Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Brands reluctantly accepted his consolation prize: Top assistant to Zalesky, and chief recruiter. By the winter of 2005, Zalesky’s head-coaching career included three NCAA and three Big Ten team titles and a whole host of individual conference and national champion wrestlers, and it was nowhere near enough. The Hawks had not won a national crown in five years, and the suspicion was beginning to creep in that Zalesky had done his best work in the first three seasons of his career, 1998, 1999 and 2000, when he basically was coaching athletes chosen and recruited by Gable to fit Gable’s system. On his own, Zalesky, with Brands out front on recruiting, getting people fired up to join the Hawkeyes, had signed some tremendous wrestlers but hadn’t been able to put together a team capable of winning it all—and second-place finishes at the NCAAs, no matter how spectacularly they were achieved nor from what difficulties forged, no longer were acceptable at Iowa. Gable had set the bar that high. Jim Zalesky needed to start winning it all again. All of which makes it such a puzzle that the fall of 2004 did not become one of the great talent hauls in University of Iowa wrestling history. Here was this senior class, so loaded with elite Division I potential, and every one of the kids had grown up thinking that someday, maybe, if they hit the weights and ran wind sprints until they puked, if they wrestled so hard and so long that they (like the great Gable was said so often to have done) might have to drag themselves by their arms across the wrestling room at the end of practice—if they did all that, then maybe they would one day find themselves in the yellow-and-black of Iowa. So Zalesky had that going for him, the way he did every year at recruiting time when it came down to the kids from the home state. But this year was different. Zalesky was the same competent coach he had always been, but he no longer had Brands in his corner. Brands had finally followed his ambition and secured a job trying to turn Virginia Tech’s straggling program into a national power. He was pure energy and desire, and he electrified high school kids with his pitch. After Tom Brands came to people’s houses for a visit, half the parents were ready to sign up for six a.m. workouts. He communicated his passion for the sport with sincerity; he could actually make you understand that it was a life-and-death proposition to him, no matter how ridiculous that seems when put down on paper. With his enthusiasm and his clearly defined direction, he had Jay hooked early on.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  He had such an admirer in Dan that the day Brands announced he was leaving for Virginia Tech, Dan remembers thinking to himself, “Iowa may not happen.” What Dan was beginning to realize (and Jay was to discover as well) was that his interest in Iowa had had significantly to do with Brands, whom both boys saw as the next best thing to wrestling for Gable. When Dan watched the Hawkeyes in action, he was always struck by the way that Brands did most of the coaching, and almost all of the yelling. “Zalesky looked more like an organizer than the coach—he kind of stood off to the side,” Dan says. “It was like he was running the business. Brands is just totally different. I had to think about it, and I thought that Brands was the coach who could help me get to the next level, make me better. If Brands was still at Iowa, I’d be at Iowa.” Even if there had been no scholarship money to give? “If Brands was at Iowa,” Dan repeats, “I’d be there.” So Brands was going to make that much difference to the LeCleres and the Borschels of the world, and Zalesky had to find a way to bridge that gap. He had assets, the greatest of which was the fact that his school was still the object of the boys’ wrestling dreams. The Hawkeye wrestling room was still the place where Gable might at any time wander through, stopping to help a wrestler with his positioning or tell a freshman about something he’d seen on tape that might reveal an area to be strengthened. It was a place rich enough in its history and strong enough in its current incarnation to attract the high-profile likes of Falck and Tsirtsis and heavyweight Matt Fields, the former state champion from North Cedar High. It was the ultimate home-field advantage. But it alone wasn’t enough. It was going to be up to Zalesky to make the seniors understand how much he wanted them in Iowa City, how huge a mistake they’d be making by even considering someplace else. He was going to have to overcome his own natural personality, the distance that he tended to put between himself and the parents and athletes whom he met. And, of course, the whole world of wrestlers is not created equal: Zalesky was going to have to decide how many of the seniors he really cared about going after. The answer: Almost none, until it was too late. While Brands did everything but burrow a tunnel between Blacksburg, Virginia, and the homes of the coveted seniors of eastern Iowa, Jim Zalesky went the other way. He played coy. He may actually have been as indifferent as he appeared. He made a visit to the Borschels’ home and had dinner, yet it was Jay and his parents who found themselves constantly having to restart the conversation. “We couldn’t get him to talk,” Jim Borschel says.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  He was the successor of the jovial and philanthropic old gentleman under whose government Hanno's father and uncle had studied, and who died soon after 1971. At that time Doctor Wulicke, previously a professor at a Prussian grammar school, had been appointed, and with him another, a new spirit had moved into the old school. Where classical education had formerly been seen as a cheerful end in itself, to be pursued with calm, leisure, and happy idealism, the concepts of authority, duty, power, service, and career had now attained the highest dignity, and the "categorical imperative of our philosopher Kant ' was the banner that Director Wulicke menacingly unfurled in every speech. The school had become a state within a state in which Prussian official restraint reigned so violently that not only the teachers but also the students felt themselves to be civil servants who were concerned about nothing but their advancement and being well-regarded by those in power ... Soon after the new director moved in The rebuilding and refurnishing of the institution was started under the most excellent hygienic and aesthetic points of view and everything was happily completed. The question remained, however, whether earlier, when there had been less modern comfort and a little more good nature, spirit, cheerfulness, benevolence and comfort in these rooms, the school had not been a more sympathetic and beneficial institute... who were concerned about nothing but their advancement and being in good standing with those in power ... Soon after the new director had moved in, the reconstruction and refurnishing of the institution, also taking into account the most excellent hygienic and aesthetic aspects, began and everything was completed happily . The question remained, however, whether earlier, when there had been less modern comfort and a little more good nature, spirit, cheerfulness, benevolence and comfort in these rooms, the school had not been a more sympathetic and beneficial institute... who were concerned about nothing but their advancement and being in good standing with those in power ... Soon after the new director had moved in, the reconstruction and refurnishing of the institution, also taking into account the most excellent hygienic and aesthetic aspects, began and everything was completed happily . The question remained, however, whether earlier, when there had been less modern comfort and a little more good nature, spirit, cheerfulness, benevolence and comfort in these rooms, the school had not been a more sympathetic and beneficial institute... to be in good standing with those in power ... Soon after the new director had moved in, the reconstruction and refurnishing of the institution, also taking into account the most excellent hygienic and aesthetic aspects, began and everything was happily completed. The question remained, however, whether earlier, when there had been less modern comfort and a little more good nature, spirit, cheerfulness, benevolence and comfort in these rooms, the school had not been a more sympathetic and beneficial institute... to be in good standing with those in power ...

