Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

It was about that time when I started smoking -- just a little bit, although a little more than Sherman Moyer. Maybe Moyer had inspired me; if I couldn't get out from under him on the mat, at least I could outsmoke him. It was a stupid way to try to say goodbye to wrestling, which I wouldn't say goodbye to until I was 47 -- whereas I would quit smoking almost as soon as I started. Most self-destructive behavior is simply ridiculous -- never mind how complexly compelled by personal demons. Given my limited talent, I could ill afford to undermine one of my few advantages as a wrestler -- before I started smoking, I was in fanatically good shape.

A pack would last me at least a week, often two weeks; and the more I smoked, the harder I trained. What was the point of it? So little smoking hardly constitutes an unbreakable habit -- I'd never had the habit. In Pittsburgh, I could have used a school psychiatrist -- and not for my spelling. In the back of my mind, even as I smoked, I imagined that I could redeem myself at the Freshman Eastern Intercollegiates; the three Pitt freshmen who were uninjured and eligible -- I was one of them -- would get to go.

It was probably because of my brief managerial experience that I was trusted with the bus tickets and pocket money for the trip to West Point; Coach Peery put me in charge. The varsity team was staying in Pittsburgh, preparing for the nationals; no coach would accompany Lee Hall and me, and Carswell or Caswell -- I'm going to call him Caswell -- to the tournament at Army. It seemed simple enough. I had bus tickets from Pittsburgh to the Port Authority in New York City, together with something called "transfer passes" from New York to West Point. I was told to get the three of us to Manhattan and take the first available bus up the Hudson. What could have been easier? But the bus from Pittsburgh was delayed; by the time we reached the Port Authority, it was midnight. The next available bus to West Point was at 8:00 in the morning; from filling out the registration forms from Army, I remembered that the weighins were at 7:00 A.M.

"We can't miss the weighins and still wrestle," Caswell said.

"What do we do?" Lee Hall asked me.

Inevitably, I recalled the surgical basin on my head -- at either Navy or Maryland -- and I wondered what Rex Peery would have wanted us to do. The whole year the three of us had been wrestling only our teammates in the wrestling room; it wouldn't have been like missing one tournament -- it would have meant missing our only tournament. I counted the pocket money that Coach Peery had given me: $100. I had our return "transfer passes" from West Point to the Port Authority, and our return tickets from New York to Pittsburgh. All we had to do was get ourselves up the Hudson to West Point before 7:00 in the morning. What did we need the $100 for? (We had to make weight -- we couldn't eat anything, anyway.)

Once outside the Port Authority -- now it was well after midnight -- I was glad to be in the company of our highly recruited 177-pounder, Lee Hall, and with Caswell, the pound-for-pound strongest person in the world. (Caswell would be wrestling at Army at 137 pounds. I was listed to weigh in at 130.) It took me a dozen cabs, or more, before I found a taxi driver who would take us to West Point for $100.

"West Point? A hundred bucks? Sure, man," the driver said. "Where's West Point?"

Caswell said he couldn't read a map in a moving car without throwing up, and Lee Hall couldn't comfortably fit in the front seat; the meter crowded him (Lee had to cut a lot of weight to weigh 177 pounds). Therefore, I was our navigator -- I sat up front with the driver.

"You just go up the Hudson," I told him.

"Sure, man," he said. "Up the what?"

I have flown nonstop from New York to Tokyo; I have driven nonstop from Iowa City to Exeter, New Hampshire. But that trip up the Hudson was the longest of my life. Didn't the Dutch explore the Hudson in boats? Not even in a boat could we have made worse time.

In the first place, the only map was a map of Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx. In the second place, as soon as the city lights were gone, our driver informed us that he was afraid of the dark.

"I never drove in the dark before," he whimpered. "Not dis dark!"

We inched along. It began to sleet. It seemed that only back roads led to West Point -- at least they were the only roads we found.

"I never seen so many trees," our driver said. "Not dis many!"

