Read Online Trying to Save Piggy Sneed by John Irving - Free Book Online Page B

Anyway, I advanced to the quarterfinals, realizing that I’d actually learned a little wrestling in the course of taking a pounding at Pitt.
    In the quarterfinals, I pinned a guy from R.PI. — I remember where he was from only because Lee Hall or Caswell asked me what “R.PI.” stood for and I realized that I didn’t know how to spell Rensselaer
or
Polytechnic. Suddenly I was in the semifinals.
    That hour — maybe it was two or three hours — between the quarterfinals and the semifinals … that was the best time of my one season of wrestling at Pittsburgh. That was when I knew I wasn’t coming back. Lee Hall was talking to me; he was saying what a great freshman team we had — if only most of them had been able to wrestle. He was saying that Pitt would have walked away with the team title at that tournament — if only Johnson and Heniff and Warnick and O’Korn and Carr had been there. I agreed with Lee. But I knew that if Johnson and Heniff and Warnick and O’Korn and Carr had been there,
I
wouldn’t have been wrestling; there was no room for me in that lineup. Caswell would have agreed with me: in such a lineup, there would have been no room for Caswell either.
    And so I began to savor just being in the semifinals. It’s fatal when you do that; you have to think about winning — not that you feel good to just
be
there. It’s fatal to get distracted, too, and I was a little distracted; the thought that I would not come back to Pittsburgh had been in my mind before the Freshman Eastern Intercollegiates, of course — only now I
knew
it. I was also worried about my parents. Where were they?
    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