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  He has a crucial strategic decision to make: It is Nick’s choice whether to begin the period in the on-top position (and thus try for a pin or for near-fall points) or the down position (and try for a 1-point escape, then a 2-point takedown to win). Nick looks to his corner for guidance. Doug, straining to be heard over the din of the crowd and all these other matches bursting with sound around him, tries to hand-signal Nick that he can choose whichever position he feels better about—but Nick only sees his father make the “down” motion with his hands. Nick starts on the bottom, but his fatigue is setting in, and almost as soon as the period begins, Norton is able to break down one of Nick’s arms and get one shoulder of Nick’s to the mat. Nick fights to break free, but Norton uses his top-position leverage to finally roll both of Nick’s shoulders onto the mat. Not quite a minute into the third, Nick is pinned. “I did that to him,” Doug says later, downstairs. “He didn’t see my sign. I should have yelled it, too.” Doug is disconsolate. It’s no use telling him the truth, which is that it probably didn’t matter, that Nick was fading physically and stuck in there against a really solid wrestler. After having spent so much time on the sideline this season, Nick cannot summon his A-game on command, and over in the cool-down area, he looks spent. He is. He will go on to lose his consolation semifinal as well. After such a great run through the section and district tournaments, this isn’t Nick’s year, after all. As Dan had earlier observed, it was barely a year at that, and at the finish it was too much to ask to get all the way there. But Nick is only a sophomore. There is still time. There is more LeClere to come. By the time the excitement on the other mats begins to taper off, the crowd inside Veterans Memorial has almost completely turned its attention to an eye-popping scene more or less in the middle of the auditorium. There, down on his hands and knees, is the great Dan LeClere. Stuck. The other wrestler on the mat is Klint Kersten, one of a number of strong entries from a well-coached program, Logan-Magnolia, that will finish this weekend with the top team score in Class 1A. And Kersten has decided, in this semifinal, to put on the match of his life. Dan has stormed the mat with his usual fierceness to begin the contest. He is so ready for this; he has paced himself into his usual frenzy downstairs and come up to this great roar of applause from the North-Linn fans in particular and many in the crowd in general. As the wrestlers circle each other to begin, Dan suddenly springs forward, so quick and so light on his feet, and dives down to spear one of Kersten’s legs.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  When I finally made my way down from the garden, I was frustrated to find that access to the water was blocked by a seemingly endless line of construction, complexes of restaurants and casinos and discotheques, all of them boarded up for the season, barricaded against sea and weather and, I assumed, the plundering hands that had covered these boards with graffiti. And yet, when I did find a way through these linked complexes, reaching not quite the beach yet but the road that ran alongside it, I turned away after only a few moments. The wind coming off the sea, unbroken by trees or by the buildings that had frustrated my approach, was too fierce to stand facing it for long. And I was fascinated by those buildings, now that I saw the other side of them, with their garish, amusement-park facades rising above their boarded windows. I could hear a radio playing faintly from within one of the restaurants, but there was no other sign of human presence, no voices or movement save for the cats that had improvised some habitation on the rooftops, where they watched me, disinterested and alert. There was a ghostliness about the whole strip, as if it had been abandoned for years. One restaurant wasn’t boarded up, I don’t know why, and I walked up the few steps to the deck to peer in through the glass, which was crusted with salt and sand. It was a place for children, a restaurant and playroom both, with figurines and coin-operated rides in the shapes of characters from American cartoons. These were wrapped in sheets of plastic, further blurring an image already blurred by the glass, so that they were grotesquely distorted; and for a moment, as I looked at these figures I associated with my childhood, it was as if they took on a kind of agonized life, like quarantined victims of some plague or like infants themselves, suffocating in plastic cauls. Mitko was awake when I returned to the hotel, lounging and watching television, unperturbed by my absence, though he wanted to know where I had been and took my camera to scan through the photos I had taken. He knew every inch of the park, he said, he recognized each of the scenes on the screen, and he demonstrated this knowledge by describing for me what lay outside the frame. Later that afternoon he took me into the center, through its streets and squares, pointing out landmarks that were like miniatures of their counterparts in the capital: monuments to the same patriots, museums of history, of archaeology and ethnography, the Roman ruins and the central cathedral with its efflorescence of domes.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was interested to see what effect this would have on Phil, who was washing in a thorough, slightly over-hearty way; but though he glanced shyly at what was going on, his own simple little cock remained unstirred. A couple of Cypriot men, who talked loudly and securely in Greek, old friends with thick moustaches and frames rectangular with muscle, shampooed flossily opposite me; and some greyer specimens, voyeurs who came only for the showers, mooned hungrily at the other end of the room. I was quite brisk, and followed his Lordship out to the drying area. He had a rough old towel, the grey of institutional laundering. He gathered it into a knot and dabbed at himself with it, breathing in a manner that was nearly a whistle, and seemed always about to become a well-known Mozartian tune. I paced around drying myself, then tied my towel round my waist in a kind of Polynesian skirt and couldn’t resist saying to him, with a step forwards and a bid for his attention: ‘Are you feeling better now?’ ‘Hello, hello,’ he said, not at all taken aback. ‘Goodness me …’ he looked around as if something interesting had just started happening somewhere else. ‘I was surprised to see you swimming so soon after your … accident.’ ‘Like to swim you know,’ he said promptly. ‘Floating around in lovely, lovely water.’ I waited for some recognition of the drift of my remarks. He wouldn’t really look at me, though. ‘Do you know, I’ve been swimming here for over forty years? Oh yes—up and down. I expect I’ve swum right round the globe by now—if you added it all together, you know. Splish-splosh, flippety-flop!’ I identified already the abstracted tone with which he produced these inane jingling phrases, as if to prevent objections being made by filling up the space and time with nonsense. Yet somehow, at this stage, I wasn’t going to let him escape. ‘I was there, you know,’ I remarked factually, ‘in Kensington Gardens, when you were taken ill.’ He looked at me with a suddenly summoned attentiveness. ‘I’m quite over all that nasty business now,’ he said patiently. ‘In fact,’ I pursued, ‘it was I who looked after you, you know …’ This seemed to knock him rather, and he started to shamble off into the changing-room and then to think better of it, coming back to me in a sideways manner. His eyes ran down my front and he looked at my long, gappy toes as he said, ‘You were the chappy that, er, puff-puff, bang-bang … I say, goodness me. My dear fellow!’ He did not know what to do. ‘Anyway,’ I said, disappointed of a show of gratitude, ‘I’m glad to see you’ve recovered’—and I moved away feeling foolish and a little cross.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Up in the showers afterwards he was standing beside the same person, and the reason for it became clearer. The boy, very brown all over, except for a pink triangle above the crack of his ass, was thin and wiry, though not quite unattractively so, his colour glamorising (as it can do a nondescript Italian or Arab) what would have been a meagre body if pale. There was something strained about him, particularly his gaunt, narrow head, hollow-cheeked and with short dark curls. His sunken eyes were a cold blue, made the more striking by his tan; when he turned round I saw that he had shaved off all his pubic hair, which added a kinky and intenser nakedness to his salient, sideways-curving, pink-headed and very large cock. The conversation was not fluent. The youth would pass some bland comment, and James would try to reply with adequate enthusiasm or insouciance. ‘See you,’ said the youth, abruptly turning off his shower and going off to dry. ‘Yes, see you,’ said James, managing to make it seem a careless possibility, though the smile faded off his face in a way that showed it was not spontaneous. He had effectively been put down, as it is impossible to go padding out after someone in simulated sportsman-like ease when they have just said goodbye to you. I crossed over and took my place beside James. ‘Who’s your friend?’ I enquired. He merely gave me a sceptical look. ‘Why don’t you go after him?’ ‘I don’t think I care for him.’ ‘Oh come on! He looked to me as if he quite cared for you—if Dame Tumescence is anything to go by.’ ‘Another time, perhaps.’ He shampooed his receding hair in a listless fashion. ‘I see Miss Manners is having a ball.’ It was one of James’s almanac of nicknames.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Perhaps a minute later, he wrenches Tyler over onto his back. Tyler appears shocked at what is happening; he is trying to process what to do, but there’s no time. Verschoor isn’t going to miss this chance. He sticks Tyler on his back and records a stunning fall in just a minute and a half of wrestling time. Even those who championed Ver schoor wouldn’t have predicted it. It’s no fluke; Verschoor is too good for that to be so. But it’s also something that might not happen if the two opponents wrestled a dozen times more. Of course, it doesn’t have to—it happened this time, when it mattered most. On this day, for the only time this season, Tyler gets caught and pinned. In his corner, Doug and Brad Bridgewater and Larry Henderson don’t appear terribly surprised, but it’s clear they are struggling for what to say to their beaten wrestler. If there is any good news, it is that Tyler seems more confused by the turn of events than hurt or emotionally flamed. He grabs his gear and runs off the mat, but downstairs, just a few moments later, he is neither hanging his head nor trying to be alone—he’s around the other North-Linn wrestlers and coaches, talking, going back over the sudden sequence of events. Learning. Tyler isn’t ready to anticipate the end of his tournament—he’s just getting started. He also knows that, outside of Morningstar, Verschoor is the toughest wrestler he could have faced. It isn’t over yet for Tyler as long as he won’t let it be—and, seeing him now, it is clear that he won’t. The disappointment of Tyler’s match aside, the day is not lost for North-Linn. Ryan Mulnix wins his first-round match when his opponent gets hurt, the boy eventually requiring a gurney to take him off the floor with his neck in a brace. Ryan, who has endured that season-long pain in his shoulder, looks on impassively. He knows how it feels. Ben Fisher’s tournament begins at 135 pounds with an opponent whom his coaches think he should be able to beat. Easy to say from the side of the mat, of course, and with Ben there is seldom anything that feels predetermined. The two wrestlers struggle, each looking a little nervous and a little conservative, afraid of making a fatal mistake so early in the tourney. With the score tied 2–2 going into the third period, Ben escapes from his opponent (1 point) and then gets him on a low takedown (2 points) for a 5–2 lead—but with 16 seconds left and Mike and Kathy screaming their encouragement from the nearby bleachers, Ben seems to let up momentarily, and his opponent squirts out of his grasp for a 1-point escape. Now it is 5–3, with the clock counting down and both wrestlers back on their feet.