The Imaginary Girlfriend (13 page)

The semifinals: Brendan Irving, seeded fifth at 135 pounds, pins the number-one seed at 4:40 of the third period. Brendan pinned all his opponents in the ‘89 New England Class A tournament. P
HOTO:
J
ANET
I
RVING

Coach Irving embracing son Brenden, seconds after Brendan won the '89 New England Class A title at135 pounds—by a fall in 4:52 of the third period. P
HOTOGRAPHER UNKNOW

At 31 pounds, Everett looks like a future middleweight. P
HOTO: COOK NEILSON

I put my Vermont Academy wrestlers on the team bus with my co-coach, Mike Kennelly, and I asked Mike and the team to forgive me for not riding on the bus with them one last time. I wanted to ride back to Vermont in Colin's car, with Colin and Brendan. On the long drive home (we were still somewhere in New Hampshire), Colin picked up a speeding ticket—shortly after delivering a lecture to Brendan and me about the infallibility of his new radar-detection system. But we could laugh about the ticket. Brendan, like his brother before him, had won the New England Class A title. It was the happiest night of my life.

I suppose I could mope around, wishing that my wrestling career, as a competitor, had ended half as happily as my life as a coach. But I think I've been lucky: I've always taken more pleasure from my children than I have from myself; I enjoy my children, and I try not to drive them—I drive myself.

In 1976, I was in the middle of
The World According to Garp
, and I was struggling with it—the novel had three first chapters, and I couldn't decide whether Garp or his mother was the main character. I had applied for a Guggenheim, but I didn't know that this time I was going to get one—I'd applied and
hadn't
gotten one before. I was teaching at Mount Holyoke—an all-women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts—and I was working out in the wrestling room at Amherst College.

Henry Littlefield was the coach at Amherst then; Henry was a heavyweight—everything about him was grand. He was more than expansive, he was eloquent; he was better than good-humored, he was jolly. Henry was very rare, a kind of Renaissance man among wrestling coaches, and the atmosphere in the Amherst wrestling room was, to Henry's credit, both aggressive and good-natured—a difficult combination to achieve.

I was living in a faculty house on the edge of the Mount Holyoke athletic fields—Colin and Brendan had a great “yard” to play in, and the college pool to swim in. I arranged my classes so that I could run or use the weight room at the Mount Holyoke gym in the early morning; I would write for a couple of hours at midday—and again, late at night, after the children were in bed. In the afternoons, I would drive to the Amherst wrestling room; I often took Colin with me—he was 10 and 11 that wrestling season.

I weighed 162 when that season began; there was a postseason open tournament at Springfield College, and I intended to enter it at I36V2 pounds. I was 34; the weight came off a little harder than it once had. After three months, I was holding my weight pretty easily at 142; the rest, as wrestlers frequently say, was “just water.” That was all I was drinking in those months—just water. I had half a grapefruit with a teaspoon of honey for breakfast, and usually an apple or a banana; I had a bowl of oatmeal with a teaspoon of maple syrup for lunch; for dinner, I had some steamed fish and vegetables—lots of vegetables.

The last week before the tournament I was consistently weighing under 140, but I couldn't get under 138—that was the “water.” Then I got sick; I had bronchitis, and the antibiotic was intolerable on my empty stomach. The doctor told me I had to eat to save my stomach, or give up the antibiotic; I couldn't give up the antibiotic because I couldn't wrestle with bronchitis. I tried to soothe my stomach with a little yogurt, or some skim milk. I felt better, but in two days I weighed 145. I couldn't make the 136½-pound class, although I knew it was my best wrestling weight. The next weight class was 149½; I started eating more oatmeal, and I added some rice to the steamed fish and vegetables.

At Springfield I weighed in at 147, with all my clothes on—and I'd eaten breakfast before the weigh-ins. The other contenders at 149V2 were stripped naked; they exhaled their last breath before stepping on the scales. I tried not to notice how big they were. I was in the training room, getting taped—I had had a “loose” left pinky finger all season; it kept dislocating at the big knuckle joint—and Colin was looking grim. He was just beginning to get interested in wrestling; he had watched every detail of the weigh-ins.

“What are you thinking, Colin?” I asked him.

“You look like a thirty-six-pounder, Dad,” Colin said.

I had never thought of the tournament at Springfield as my last tournament; all I'd hoped was to win one or two matches—and maybe place. It hadn't occurred to me that
watching
me lose might be painful for Colin. For Brendan, who was only six that spring, watching me wrestle, win or lose, was no big deal. Colin was old enough to realize that losing a wrestling match took a lot more out of me than losing a couple of sets of weekend tennis to a friend.

I drew a wild man in the first round. “Talent is overrated,” Ted Seabrooke used to say. The guy was talented, and very dangerous, but he was also stupid. I was overcautious in the first period; I pulled out of a couple of sure takedowns because I was afraid of an upper-body throw that the wild man appeared to like in the underhook position—I came out ahead on takedowns, anyway. It was in the top position that the wild man was most dangerous. He was a leg man, and he hit me with a cheap tilt off a cross-body ride. (I was lucky it was only the tilt I got caught in; what the leg man was looking for was a bent-leg Turk—very uncomfortable.) I'd been leading 6-3, but the near-fall tied it up at 6-6—and I was still on the bottom. Off the whistle, the leg man put in his near leg for the cross-body ride again, but this time I drilled his head into the mat before he could tie up my far arm; it was a most basic defense against a cross-body ride. Ted Seabrooke had warned me that the move wouldn't work against a
good
leg man, but this guy wasn't good—he was sloppy.

