What do wrestling and restoration comedy have in common? At first glance, very little. Wrestling is a blood sport, like boxing or cage fighting. Restoration comedy is a literary genre that features risqué plays popular in London around 1660. However, despite their glaring dissimilarities, each played a key role in my development, first as an athlete, then as a student, and finally, as a teacher.
Let me explain. As a high school freshman, I tried out for the wrestling team. Despite my inexperience, I made both the team and the starting lineup. Wrestling has a steep learning curve, and in the early going, I took my share of lumps. But my coach saw that I had potential, and he invited me to join him at a nearby club that included some of the top wrestlers in the area. Within a couple months, my skills, stamina, and toughness all improved significantly, and I started racking up the wins. In the three years that followed, I developed into one of the best wrestlers on a talented team, qualified for the state tournament, and became captain. Based on that success, I looked forward to competing in college.
All well and good except I chose to attend Bucknell University, which had a very strong program and, essentially, a Division I schedule. Although I was not recruited, I asked the wrestling coach if I could walk on and try to earn a spot. He said sure, so I got myself in the best shape of my life. I attended the first practice in November reasonably confident about my prospects. Then a student named Tom Scotten entered the room. He was a freshman who had been recruited; he was also in my weight class. After a few warm-up stretches, he vaulted into a handstand and walked upside down in a full circle around the mat. Then, in one motion, he flipped from his hands back to his feet and executed a full backward summersault. At that moment, I realized two things: one, I would never beat this guy. And two, because we were the same weight and the same age, I would never make the team.
To say that I was disappointed is an understatement. Much of my high school reputation and confidence had been forged on the wrestling mat. Suddenly that disappeared, leaving me without a reliable identity, a precarious fate for a lowly freshman trying to make his way on a bustling university campus. Oddly, I found relief from this predicament a month later when a fellow student from my dorm floor was cast in a play staged by Bucknell’s theater troupe, Cap and Dagger. I didn’t know much about drama, especially a three-hundred-year-old restoration comedy by William Wycherley called The Country Wife. Basically, I was going to support a friend. But what I saw on stage that night changed my life forever.
Some context here. Restoration comedy is so-named because it coincides with the return of the English monarchy after eighteen years of repressive Puritan rule. You may recall that, to Puritans, everyone was a potential sinner, and every sin meant the prospect of eternal damnation. As you can imagine, after almost two decades of this holy terror, Londoners were ready to party like it was 1999. Nowhere was this more evident than in their theater, which featured comedies full of sexual hijinks, bawdy puns, and naughty double entendres. The fireworks began in Act One, and I was immediately transfixed. The production was very polished and professional, but it was the language that drew my fascination, a verbal battle of wits played out against the backdrop of deceptively ordinary drawing room conversations. I had never heard or seen anything quite like it. And while it may sound like hyperbole, when the final curtain dropped at play’s end, a new identity and direction within me had formed.
Skeptical readers may doubt the transformative power of a single event. And I am certainly not suggesting that one dramatic performance changed me from a wrestler into a litterateur. But in its aftermath, I began to think a lot less about wrestling, and a lot more about language and books. Of course, there were other influences that contributed to this change, especially the inspirational tutelage of English professors like Michael Payne and Catherine Smith, and my appointment as managing editor of Bucknell’s superb school paper, The Bucknellian. But it was the university’s theater department where the magic happened. After The Country Wife, I got involved, mostly offstage, in as many plays as possible, from Marat Sade to The Tempest. I even got a bit part in a wonderful play, The Physicists, in which I performed a song by Buxtehude on a plastic recorder to a packed house in Coleman Hall. It wasn’t scoring a third-period winning takedown against a crosstown wrestling rival, but in its own way, it was electrifying, and it remains one of the most savored memories from my college years.
At the outset of this essay, I wrote that wrestling and theater were big influences on my evolution as an athlete and as a student. But what about my role as a teacher? Like my colleagues at Pingry, I always encourage students to explore as many different avenues as possible. Take a new elective. Write for The Record. Attend a play. Better yet, audition for one. Somewhere beyond the familiar, you may stumble upon an interest that rearranges your sense of who you are. Two years ago in a Pingry podcast, Tanya Puranik ’26 asked me if I thought it was okay for students in high school to zero in on one particular future: pick a popular college major, pursue a specific career, and achieve a certain lifestyle. I replied that, while there is nothing wrong with considering those possibilities, it may be unwise (as I put it), to place all your roulette chips on red 32 when you’re that young. I also added that, of all the students I knew in college, including myself, at least half of us took different paths than the ones we had started on. So take it from a former wrestler, converted thespian, and current English teacher. Go for what you want with all you’ve got, but don’t stop exploring along the way. If you do, you may never know what you missed.
Incidentally, Tom Scotten finished his Bucknell career with an 89–4–1 record. He was named the team’s outstanding wrestler four years in a row, qualified for the NCAA tournament four times, and was honored as the university’s top male athlete in 1978.
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To contact the author: Mr. Keating
Author photo by Anthony "Truncs" Truncale '26