The Imaginary Girlfriend Read Free

pit. I always wondered what the visiting wrestlers thought of the gunfire.
    My first match in the pit was a learning experience. First-year wrestlers, or even second-year wrestlers, are not often starters on prep-school or high-school wrestling teams of any competitive quality. In New Hampshire, in the 1950s, wrestling—unlike baseball or basketball or hockey or skiing—was not something every kid grew up doing. There are certain illogical things to learn about any sport; wrestling, especially, does not come naturally. A double-leg takedown is
not
like a head-on tackle in football. Wrestling is not about knocking a man down—it’s about controlling him. To take a man down by his legs, you have to do more than knock his legs out from under him: you have to get your hips under your opponent, so that you can lift him off the mat before you put him down—this is only one example. Suffice it to say that a first-year wrestler is at a considerable disadvantage when wrestling anyone with experience—regardless of how physically strong or well-conditioned the first-year wrestler is.
    I forget the exact combination of illness or injury or deaths-in-a-family (or all three) that led to my first match in the pit; as a first-year wrestler, I was quite content to practice wrestling with other first-year or second-year wrestlers. There was a “ladder” posted in the wrestling room, by weight class; in my first year, I would have been as low as fourth or fifth on the ladder at 133 pounds. But the varsity man was sick or hurt, and the junior-varsity man failed to make weight—and possibly the boy who was next-in-line had gone home for the weekend because his parents were divorcing. Who knows? For whatever reason, I was the best available body in the 133-pound class.
    I was informed of this unwelcome news in the dining hall where I worked as a waiter at a faculty table; fortunately, I had not yet eaten my breakfast—I would have had to vomit it up. As it was, I was four pounds over the weight class and I ran for almost an hour on the wooden track of the indoor cage; I ran in a ski parka and other winter clothing. Then I skipped rope in the wrestling room for half an hour, wearing a rubber suit with a hooded sweatshirt over it. I was an eighth of a pound under 133 at the weigh-ins, where I had my first look at my opponent—Vincent Buonomano, a defending New England Champion from Mount Pleasant High School in Providence, Rhode Island.
    Had we forfeited the weight class, we could not have done worse: a forfeit counts the same as a pin—six points. It was Coach Seabrooke’s hope that I wouldn’t be pinned. In those days, a loss by decision was only a three-point loss for the team, regardless of how lopsided the score of the individual match. My goal, in other words, was to take a beating and lose the team only three points instead of six.
    For the first 15 or 20 seconds, this goal seemed feasible; then I was taken down, to my back, and I spent the remainder of the period in a neck bridge—I had a strong neck. The choice was mine in the second period: on Coach Seabrooke’s advice, I chose the top position. (Ted knew that I was barely surviving on the bottom.) But Buonomano reversed me immediately, and so I spent the better part of the second period fighting off my back, too. My only points were for escapes—unearned, because Buonomano let me go; he was guessing it might be easier to pin me directly following a takedown. One such takedown dropped me on my nose—both my hands were trapped, so that I couldn’t break my fall. (It’s true what they say about “seeing stars.”)
    When they stop a wrestling match to stop bleeding, there’s no clock counting the injury time; this is because you can’t fake bleeding. For other injuries, a wrestler is allowed no more than 90 seconds of injury time—accumulated in the course of the match. In this case, they