If our taxi driver was terrified of the dark, and of the unusual number of trees, the soldiers who were dressed to kill -- and who guarded the formidable entrance to the United States Military Academy at West Point (I presume they were M.P.s) -- were his undoing. The Military Police were not expecting the predawn arrival of three wrestlers from Pittsburgh; the other wrestlers had long ago arrived -- the soldiers presumed they'd gone to bed. However, it was not necessary to open our gym bags in order to verify that we were wr

estlers; it was only necessary for the M.P.s to get a look at Lee Hall.

It was then a matter of deciding on the whereabouts of our barracks. Where were all the other wrestlers sleeping? The soldiers at the gate, intimidating though they were, were not brave enough to call the Army wrestling coach and ask him where we were to be sheltered -- it was about 4:00 A.M., only three hours to weighins. Lee Hall and Caswell knew what I was thinking when I suggested to the soldiers that we sleep in the gym. I explained that the mats were usually rolled out the night before; that way the mats are lying flat by the time of competition -- you don't have to tape the corners to the floor. We could sleep on the mats, I offered -- we didn't mind.

Lee Hall and Caswell knew that I was thinking of the scales, not the mats -- I couldn't have cared less about the mats, or sleeping. We had three hours before weighins and we hadn't been able to check our weight since we left Pittsburgh. If I was a half-pound over, I needed to sweat; I'd been a pound and a half over when we left Pittsburgh. I'd eaten nothing, and I'd had nothing to drink; usually, if I was a pound and a half over in the afternoon before a morning weighin, I could drink eight ounces of water and still lose the weight in my sleep. I hadn't slept or had my usual eight ounces of water, but I was dying to get on the scales, to be sure.

The M.P.s didn't think that letting us into the gym was a good idea. There was a barracks somewhere for visiting teams; the soldiers sounded more or less sure of this, although they weren't sure which barracks it was.

Lee Hall confided to me that he thought we should go somewhere warm and "just run." That way we'd at least be losing weight. And how much sleep would we get before weighins, anyway? I agreed with Lee.

Caswell looked remarkably well rested; he'd slept the whole way from Manhattan and was now viewing the austere buildings of the military academy with the eagerness of a child who'd just arrived at an amusement park -- apparently Caswell never worried about his weight.

It was then I noticed that our taxi driver was too frightened to leave; he couldn't possibly find his way back to the city -- "not in dis dark," he said. The M.P.s were doubly unsure which barracks might be available for him.

One of the soldiers got up the nerve to make a phone call. I don't know the name or rank of the man who was awakened, but his voice was exceptionally powerful and loud. We were brought to a darkened building in a Jeep -- our taxi driver, too; he'd happily left the keys to his cab with the M.P.s at the gate. It was one of those stone dormitories where the stairs were lit with timed lights; on each floor, a single switch turned on the lights for the entire stairwell. At every stair landing, next to the hall door, the light switch was indicated by a small bulb that glowed the dull yellow of a cat's eye. The lights "ticked" for two minutes and then they went out; to turn them on, you had to find the nearest cat's eye again. By this torturous method, a few wrestlers were sprinting or jogging up and down the stairs -- sometimes in light, sometimes in darkness, depending on the whim of the timed lights in the stairwell. One of these stair runners directed us to a huge, bad-smelling, overheated room where many wrestlers were lying on cots; they were fully clothed, under mounds of blankets -- trying to sweat off the extra weight while they slept. (Most of them were lying in the dark, awake.)

"Man, it stinks in here," our taxi driver said.

At first glance, it seemed there were no empty cots, but this didn't trouble Caswell, who made himself comfortable on top of his gym bag on the floor; I think he was asleep by the time Lee Hall and I had changed into our sweatsuits and were running around the stairwell. The guys who'd been running the stairs ahead of us had worked out a system with the lights: when the lights went out, whoever was nearest a stair landing looked for the dull-yellow bulb. We kept running, whether the lights were on or off. Nobody talked on the stairs. Every so often I would call out "Lee?" and Lee Hall would say "What?"

After 15 or 20 minutes, I was sweating the way I wanted to; I started trotting more slowly, moving just fast enough so the sweat didn't stop. I think I was asleep when I ran into a wall in the dark. My eyebrow was split open. I could feel that I was bleeding, but I didn't know how badly I was cut.

"Lee?" I called.

"What?" Lee Hall said.