was offered. I didn't make much money, and I would never again see the likes of a tournament like that tournament in Maine. But the reason I was a referee at all, not to mention the reason I enjoyed it, was Cliff Gallagher. It was a great way to get back into wrestling.
"I told you -- you're always going to love it," Ted Seabrooke said.
The Gold Medalist
In Iowa -- I was a student at the Writers' Workshop from 1965 until 1967 -- Vance Bourjaily befriended me, but Vance was not my principal teacher. For a brief moment I tried working with Nelson Algren, who -- except for the unnamed Instructor C-from my unsuccessful days in Pittsburgh -- represented my first encounter with a critic of an unconstructive nature. I was attracted to Mr. Algren's rough charm, but he didn't much care for me or my writing. I was "too fancy" a writer for his taste, he told me; and, worse (I suspect), I was not a city boy who'd been schooled on the mean streets. I was a small-town boy and a private-school brat; I was even more privileged than Algren knew -- I was a "faculty brat." The best tutor for a young writer, in Mr. Algren's clearly expressed view, was real life, by which I think he meant an urban life. In any case, my life had not been "real" enough to suit him; and it troubled him that I was a wrestler, not a boxer -- the latter was superior to the former, in Mr. A.'s opinion. He was always good-natured in his teasing of me, but there was a detectable disdain behind his humor. And I was not a poker player, which I think further revealed to Algren the shallowness of my courage.
My friend the poet Donald Justice (a very good poker player, I'm told) once confided to me that Mr. Algren lost a lot of money in Iowa City -- coming down from Chicago, as he did, and expecting to find the town full of rubes. He took me for a rube -- and certainly I was -- but he caused me no lasting wounds. Creative Writing, if honest at all, must be an occasionally unwelcoming experience. I appreciated Mr. Algren's honesty; his abrasiveness couldn't keep me from liking him.
I would not see Nelson Algren again until shortly before his death, when he moved to Sag Harbor and Kurt Vonnegut brought him to my house in Sagaponack for dinner. Again I liked him, and again he teased me; he was good at it. This time he claimed not to remember me from our Iowa days, although I went out of my way to remind him of our conversations; admittedly, since they had been few and brief, it's possible that Algren didn't remember me. But in saying goodnight he pretended to confuse me with Clifford Irving, the perpetrator of that notorious Howard Hughes hoax; he appreciated a good scam, Mr. Algren said. And when Vonnegut explained to him that I was not that Irving, Algren winked at me -- he was still teasing me. (You shouldn't take a Creative Writing course, much less entertain the notion of becoming a writer, if you can't take a little teasing -- or even a lot.)
But, thankfully, there were other teachers at Iowa. I was tempted to study with Jose Donoso, for I admired his writing and found him gracious -- in every way that Nelson Algren was not. Then, upon first sight, I developed a schoolboy's unspoken crush on Mr. Donoso's wife; thereafter I could never look him in the eyes, which would not have made for a successful student-teacher relation
ship. And so my principal teacher and mentor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop became Kurt Vonnegut. (I once had a brawl in a pool hall -- convincingly demonstrating, although never to Nelson Algren and not in his presence, that wrestling is superior to boxing -- because a fellow student at Iowa, a boxer, had called Mr. Vonnegut a "science-fiction hack"; this false charge was made without the offending student's having read a single one of Kurt's books, "only the covers.")
Did Kurt Vonnegut "teach" me how to write? Certainly not; yet Mr. Vonnegut saved me time, and he encouraged me. He pointed out some bad habits in my early work (in my first novel-in-progress), and he also pointed out those areas of storytelling and characterization that were developing agreeably enough. I would doubtless have made these discoveries on my own, but later -- maybe much later. And time, to young and old writers alike, is valuable.
Later, as a teacher -- I taught at the Workshop from 1972 until 1975 -- I encountered many future writers among my students at Iowa. I didn't "teach" Ron Hansen or Stephen Wright or T. Coraghessan Boyle or Susan Taylor Chehak or Allan Gurganus or Gail Harper or Kent Haruf or Robert Chibka or Douglas Unger how to write, but I hope I may have encouraged them and saved them a little time. I did nothing more for them than Kurt Vonnegut did for me, but in my case Mr. Vonnegut -- and Mr. Yount and Mr. Williams -- did quite a lot.