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But it was the right place. I recognised the Mayfair portraits, the louche studies of Bobby—Bobby who today was nowhere to be seen, banished doubtless under the good behaviour clause—and all the randomness of it was right to me, as that was how it had been before. But when I got to the bottom, and peeled back the last piece of protective tissue, I had to acknowledge that none of the pictures of Colin, those artfully lewd compositions, was there. I searched the drawers above and below as well, but with dwindling hope. Charles called out, ‘What’s he looking for?’ and when Staines replied, ‘I promised him some photographs of a boy called Colin, but I just don’t know where they are,’ I knew he was lying. ‘Colin?’ said Charles. ‘Oh, I don’t think I know that one. Do I know that one?’ I nodded at him to signal that this was the boy I had told him about, the thing that mattered to me; but he was quite inscrutable, full of diplomatic ignorance. Half an hour later, when we shook hands and parted, he wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘Well, that was a mixed success,’ I said to James, as he climbed down into his car, and I leant over the open door. ‘Don’t worry about the Colin thing,’ he said. I drummed on the roof. ‘I want to get him! I don’t seem to have anything else to do.’ ‘Do you want a lift?’ ‘No, I’m going home. Then I’m going to have a swim: one must keep the body if not the soul together.’ ‘See you soon.’ ‘See you my darling.’ It was very quiet at the Corry, when I arrived mid-afternoon. The few people there looked at each other with considerate curiosity rather than rivalry. There was a sense of various different routines equably overlapping. There were several old boys, one or two perhaps even of Charles’s age, and doubtless all with their own story, strange and yet oddly comparable, to tell. And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of. ABOUT THE AUTHORAlan Hollinghurst is the author of three other novels, The Folding Star, The Spell, and The Line of Beauty, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004. In addition, he has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He lives in London. [image "Alan Hollinghurst The Sparsholt Affair back ad" file=images/Holl_9780307806604_epub_002_r1.jpg] AAKnopf.com ALSO AVAILABLE FROM VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL [image file=images/Holl_9780307806604_epub_L02_r1.jpg] TALKING IT OVER by Julian BarnesThrough the indelible voices of three narrators—two best friends and the woman they both love—Julian Barnes reconstructs the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades. “An interplay of serious thought and dazzling wit.… It’s moving, it’s funny, it’s frightening … fiction at its best” (The New York Times Book Review). Fiction/Literature

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  He sees high school seniors, like Jay and Dan, who spent so much of their waking lives hanging around the Iowa program that there is no longer anything exciting about the notion of going to college there. He is slightly dismayed at the tunnel vision of some of the local high school wrestlers who consider his program only, and would leave the state before wrestling for, say, Iowa State University or the University of Northern Iowa. And it goes beyond that for Zalesky, himself a former Iowa high school star alongside his talented brother Lennie, who went on to become the head coach at the University of California at Davis. What Jim Zalesky sees, when he looks at the landscape of Iowa wrestling, with its history and its traditions and its astonishing unspoken pressures, is a generation of kids who, in the end, might just want to get the hell out of the state to get some peace and quiet. “Especially with this group,” Zalesky says, sitting behind his desk in the wrestling office at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. “The parents were so involved, you know, the dads and the parents. And a lot of times I wonder: Are these kids just wanting to get away from their dads, too? You know? ’Cause the dads are always on ’em, telling ’em what to do, and to me that could get old. My dad never said a word to us. He never said a word edgewise. He was in the stands cheering for us, but he never told us when to work out, or go get your workout in, or do this or do that, or watch your diet, or anything else. It was all on your own: You want to do it, fine, I’ll support you, but you’re doing it. Anymore, you see so many parents involved. And that’s where recruiting gets tough, and some of this stuff I think gets a lot tougher than it used to be.” When Zalesky’s take on what has transpired is relayed to Jay, he appears momentarily to be at a loss for words—but he finds them. “He never gave me any reason to come,” Jay finally replies. “He came to our house, and there was just…nothing. He never made me feel like he wanted me to be there.” Likewise, Dan is adamant that the only place he ever dreamed about attending was Iowa, but Zalesky never made him feel there was a place for him in the wrestling room. It was the same for all the boys, for Joey and Mitch and Ryan and Kyle. They all wanted the dream of competing for Gable at Iowa, and after they saw Gable go away they found a suitable replacement in Tom Brands; and then Brands left, too, and suddenly they were facing the reality that the Iowa program they’d wanted all their lives was not, strictly speaking, the one placed before them now.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  mitted, and told her that if she did not regard the for- tunes of the family for her husband's sake, she ought at least to consider her jjoor children. This argument struck her ; she rallied her spirits, and resolved to try by every means to regain her husband's love. Next night, perceiving that he rose from beside her, she also got up, put on her night-wrapper, had her bed made, and sat down to read for hours until his return. When he entered the room, she went up and kissed him, and presented a basin and water to him to wash his hands. Her husband, astonished at this extraordinary behaviour, told her that he had only been to the privy, and that he had no need to wash. She replied, that although it was no great matter, still it was decent to wash one's hands when one came from so nasty a place, thereby wishing to make him know and hate his wicked way of life. As this did not produce any amendment in him, she