Free Trying to Save Piggy Sneed by John Irving Page B

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