I'm talking about technical blunders, the perpetration of sheer boredom, point-of-view problems, the different qualities of first-person and third-person voice, the deadening effect of exposition in dialogue, the crippling limitations of the present tense, the intrusions upon narrative momentum caused by puerile and pointless experimentation -- and on and on. You just say: "You're good at that." And: "You're not very good at this." These areas of complaint are so basic that most talented young writers will eventually spot their mistakes themselves, but perhaps at a time when a substantial revision of the manuscript might be necessary -- or worse, after the book is published.
Tom Williams once told me that I had a habit of attributing mythological proportions and legendary status to my characters -- he meant before my characters had done anything to earn such attribution. (The same could be said of Garcia Marquez, but in my case Mr. Williams's criticism was valid.) And Kurt
Vonnegut once asked me if I thought there was something intrinsically funny about the verbs "peek" and "peer." (What could be "intrinsically funny" about verbs? I thought. But Mr. Vonnegut meant that I overused these verbs to a point of self-conscious cuteness; he was right.)
When I was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Gail Godwin was a student there, and the future (1989) National Book Award winner, John Casey, was in my class -- Gail and John were "taught" by Kurt Vonnegut, too.
Mr. Casey recently reminded me that Ms. Godwin was, upon her arrival in Iowa City, already a writer to take seriously. Casey recalled how Gail defended herself in the parking lot of the English & Philosophy Building from the unwanted attentions of a lecherous fellow student, who shall remain nameless.
"Please leave me alone," Ms. Godwin warned the offending student, "or I shall be forced to wound you with a weapon you can ill afford to be wounded by in a town this small."
The threat was most mysterious, not to mention writerly, but the oafish lecher was not easily deterred. "And what might that weapon be, little lady?" the lout allegedly asked.
"Gossip," Gail Godwin replied.
Andre Dubus and James Crumley were also students at the Writers' Workshop then. I remember a picnic at Vance Bourjaily's farm, where a friendly pie-fight ensued; Dubus or Crumley, bare-chested and reasonably hairy, was struck in the chest by a Boston cream pie. Who threw the pie, and why, escapes my ever-failing memory -- I swear I didn't do it. David Plimpton is a possible candidate. Plimpton and I were wrestling teammates at Exeter -- he was the team captain a year ahead of me -- and our being together in Iowa seemed an unlikely irony to us both. (Plimpton had wrestled at Yale.)
These were the days before the fabulous Carver-Hawkeye Arena; the Iowa wrestling room was up among the girders of the old fieldhouse. Dave McCuskey was the coach; he was friendly to me, but ever-critical of my physical condition. I was capable of wrestling, hard, with Coach McCuskey's boys, but only for three or four minutes; then I needed to sit down and rest on the mat with my back against the wrestling-room wall. McCuskey frowned upon this behavior: if I wasn't in shape to go head to head with his boys for "the full nine minutes," then I shouldn't be wrestling at all. I was content to shoot takedowns until I got tired; then I'd rest against the wall -- and then I'd shoot a few more takedowns. Coach McCuskey didn't like me resting against the wall.
David Plimpton, who was as out-of-shape as I was, also enjoyed sparring with Coach McCuskey's Iowa wrestlers. Plimpton told me that McCuskey was similarly disapproving of him. From Plimpton's and my point of view, we were making a contribution: we were offering our aging bodies as extra workout partners for McCuskey's kids. But it was Coach McCuskey's wrestling room; he set the tone -- and I respected him. No resting against the wall. As a consequence, my appearances (and Plimpton's) in the Iowa wrestling room were sporadic -- I went there only when I wanted to punish myself.
A happy solution might have been for Plimpton and me to wrestle together, but Plimpton had been a 191-pounder at Yale (when I'd been a 130-pounder at Pitt); we'd both put on 15 or 20 pounds since then, but we couldn't wrestle together -- there was about a 60-pound difference between us.