continued the same course of proceeding for a year, but still without success. This being the case, one night, when she was wait- ing for her husband, who stayed away longer than usual, she took it into her head to go after him. She did so, and looking for him in chamber after chamber, she at last found him in a back lumber-room in bed with the ugliest and dirtiest servant wench about the house. To teach him to quit so handsome and so cleanly a wife for so ugly and frousy a servant, she took some straw and set it on fire in the middle of the room. But seeing that the smoke would as soon smother her husband as awake him, she pulled him by the arm, crying out " Fire ! fire ! " If the husband was ashamed and confounded at being found by so worthy a wife with such a swinish bedfel- low, it was not without great reason. " For more than a year, sir," said his wife, " have I been endeavouring by Fourth Day. \ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. ZZZ gentleness and patience to withdraw you from such a wicked life, and make you comprehend that, while waslv ing the outside, you ought to make the inside clean also ; but when I saw that all my efforts were useless, I be- thought me of employing the element which is to put an end to all things. If this does not correct you, sir, I know not if I shall be able another time to withdraw you from the danger as I have done now. I pray you to consider that there is no greater despair than that of slighted love, and that if I had not had God before my eyes, I could not have been patient so long."

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Dan Gable listens to the recent history, and he takes in the news coolly. Gable knows it was a swing and a miss for Zalesky, but he clearly feels constrained in what he can say. Still, Gable won’t skirt the issue, nor will he excuse Zalesky for his role in it. When it is suggested that one of the obvious problems this year was the lack of scholarship money to give to people like Jay and Dan, Gable agrees, but then adds, “If you’re running low on money, you’ve got to make wrestlers feel wanted in other ways. There are other reasons to wrestle at Iowa besides money.” (True enough: Both Jay and Dan, as well as their parents, say they never would have let money be the issue if either wrestler had wanted to go to work for Zalesky.) How about the notion that there were too many wrestlers already in the Iowa program at certain weights? “Oh, sure,” Gable says. “But when you’ve got good prospects…I sometimes had three and four kids coming in at about the same weight, but then we’d spread them out after they got to college. There’s a process there. Where you’re wrestling in high school, weight-wise, isn’t necessarily where you’re going to wrestle in college. I never minded having a bunch of guys in the same general weight area—something always seemed to work out.” Gable reflects for a moment. “I will bet you that those guys all wanted to go to Iowa,” he says. He may not know how right he really is. “I blame Iowa,” Pablo Ubasa says of the current mess—sincerely, not bitterly. Ubasa, a former Iowa walk-on, obviously loves the program, and he thinks of Gable as a surrogate father. These seniors, in turn, are his kids, the first group of wrestlers Pablo ever had, when he was beginning his own fledgling coaching career. He envisioned watching them take their skills to the NCAA level right in front of the home folks. Even if it was overreaching to think there could be a place on the Hawkeyes’ roster for every member of this super-senior group, Ubasa didn’t mind daydreaming. After all, it wasn’t merely what he wanted for the wrestlers; it was, uniformly, what they wanted for themselves. They worked through the years with that goal in mind, and as they got better and better the dream became just a little more vivid. When they hit high school, it became obvious that this was no ordinary class of wrestlers, not some bizarre geographical fluke. Iowa’s tradition-bound, time-honored system of putting little wrestlers into the long pipeline had produced, this time, a staggering collection of talent all within a 70-mile radius—and all right under the nose of the University of Iowa’s wrestling program. “They saw these guys coming up through the ranks,” Pablo says. “You could see them coming for years. But then when they got to senior year there’s no room for them.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " For my part," said Parlamente, " I cannot ignore the fact that there have been among them men of very bad faith ; for I know well that one of them, a doctor in theology and a principal of their order, wanted to per- suade several of his brethren that the Gospel was no more worthy of belief than Caesar's Commentaries, or other histories written by authentic doctors; and, from the hour I heard that, I would never believe a preacher's word, unless I found it conformable to God's, which is the true touchstone for distinguishing true words and false." " Be assured," said Oisille, " that they who often read it in humility will never be deceived by human fictions or inventions ; for whoso has a mind filled with truth cannot receive a lie." " Yet it seems to me that a simple person is more easily deceived than another," observed Simontault. " Yes," said Longarine, " if you esteem silliness to be simplicity." " I say," returned Simontault, " that a good, gentle, simple woman is more easily beguiled than one who is cunning and crafty." " I suppose you know some one who is too full of such goodness," said Nomerfide ; " if so, tell us about her." Fifth day. \ (IVEEN OF NAVARRE. 38 1 " Since you have so well guessed, I will not disap- point you," replied Simontault ; " but you must promise me not to weep. Those who say, ladies, that your craftiness exceeds that of men, would find it hard to produce such an example as that I am about to relate to you, wherein I intend to set forth the great craft of a husband, and the simplicity and good nature of his wife." [The preceding novel and epilogue, which are found in all the MSS., are wanting in the edition of 1588. Claude Gouget has substituted the following for them in that of 1559.J How two lovers cleverly consummated their amours, the issue ot which was happy.