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Rex.
    Coach Peery put a surgical basin on my head—it was a bowl, but not a round one—and he cut my hair with a pair of snub-nosed shears, of the kind used for removing adhesive tape from injured ankles and knees and shoulders and wrists and fingers . . . and whatever else could be taped. (By the end of a wrestling season, almost everything was taped.) All things considered, it wasn’t a bad haircut—Rex would never try to make anyone look foolish. Besides, emblematic of my experience at Pitt, I had brought the haircut on myself.

The Hundred-Dollar Taxi Ride
    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 good-bye 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 weigh-ins were at 7:00 A.M.
    â€œWe can’t miss the weigh-ins and still wrestle,” Caswell said.
    â€œWhat 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