Seven years later, when I would go back to Iowa to teach at the Writers' Workshop, the wrestling room was still in the girders of the old fieldhouse but the atmosphere in the room had changed. Gary Kurdelmeir, a former national champion for Iowa in 1958, was the head coach. In '72, Kurdelmeir's new assistant coach arrived in Iowa City -- Dan Gable, fresh from a Gold-Medal performance in the Munich Olympics at 1491/2 pounds. In Kurdelmeir and Gable's wrestling room, there were lots of "graduate students" (as Plimpton and I had been in 1965-67) and other postcollege wrestlers. The years I taught at the Workshop (1972-75) were the beginning of Iowa's dominance of collegiate wrestling under Dan Gable. (As the head coach, Gary Kurdlemeir won two national team titles for Iowa -- in '75 and '76 -- but the head-coaching job would soon be Gable's; he won his first team championship in '78. J. Robinson, now the head coach at the University of Minnesota, became Gable's assistant.)
Brad Smith, Chuck Yagla, Dan Holm, Chris Campbell -- they were all in the Iowa wrestling room at that time, and they would all become national champions. That wrestling room was the most intense wrestling room I have ever seen; yet Gable and Kurdlemeir were happy to have you there, contributing -- even if you were good for no more than two minutes before you had to go rest against the wall. In that room, two minutes was all I was good for.
At several of Iowa's dual meets, I sat beside the former Iowa coach, Dave McCuskey, who was retired; as fellow spectators, Coach McCuskey and I had no philosophical differences of opinion. Everyone admired Gable: with three national collegiate titles at Iowa State (just one loss in his entire college career), he drew a crowd -- not only at Iowa's matches but in the wrestling room. Everyone wanted to wrestle with him -- if only for two minutes. In those years, I generally chose easier workout partners, but there were no easy workout partners in that Iowa room. Like everyone else, I couldn't resist the occasional thrill (and instant humiliation) of wrestling Dan Gable. I never scored a point on him, of course. In this failure, I was in good company: in the 1972 Olympics at Munich, where Gable won the Gold Medal, none of his opponents scored a point on him either.
To win the Olympics in freestyle wrestling without losing a single point is akin to winning the men's final at Wimbledon in straight sets, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0; or perhaps a four-game sweep of the World Series, while holding the losing team scoreless. It's rarer still that Gable's dominance as a wrestler has undergone the transition from competitor to coach with equal success: in 1995, Iowa won its fourth NCAA title of the last five years -- and its fifteenth national championship of the last 21. In '95, Iowa also capt
ured its 22nd straight Big 10 crown; I believe that's a record for consecutive collegiate championships -- in any conference, in any sport. Out of 10 weight classes, the '95 Iowa team advanced seven wrestlers to the semifinal round of the NCAA tournament. Ever the perfectionist, Dan Gable was disappointed: Iowa's 150-pounder and 190-pounder were both defending national champions -- in the finals, they both lost.
It's always the wrestling I remember; it marks the years. My memories of being a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and of being a teacher there, frequently intermingle; I even confuse my fellow students with my students. But I can manage to sort out the years (not only in Iowa) by the workout partners that I had, and by recalling who the coach was -- and in which wrestling room I worked out. And possibly it is a testimony to the practical, businesslike atmosphere of the Writers' Workshop that I remember my student days and my teaching days as much the same. I felt fortunate to be at Iowa -- in both capacities.
The Death of a Friend
Don Hendrie, Jr., who was a classmate of mine at Exeter, although I hardly knew him there, was another student at the Iowa Workshop (in my student days); he is the author of four novels and one collection of short stories -- in addition to serving for several years as the director of the graduate writing program at the University of Alabama. The coincidence of my being at Iowa with Don Hendrie is an even more unlikely irony than my being there with David Plimpton, because, when Hendrie and I were students at Exeter, we both sought the affections of the same young woman; she married Hendrie, who in Iowa became my closest friend. Our children would grow up together. When I was teaching and coaching at a small college in Vermont, Hendrie would be teaching at a small college in New Hampshire -- about an hour's distance. When he taught at Mount Holyoke College, I followed him there.