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The widow's beauty attracted round her many great lords and gentlemen as suitors, some of whom were ac- tuated only by love, others had an eye to her wealth ; for, in addition to her beauty, she was very rich, One gentleman especially, named the Seigneur des Cheriots, was so assiduous in his wooing that he never failed to pre- sent himself at her lever 2a\^ her coucher, and spent as much time in her society as he possibly could. The prince, who thought that a man of such mean birth and appearance did not deserve to be treated so favourably, was not at all pleased with his assiduities, and often remonstrated with the widow on the subject ; but as she was a duke's daughter, she excused herself, saying that she talked generally to everybody, and that their intimacy would be less observed when it was seen that she did not talk more to one than to another. After some time, this Sieur des Cheriots pressed his suit so much that she prom- ised to marry him, more in consequence of his importunity than of her preference for him, on condition that he would not require her to declare the marriage until her daughters were married. After this promise, the gentle- man used to go to her chamber without scruple, at any hour he pleased ; and there was only a femme-de-cham- bre and a man who were privy to the affair. The prince was so displeased at seeing the gentle- 438 TirE IIEPTAMEKO.V OF THE [Nin'el 53. man becoming more and more domesticated with her he loved, that he could not help saying to her, " I have always prized your honour as that of my own sister. You know with what propriety I have always addressed you, and what pleasure I feel in loving a lady so discreet and virtuous as you ; but if I thought that another ob- tained by importunity what I would not ask for against your inclination, I could not endure it, nor would it do you honour. I say this to you because you are young and fair,' and have hitherto enjoyed a good reputation ; but you are beginning to be the subject of reports greatly to your disadvantage. Though this person has neither birth, fortune, credit, knowledge, nor good looks in com- parison with you, it would have been better, nevertheless, that you had married him than have given rise to sus- picion, as you are doing. Tell me then, I entreat, if you are resolved to love him ; for I dp not choose to have him for a companion, but v^ill leave you wholly to him, and will no longer entertain for you the sentiments I have hitherto cherished-"

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was one of the most astonishing pieces of film I had ever seen, and I felt a thrill at the violent intrusion as well as dismay at the smashing of something so strange and intricate; I was disappointed when the attendant, realising I was there and perhaps in need of encouragement, tapped a button and transformed the picture into the relative banality of American college boys sticking their cocks up each other’s assholes. ‘Cinema, sir?’ he said. ‘We’ve got some really hot-core hard films …’ His heart wasn’t in it so I paid him my fiver and left him to the wonderful world of nature. I went down the stairs, lit by one gloomy red-painted bulb. The cinema itself was a small cellar room, the squalor of which was only fully apparent at the desolating moment in the early hours when the show ended for the night and the lights were suddenly switched on, revealing the bare, damp-stained walls, the rubbish on the floor, and the remaining audience, either asleep or doing things best covered by darkness. It had perhaps ten tiers of seats, salvaged from the refurbishment of some bona fide picture house: some lacked arms, which helped patrons get to know each other, and one lacked a seat, and was the repeated cause of embarrassment to diffident people, blinded by the dark, who chose it as the first empty place to hand and sat down heavily on the floor instead. I had not been there for months and was struck again by its character: pushing open the door I felt it weigh on sight, smell and hearing. The smell was smoke and sweat, a stale, male odour tartishly overlaid with a cheap lemon-scented air-freshener like a taxi and dusted from time to time with a trace of Trouble for Men. The sound was the laid-back aphrodisiac pop music which, as the films had no sound-track, played continuously and repetitively to enhance the mood and cover the quieter noises made by the customers. The look of the place changed in the first minute or so, as I waited just inside the door for my eyes to accustom themselves to the near dark. The only light came from the small screen, and from a dim yellow ‘Fire Exit’ sign. I had once taken this exit, which led to a fetid back staircase with a locked door at the top. Smoke thickened the air and hung in the projector’s beam. It was important to sit near the back, where it was darker and more went on, but also essential to avoid the attentions of truly gruesome people. Slightly encumbered with my bag I moved into a row empty except for a heavy businessman at the far end. It was not a very good house, so I settled down to watch and wait. Occasionally cigarettes were lit and the men shifted in their seats and looked around; the mood faltered between tension and lethargy.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  And he is not alone: On a nearby mat, in the other 171-pound 3A semifinal, an undefeated wrestler named Austin Boehm has pinned his opponent in even less time to earn his spot against Jay for the state title. Boehm is from Urbandale, a Des Moines suburb, and he will take the local goodwill along with his season record of 38–0 into Sat urday night. Jay has been around the sport too long to put much stock in an undefeated record, because, in Iowa as everywhere else, the issue is almost always quality of competition. All Jay really knows is that Boehm is good enough to be the other last person standing, and that, somewhere, there will be someone who thinks Boehm can take down Borschel in the biggest match of Jay’s life. And, once again, that is all Jay needs to know. It’s enough. They begin wrapping things up on Saturday afternoon inside the Barn: Stories, careers, endings. The people file in and out of the freezing cold, some of them standing in the lobby trying to get their hands on tickets for the evening finals session, the only one of the