At first I thought I'd given him a concussion, but the wild man needed only 45 seconds of injury time to clear his head. He was angry at me. It's stupid to be angry at your opponent when you wrestle; also, my move had been perfectly legal—it was a Ted Seabrooke move, not a Cliff Gallagher move.

The referee had blown the whistle for the injury without giving me points for my reversal, so the score was still 6-6—and I was still on the bottom. Off the whistle, Talented-but-Stupid put in his near leg again; once again, I protected my far arm and drilled his head into the mat. This time, the wild man needed a full minute to clear his head; thus he ran out of injury time—I won by injury default. The leg man was still angry; I could tell he thought he would have won the match if only I hadn't kept banging his head into the mat. I tend to think that he would have won, too; he seemed tireless to me—Tireless-but-Stupid. The wild man told me he hoped he would see me in one of the consolation rounds. If I lost in one of the championship rounds, at any time before the finals, I would drop down to the wrestle-backs, to the consolation brackets. It was conceivable that, if the leg man kept winning consolation matches, we would meet again. I hoped not.

(“There is no such thing as
half
a cross-body ride,” Coach Seabrooke used to say. “If you put a leg in, you've got to get hold of something else—unless you
want
to get your head drilled into the mat.”)

In the locker room, the wild man with the headache was slamming lockers and kicking benches. I tried to stay away from him, but he followed me into the training room, where I had to have my “loose” left pinky finger retaped.

“I don't like anybody fuckin' with my head!” the leg man told me.

I felt old—I felt like a coach, not like a wrestler. Quoting Ted Seabrooke, I said: “If you put a leg in, you've got to get hold of something else—unless you
want
to get your head drilled into the mat.”

“Shit!” the wild man shouted. (An inexplicable utterance—on a level of intelligence with
half
a cross-body ride.)

I was glad that Colin was in the stands with Brendan. Don Hendrie was in the stands with his children, too. When I was retaped, I went back up on the floor of the gym where the mats were laid out. A couple of Amherst wrestlers were also entered in the tournament; I watched their matches—all day, we would take turns coaching each other.

The toughest-looking kid in my weight class was a guy from the Coast Guard Academy; he was very slick on his feet, and he liked the high-crotch series for takedowns—my best defense, my whizzer, was worthless against a high-crotch. I knew I would have trouble with the guy from the Coast Guard, but I made the mistake of looking ahead, in the brackets, to my match with him; I overlooked the guy I had to wrestle in the next round.

He was someone in the military. He told me later he'd been stationed in Germany and had wrestled a lot of Greco-Roman matches over there; at the time, I think, he was stationed somewhere in New Jersey. I had my mind on the guy from the Coast Guard Academy, an error in concentration—and further indication, to me, that it was time to be a coach and not a wrestler. I gave up a couple of avoidable takedowns in the first period. Trailing by only three points in the second, I panicked too early and took an out-of-position shot at a takedown; he countered me to my back. When I fought off my back, I was trailing by seven points. Now it was time to panic. I managed an escape before the end of the period, but I couldn't complete a takedown before the buzzer; starting the third, I was six points behind. I got another escape, and a takedown, and he was hit with a penalty point for stalling; I rode him out, in the final period (I picked up another point for riding time), but I was aware of myself as a 36-pounder trying to turn a 49-pounder—he was too big to turn. I lost by a point. It was a respectable match, but I'd given it away in the first period. “Mental mistakes,” Coach Seabrooke would have told me.

I dropped down into the consolation brackets and was pinned in my first match. I had scored with a snap-down in the first period—I was leading 2-1, because the guy had escaped from me following my takedown, when I got caught in a nice upper-body move: a bear hug with an inside trip. I was pinned before I could get my breath back. When I went to the training room, to get untaped, I saw that my left pinky finger was pointing straight up from the back of my hand; it was dislocated at the big knuckle joint again, but I was unaware of when or how it had happened. The trainer popped the finger back in place.

I was sitting on the training table, with my left hand packed in ice, when my opponent from the second round—the guy who'd been stationed in Germany and who was still in the military in New Jersey—came into the training room to ice his neck. He'd run into the guy from the Coast Guard Academy in the semifinals—he'd lost—and he wanted to know about the guy who'd just pinned me; he was a boy from Springfield College. I told the military man to watch out for the bear hug with the inside trip.

I still wasn't thinking that this was my last tournament; I didn't feel bad, although I was angry at myself for getting pinned. Then the military man and I shook hands, and I wished him luck the rest of the way; since I'd been eliminated from the tournament, and my children were there, I thought it was time to take the children home. I felt like having a beer, and eating as much as my shrunken stomach would hold.

In parting, the military man said: “Nice match, sir.”

That was all. That was it. He meant me no harm. But the damage was done. He was probably 24, and I was 34, but when he called me “sir,” I felt older than I feel now, at 53; I felt ancient. It was time to be a coach, but not a wrestler.

Later, I phoned Ted Seabrooke. (At the time, Ted's death was four years away; he'd been sick, but I had no idea how bad things were going to get for him—I doubt that he knew either.) I gave Ted the results of the tournament, and I told him that I'd decided to call an end to competing as a wrestler—I told him the “sir” story.