John Irving became a wrestler and a writer at the same time. And he talks in this memoir about both, his career as a halfway decent wrestler and then a respected coach and his years of learning who to write and then as a teacher of a creative writing course. He also speaks about his coaches, his fellow writers and his sons, with tons of affection for all of them. John Irving has a reputation for writing long and complicated novels. This memoir is the opposite. It is simple, short and joyful. A very touching memoir.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“In the semifinals, I also disqualified a heavyweight for deliberately throwing his opponent on top of the scorer’s table; I had twice warned and penalized this wrestler for continuing to wrestle off the mat – after the whistle blew. I’d even asked his coach if the heavyweight in question was deaf. Listened to as an audiobook<\/mark><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Irving became a wrestler and a writer at the same time. And he talks in this memoir about both, his career as a halfway decent wrestler and then a respected coach and his years of learning who to write and then as a teacher of a creative writing course. He also speaks about his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9738,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[142,156,154,155],"tags":[47,98,189],"class_list":["post-9737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-2022","category-challenge-abc-2021-2022","category-challenge-riquiqui-2022","category-challenge-solidaire-2022","tag-humour","tag-life","tag-sport"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/lilartsy-333oj7zFsdg-unsplash-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9737"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9769,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9737\/revisions\/9769"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
‘No, he’s just a little stupid,’ his coach replied.
When I disqualified the heavyweight, his parents came out of the stands and confronted me in the middle of the mat. I had no trouble recognizing who they were – they didn’t have to introduce themselves. At a glance, I could see they’d swum forth from the same gene pool for enormity that had spawned their son.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n