State Tournament to which a reserved seat is necessary. Naturally, all those seats were sold last fall, and so now it’ll be a seller’s market. “But they won’t scalp—you’ll get the ticket for face value,” says a father from Glenwood, a man looking, however improbably, for five seats together for Saturday night. “It would be unsportsmanlike to scalp at an event like this.” In the afternoon consolations, some of those wrestling stories are being told. With the full North-Linn crowd in the stands, Ben Fisher, still in the aftermath of his two Friday defeats, goes out for the final match of his career and finds himself wrestling for fifth place against his old nemesis, Alex Riniker, the boy to whom Ben lost at conference and districts but beat at sectionals. Considering everything, Ben appears surprisingly ready to wrestle; it’s not until the match begins that it becomes easy to see how physically depleted both boys are. From the start of the match forward, it is a grim struggle for position on the mat, two wrestlers who know each other’s moves well enough to blunt almost every offensive maneuver. Each time Ben tries to dive for Riniker’s ankle, Riniker deftly moves backward. Riniker, in turn, can’t get a decent hold on one of Ben’s legs, because Ben knows better than to let his opponent beat him with that move. It’s exhausting to watch. Three full periods of grind produce a 1–1 tie that spills into overtime, and then Ben makes the mistake—he has made it before—of appearing for just an instant to stop wrestling as the two boys near the edge of the mat. It’s a tiny let-up, almost nothing, but Riniker notices. He summons up the energy to maneuver around Ben for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it takedown, and that is the end of it. Ben finishes in sixth place.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  In the first year after Jay, the Lions sent five wrestlers to Des Moines, only one of them—Matt McDonough—a returnee from the year before. McDonough battled through the 3A bracket at 112 pounds to capture his first state title, becoming only the fourth individual champion in school history. Jay’s gradually appreciating assessment of Matt as a freshman had proved spot-on; in his sophomore season, Matt was stronger, more assured and consistently tenacious. But Doug Streicher had other reasons to be pleased: Jason Nelson made a surprise run at 152 pounds that resulted in a second-place finish; Wes Shetterly took sixth at his weight class. Linn-Mar, after four years of being known for Jay’s exploits, was producing good wrestlers up and down the scale. By all accounts, it had been another solid wrestling year for the high-schoolers in eastern Iowa. Of course, it couldn’t compare with 2005, when that bumper crop of talent had come blasting through. That group was epic. It would be impossible to re-create that kind of magic. Anyway, they were long gone. So it seemed. When the Iowa wrestling world came unhinged in the spring of 2006 , it did so in the manner Hemingway once suggested of the man who went broke: gradually and then suddenly. The Jim Zalesky years at the University of Iowa had built up this pressure, season by season, championship aspiration followed by NCAA disappointment. Recriminations flew among the bickering faithful, with many calling for Zalesky to go. The ghost of Gable, and all that winning, seemed to hover everywhere. It was finally too much. Zalesky’s team had rallied from a lackluster season the year before to finish second at the NCAAs in the spring of 2004, giving rise to the optimism that Iowa might prove strong enough to rebuild itself from within. Two winters later, that belief was almost fully diminished. Iowa finished the 2005–06 regular season with a 10-7 dual record, absorbing its most defeats in nearly forty years, and the Hawkeyes limped home a distant sixth place at the Big Ten Conference championships, which many Iowans interpreted as a rebuke either of the talent Zalesky had picked for his team or of his ability to coach it. A fourth-place finish at the NCAAs, at which the Hawkeyes crowned no individual national champions for the second straight year, confirmed things: Iowa no longer was perceived as an automatic threat to win. Something had to be done. Still, it took an almost staggering turn of events for things to eventually blow apart the way they did. A job opening had been created at Ohio State, and rumors were flying around the national wrestling community as to who might be recruited to it. Two of the names near the top of the list were Cael Sanderson, the Iowa State assistant, and Tom Brands.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  When the Iowa wrestling world came unhinged in the spring of 2006, it did so in the manner Hemingway once suggested of the man who went broke: gradually and then suddenly. The Jim Zalesky years at the University of Iowa had built up this pressure, season by season, championship aspiration followed by NCAA disappointment. Recriminations flew among the bickering faithful, with many calling for Zalesky to go. The ghost of Gable, and all that winning, seemed to hover everywhere. It was finally too much. Zalesky’s team had rallied from a lackluster season the year before to finish second at the NCAAs in the spring of 2004, giving rise to the optimism that Iowa might prove strong enough to rebuild itself from within. Two winters later, that belief was almost fully diminished. Iowa finished the 2005–06 regular season with a 10-7 dual record, absorbing its most defeats in nearly forty years, and the Hawkeyes limped home a distant sixth place at the Big Ten Conference championships, which many Iowans interpreted as a rebuke either of the talent Zalesky had picked for his team or of his ability to coach it. A fourth-place finish at the NCAAs, at which the Hawkeyes crowned no individual national champions for the second straight year, confirmed things: Iowa no longer was perceived as an automatic threat to win. Something had to be done. Still, it took an almost staggering turn of events for things to eventually blow apart the way they did. A job opening had been created at Ohio State, and rumors were flying around the national wrestling community as to who might be recruited to it. Two of the names near the top of the list were Cael Sanderson, the Iowa State assistant, and Tom Brands. Among the Iowa faithful, the notion of Ohio State taking its program to championship heights on the back of Sanderson or Brands was too much to bear, and it prompted a seismic shift. On the same day in March, Iowa fired Zalesky with a year remaining on his contract, and Iowa State University announced the surprise “retirement” of longtime coach Bobby Douglas. It was a one-two punch unprecedented in the annals of the sport in the state—and it was a direct response to the perceived outside threat. For Iowa State, moving Douglas aside meant creating room to immediately anoint Sanderson as the coach and the recruiting face of the program, and to get him away from Ohio State’s clutches. Iowa’s interest in Zalesky’s successor lay a bit farther east. For Tom Brands, Iowa’s offer to have him return as head coach was to be

