The Imaginary Girlfriend Read Online Free PDF

placed me at a considerable distance from the top rank of college wrestlers around the nation. Because of Ted Seabrooke, I wasn’t a bad wrestler; I also wasn’t a good athlete, as Ted had told me. I took a pounding at Pitt. “Halfway decent” didn’t cut it there.
    I won’t presume to define that essential ability which makes a “good athlete” for all sports, but for wrestling good balance is as important as quickness; it is also as uncoachable. And by balance I mean both kinds: the ability to keep your balance—to a small degree this can be taught, by maintaining good position—and how quickly you can recover your balance when you lose it. The latter ability is un-teachable. The speed with which I can recover my balance when I lose it is mournfully slow; this is my weakness as an athlete. (It is a sizable limitation for a wrestler.)
    In ‘62, freshmen were ineligible for varsity competition; yet I’d anticipated a challenging schedule of dual-meet matches and tournaments for the Pittsburgh freshman team—we would have been a winning team. But Johnson and Heniff and Warnick and O’Korn and Carr were either academically ineligible or nursing injuries, or both; what there was for a freshman wrestling schedule was canceled. The
only
competition I would see, until the year-end tournament—the Freshman Eastern Intercollegiates at West Point—was the considerable competition in the Pitt wrestling room. And I could easily predict my future, if I stayed at Pittsburgh. I would be a backup to Johnson or Heniff or Warnick (or to all three); later, I would be a backup to whatever talented freshmen would enter
next
year’s wrestling room with the new freshman class. I would
always
be a backup. When one of the starters was sick, when he was hurt or couldn’t make weight, I would sneak into the lineup; and there was little doubt what my role would be then—it wouldn’t be to win but to not get pinned. It would be, at best, a career spent facing Vincent Buonomano—like my first time in the pit.
    It was what success I had met with in the pit—
after
the beating by Buonomano—that made the backup role hard for me to bear. At Exeter, I had been a three-year starter. Years later, as a coach, I had the highest respect for the backup wrestlers on good wrestling teams; they were what made the teams good—
as teams.
They were the necessary workout partners who could have been starters at a smaller school, in a less competitive program. But once I’d been part of a program like Pittsburgh’s, I couldn’t have been satisfied with anything less; nor was I wise enough to recognize the distinction of backing up a wrestler of Mike Johnson’s quality. Instead, I was disappointed in myself—in my limitations. I wanted to leave Pittsburgh, but there was nowhere else I wanted to go.
    For once I was not struggling academically; yet, for the first time, I was lazy (academically), too. I worked hard in the wrestling room, but—without any outside competition—I couldn’t see my own improvement as a wrestler. I could only see that I wasn’t improving against Moyer or Johnson or Heniff or Warnick, or Carswell or Caswell—whatever the strong redhead’s name was. And I was bored with everything
but
the wrestling; to simply
see
more of it—since I couldn’t compete—I asked Coach Peery to take me on varsity road trips as the team manager. Rex took me; he knew I was discouraged, and he was being kind to me—I was an easily distracted manager. (Daydreamers have pathetic managerial skills.)
    Rex Peery was always kind to me, except once when he cut my hair. We were traveling—we were in the training room at either Navy or Maryland—and he’d warned me earlier to get a haircut. I wasn’t being in the slightest rebellious; I’d just forgotten to do it—I would have done anything to please