My first year I’d been able to master the standard tactics of classical Greco-Roman Olympic wrestling that Coach Karanov had such trouble hammering into the skulls of many of the other boys. And the linked sequence of grips, throws, and countergrips had come easily to me, long before the other guys understood them. In fact, whenever the coach needed someone to demonstrate new tactics in the ring, he usually chose me.
But when we finally began our interclub matches against teams from SKA, Dynamo, or Trud, I was consistently defeated in the ring. I knew how to maneuver, but I was just not strong enough to make my holds stick or to toss my opponent. Most of the fellows in my weight class were my height. However, they were a lot thinner, with taut, wiry muscles.
For the next two seasons, I muddled through with a mediocre record. Then one afternoon at the Spartak complex, I overheard two boys from the Metalurg team going over the roster for the matches.
“Who’s this Zuyev?” a boy asked his friend.
“Oh, don’t worry about him,” the other fellow answered. “He’s a weakling.”
I stepped back in the hallway, my ears burning with embarrassment. And as if to prove their point, I lost both my matches that afternoon within three minutes.
That was a Saturday afternoon. All day Sunday I moped about the apartment, trying to decide what to do. I simply couldn’t face the continued embarrassment of defeat, knowing deep down that I was potentially one of the best wrestlers at the Spartak complex. Then I made my decision. The Kuybyshev Aviation Institute had an excellent gymnasium, with a complete weight room equipped with bodybuilding apparatus. The next afternoon I was there, requesting use of the facilities. Officially you had to be sixteen to work with weights, and I was not yet fifteen. But the coach there was sympathetic and signed me on.
For the next six weeks I took the electric train to the Aviation Institute every evening instead of to the Spartak complex. As far as Coach Karanov knew, I had simply dropped out, another disappointed student wrestler. But I had another plan. Before, I had never tried systematically to increase my strength, muscle tone, and endurance. Now I worked at it. My mother even borrowed barbells from someone at her office for me to use at home. And one of the first things I did was stop eating sweets. Instead of chocolate pastries and honey rolls, I ate bowls of kasha, chopped beef, and salad, and I asked my mother to stock the refrigerator with fresh fruit and milk.
At the Aviation Institute weight room, I began with light barbells and worked myself up to heavy bench presses and long, multiple repetitions on the spring apparatus to build up my thighs and back muscles. Four weeks later the fat had shrunk to muscle. At the end of six weeks I could bench-press 130 pounds, which was 20 pounds over the norm for my group at Spartak.
Late one warm Tuesday afternoon after school, I found Coach Karanov in the locker room.
“I’m back, Alexey Ivanovich,” I said. “Will you give me another chance?”
He looked at me thoughtfully, then nodded. “I will, Sasha,” he said, “but only if you’re serious this time.”
And that I was. I never missed another day of practice. Every evening I stayed there after the training was over to work out with weights. When the coach gave us twenty push-ups, I did twenty-one. If we had to run a mile, I ran a quarter of a mile more.
And I began winning matches. I was chosen for the 150-pound class traveling team. It was a real honor to ride the train with my friends on the first road trip to Syzran, where we defeated the Spartak juniors in straight matches. As the wrestling program wound up at the end of that school year, I had the great pleasure of hearing opponents actually groan when they read the roster and saw my name matched against them.
But I wasn’t so successful at School Number Two. The academic standards were high, but I just did not feel challenged intellectually. In fact, by the time I was fifteen, school bored me. I was only interested in wrestling and didn’t have the time for my studies. This attitude, of course, kept me out of the political intrigues of Komsomol and put me in bad favor with the faculty.
Like other bored adolescent boys, I became rebellious and joined forces with two close friends, Vovka Ivanov and Igor Devyatkin, to harass the teachers. We always chose the last table at the rear of the classroom, which the teachers had dubbed “Kolyma,” for the Siberian gold mine prison where the hardest tattooed criminals were banished. One of our favorite targets was a chubby math teacher we scornfully called Mishka. Vovka and Igor helped me make poor Mishka’s life difficult. We booby-trapped his chalk pieces by drilling them hollow and put thumbtacks under the piled lesson forms on his desk so that he stuck his thumb. Once we used a stepladder to tape a chunk of ice on the glass lampshade hanging above his desk, so the water dripped steadily onto his head. But our best prank was when we pulled the pins from the hinges of the classroom door. As Mishka strode into the room, the heavy wooden door clattered on top of him and set off uncontrollable laughter.
He knew where to find the villains. A moment later he grabbed me by the collar and tried to slap me. I wasn’t about to be hit by a butterball like him and twisted his arm behind his back. Ten minutes later I was standing at attention before our principal, “Rema” Alexandrovna, the tough, middle-aged woman who tried to run her school fairly for both faculty and students.
“Zuyev,” she stated coldly, as if she were a State prosecutor, “your mother will be here tomorrow. You are to be expelled.”
Somehow my mother managed to patch things up the next day.
Then my friends and I were caught sneaking wine into the school Red Army party. We shared a bottle with an old cleaning lady, but she informed on us the next day anyway. Again I was hauled before Rema. “This is what you want, isn’t it?” She calmly lifted a printed Ministry of Education form from her desk. “This is your ‘wolf’s ticket.’”
It was a formal expulsion form, the “ticket” to a dead-end life. Any youth expelled from school was excluded from further training, either academic or vocational, condemned to a life of manual labor at best, or even a criminal career.
Again my mother intervened successfully. But my academic record itself was bad enough to keep me from the ninth and tenth years of academic study at the school. In fact, I had no interest in more school. I told them that I wanted to leave classrooms behind and get on with adult life. Rema noted that, in any event, my poor grades probably meant I would flunk the eighth-year exams.
My mother turned from Rema’s desk to glare at me, her face set in anger. “I cannot believe that my son is this stupid.”
“Evidently, Lydia Mikhailnovna,” Rema said scornfully, “he is both stupid and lazy.”
My pride was hurt, which, of course, was what they both intended. “If you give me a chance,” I said, “I’ll show you I’m not stupid.”
For the rest of that spring, I cut back on my wrestling training and worked hard, preparing for the exams. I studied on the train when the team took road trips. I studied on the trolley riding to and from practice. I studied hard at home each night. And when I entered the test rooms that June, I felt confident. The math and science exams were rigorous, but I passed in the upper quarter. I scored high on geography. Soviet political history didn’t interest me much, but I managed a passing grade. I liked military history, and I did very well on the section about the defense of the Motherland. I had made my point. Now no one could call me either stupid or lazy. But I’d had enough of this theoretical classroom study. I still intended to skip the final two academic years at School Number Two and to become an apprentice electrician at Kuybyshev’s electro-technology vocational school.