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Tim seemed fine with Sandy, but when we got in Eddie’s car he suddenly got out and went to sit in front with Eddie, so it was S., Chancey & me in the back. Ch was bursting with vulgar health, his skin, close up, had a waxy smoothness like church candles. I felt how big he was, squashed up next to me—his trousers immaculately white & straining. S., who thinks him so handsome (as well as a boor), cd barely be fagged to speak to him; whilst I, who don’t think he’s handsome, chatted to him happily enough—the usual thing. Tim & Eddie were madly earnest in front & talked about the League of Nations all the way to Witney. Tom Flew had brought the dogs in his van, & since a couple of other friends of Eddie’s joined us at Witney (one of them I thought I’d seen before, fair & amiable with a broken nose), they went on the last bit in the car, while Chancey & I took a ride in the van. The smell, as ever, was asphyxiating, & what with the lurching of the van I thought I was going to bring up the excellent kidneys and bacon Matthew had fixed for me earlier on. Old Tom himself, in his dog-eared, dog-mouthed, dogshit-coloured cap & hacking jacket, stank as bad as the dogs. He kept turning round while he was driving & swearing at them through the cage. Then they wd yap & whine, panting all the while in a rank, warm, excited sort of way. I was quite glad to be penned up against Chancey (we had a buttock each on the passenger’s seat) for he at least smelt of shaving-soap & hair-lotion. We stopped just in time. Tom’s boy (who improves on acquaintance—farcically rustic, of course, but his hands are magnificent, an octave and a half, I shd think) said there had been a fair few hares—but he’d been kicking about in the lane for hours, marking the spot, & it seemed fairly hopeless. At this stage I wd have been glad to find myself back in Oxford, & Sandy was pretty tragically keen on the idea of bed, a darkened room & a bottle of aspirins. Still, off we set, for what turned out to be an utterly futile morning’s sport, with poor visibility, a kind of clinging drizzle in the air, the mud making things very tricky, & not a sniff of a hare less than several hours old. Eventually Tim called off & we toiled through to another road, up which Tom’s boy miraculously appeared in Hubert’s car, looking absolutely terrified, with the lunch in the back.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court again reinforced the protections that shield prosecutors from accountability. A month before an inmate named John Thompson was scheduled to be executed in Louisiana, a crime lab report was uncovered that contradicted the State’s case against him for a robbery-murder that had taken place fourteen years earlier. State courts overturned his conviction and death sentence, and he was subsequently acquitted of all charges and released. He filed a civil suit, and a New Orleans jury awarded Thompson $14 million. The jury found that the district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., had illegally suppressed evidence of Thompson’s innocence and had allowed him to spend fourteen years in prison for a crime he had not committed. Connick appealed the judgment, and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the award in a bitterly divided 5–4 decision. As a result of immunity law, the Court held that a prosecutor cannot be held liable for misconduct in a criminal case, even if he intentionally and illegally withheld evidence of innocence. The Court’s decision was strongly criticized by scholars and Court observers, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a compelling dissent, but Thompson did not get any money. We faced similar obstacles in Walter’s case. After a year of depositions, hearings, and pretrial litigation, we eventually reached a settlement with most of the defendants that would provide Walter with a few hundred thousand dollars. Walter’s claim against Monroe County for Sheriff Tate’s misconduct could not be settled, so we appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Law enforcement officers generally have no personal resources to pay damages to victims of misconduct, so the city, county, or agency that employs them is typically the target of any civil action that seeks compensation. That’s why we had sought relief from Monroe County for the misconduct of its sheriff. The county took the position that even though the sheriff’s jurisdiction is limited to the county, he’s elected by people only in the county, and he’s paid by the county, he’s not an employee of the county. The county sheriff was an employee of the State of Alabama, the county claimed. State governments are broadly shielded from recovery for their employees’ misconduct unless the employee works for an agency that can be sued. If Tate was a state officer, Monroe County would have no liability for his misconduct and no recovery would be possible from the State of Alabama. Unfortunately for Walter, the Supreme Court ruled that county sheriffs in Alabama are state officers, again in a close 5–4 decision, which limited our ability to recover damages for the most egregious misconduct in Walter’s case. We ultimately reached settlement with all parties, but I was disappointed that we couldn’t get more for Walter. Adding insult to injury, Tate went on to be re-elected sheriff, and he remains in office today; he has been sheriff continuously for more than twenty-five years. —