OK - here's a wrestling story with a really bizarre coincidence that still amazes me. Bear with me here because it requires a little bit of background history to understand the whole story.
Way back in 1977, after I had graduated from Penn State, I started my first engineering job with General Dynamics in San Diego. I became pretty close friends with one of the guys in my group at work who happened to be a Pitt graduate. (Not relevant to this story) One day he came to work and told us he had been tapped for jury duty. After sitting through a trial for about a week, he returned to work and said he found the experience so interesting that he decided to get a law degree. So he worked out a plan to make it happen and eventually left the job to attend law school. We kept in touch for a number of years, but after a while, we both moved too many times and lost track of each other.
OK, now fast forward to 2004. I had moved to WA for a while but ended up back in San Diego again. While in WA, I made some friends through wrestling. One of them was the head coach at a HS a little East of Seattle and his son had become a pretty decent wrestler. In 2004, I saw that he was going for his 3rd state title, so I decided to go to WA for the weekend of the state tournament and watch his son wrestle. I went ahead and booked a flight and made arrangements with a friend for a place to stay.
At the beginning of the same week for the state tournament, for some odd reason I started thinking about my old friend from our days in San Diego, so I did a quick Internet search for him on Google. Sure enough, I got a hit and it turned out he was a partner in a law firm in Seattle! The web page for his law firm listed his email contact so I sent him a quick note hoping he would respond. Sure enough, I got a quick reply with the same humor I was used to hearing from him in the good old days. So we quickly traded a few emails catching up with each other and then I told him that I was actually going to be in the Seattle area the coming weekend to see a friend's son wrestle for his 3rd state title. He replied that was interesting because his wife's nephew was going to be wrestling in the same tournament, and he thought there was a chance that his wife's nephew knew my friend's son. Well it turned out that we were both talking about the same guy! My friend had married my other friend's sister about 15 years earlier and we never had any idea of the connection!
Needless to say, that weekend turned into a really special occasion. All of us from both families had a great time seeing each other and my friend's son did win his 3rd state championship. This happened 20 years ago and I'm still in awe every time I think about it.
I keep two quotes posted on the wall by my desk at work that are largely inspired by what happened.
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." -- Albert Einstein
"Too coincidental to be a coincidence." -- Yogi Berra
