Ultimate Sports (9 page)

I nodded. “Yeah, Uncle Joe, we really do.”

“No sleeper holds? No Cocoa Butts? No tag teams?”

“No, Uncle Joe. And no airplane rides, no body slams, no trances either.”

He went to the front door and opened it. Only then did he turn back. “Well, I’m glad I know. I’d have to find out sooner or later. But this breaks my heart, Joey. I won’t deny it.”

I know now how parents feel when their children discover there is no Santa Claus.

•   •   •

I’ve got to hand it to Uncle Joe: He did his homework. He started Monday’s practice by explaining the double-leg takedown from the neutral position. All week he kept with it—breakdowns, tie-ups, pinning combinations, escapes, reversals. He was coaching real wrestling, and he was doing okay too.

The problem was that in Washington there are thirteen weight classifications. So with ten wrestlers we couldn’t even field a full team. At every meet we’d have to forfeit three matches. Each forfeit would hand our opponents six points. We’d start out down eighteen points. That’s a steep hole for any team to climb out of. And we weren’t just any team. We were a lousy team.

I’d never actually wrestled in a meet. Neither had Dinky or J.P. We were the guys the good wrestlers pinned in practice. But we were all-league compared to our teammates. None of them had ever wrestled anywhere, except maybe with their moms when they were little. All the experienced wrestlers had quit.

Uncle Joe wasn’t worried. The day of our first meet, he told us to think big. “Every single one of you is capable of winning!” We let out a throaty roar and charged into the wrestling room. Two hours later we silently slunk out. We hadn’t won a match, let alone the meet. Monroe had clobbered us 69-0.

“Don’t get discouraged!” Uncle Joe boomed the next day at practice. “We’ll get better. You wait and see!”

Before the Snohomish meet Uncle Joe told us our goal was to win three-fourths of our matches. We lost 68-0.
Our goal for the Tolt meet was to win half of our matches. Tolt took us 69-0. Next our goal was to win two matches. 70-0. Then it was for someone, somehow, to manage a draw. 72-0. After that the losses piled up like homework: 70-0, 73-0, 71-0, 68-0. On and on and on. Uncle Joe never gave up, but for the rest of us the only goal left was to get through the season.

And we were almost through it, too, when the article appeared in the
Sultan News
. The headline was “A Team for the Ages.” The story was supposed to be funny. The writer had discovered that no wrestling team had ever gone an entire season without scoring at least one point. With one match left in the season—and that match against the unbeaten Seattle High Roughriders—we were about to make history.
My vote goes to Joe Milligan for Coach of the Year
, the writer ended.
Think what this man has accomplished in one year!

My father chortled as he read the article.

“It’s not funny, Dad,” I snapped.

“Come on, Joey,” he replied. “Don’t take yourself so seriously. And when I think how your uncle Joe stood right here in this room and said that with him as coach, you guys might take the state.” He put the paper down and laughed so hard tears came to his eyes and he had to blow his nose.

At practice the next day Uncle Joe, his face ashen, stood before us. There was no sparkle in his eyes. “It’s my fault,” he said, his voice dead. “I’ve made you the laughingstocks of the town. I thought I could help, but…” He stopped and bowed his head.

It was Dinky who spoke up. “Don’t blame yourself, Coach. It’s not your fault we stink.”

Immediately Uncle Joe’s spine straightened and color
returned to his cheeks. “Don’t ever put yourselves down,” he snapped. “And don’t ever quit.” I could feel his spirit revive. “I’m not going to quit.” He made his right hand into a fist. “I’ll come up with something. We’ll show everyone. Trust Uncle Joe.”

He hardly spoke that afternoon. As we practiced, we could see him thinking. His forehead was furrowed; he bit his thumbnail; his eyes stared off into space. Then, just before practice ended, he snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it!” he boomed out.

“What?” we called out in one voice. “What? What? What?”

Uncle Joe smiled mysteriously. “You’ll see tomorrow,” he answered. “I want to surprise you.”

•   •   •

The surprise was Cindy. When we emerged from the locker room, we saw her sitting in the center of the mat.

The guys, disappointed, looked to me. I took a deep breath. “Uncle Joe,” I asked, “how is a mascot going to help us wrestle better?”

He stared at me in disbelief. “A mascot? Cindy is not a mascot. Cindy is here to teach you to become better wrestlers.”

I still didn’t get it. Nobody did. “How is she going to teach us, Uncle Joe?”

“You’re going to wrestle against her, of course. How else could she teach you? Did you think she could talk or something?”

My face fell. “Uncle Joe, we can’t wrestle a dog.”

“Why not!” Uncle Joe bellowed. “Tuffy Truesdale wrestled an alligator. Willie Pappas wrestled a bear. They
were better wrestlers for it. You’ll learn a lot wrestling Cindy, Joey. Trust me.”

So for the next three days we took turns wrestling Cindy. She turned out to be a tough customer too. She squirmed like crazy, slobbered everywhere, and growled ferociously. Whenever she was close to being pinned, she passed gas, sometimes right in your face. It was like wrestling a skunk. By the end of practice on Friday, I think we were almost looking forward to taking on Seattle High.

Saturday morning at ten the team met Uncle Joe in the Sultan High parking lot. We were going to pile into his van for the drive to Seattle. He brought Cindy, of course. “I couldn’t leave my assistant coach,” he joked.

Uncle Joe had us take our uniforms out of our equipment bags and lay them out on the floor in the back of the van. “I know your moms have cleaned and ironed them. They’ll get wrinkled and end up smelling like your underpants if you keep them stuffed in your bags. I don’t want those Seattle kids to think we’re a bunch of hayseeds.”

As soon as he pulled out of the parking lot, Uncle Joe started singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” at the top of his lungs. “Come on,” he yelled out, “let’s show some spirit!”

He’d driven about two minutes when Cindy spotted a cow. Immediately she jumped from the front seat to the middle seat to the backseat, barking like crazy, nose pressed against the glass, rear end in somebody’s face. A smell like rotten eggs filled the van. “Cindy always passes a little gas when she gets excited,” Uncle Joe called back. “You’ll get used to it.”

As if we weren’t already!

An instant later Cindy spotted a horse. More barking,
more jumping, more gas. Then there were six cows, a dozen sheep, a little pony, two goats. Cindy bounded wildly about the van, pummeling us with her sticklike legs, barking and howling and passing more and more gas. From the front seat Uncle Joe roared: “Let’s sing ’John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.’“

When we reached Lake City, he pulled into a McDonald’s. “My treat!” he announced. “In appreciation for all the effort you’ve put forth this year.” As we walked to the restaurant in the cold, crisp air, Cindy put her black nose to the open crack at the top of the window and howled pitifully.

Moments later we were chowing down Big Macs, fries, and milk shakes—not exactly the recommended meal before a wrestling match, but no one complained. We talked and laughed and laughed and talked. If Uncle Joe had suggested skipping the meet entirely and going to the Space Needle instead, we would have cheered.

Too soon, Uncle Joe looked at his watch. “Anybody who needs to use the bathroom, go now. We can’t keep the Roughriders waiting.”

We trudged back across the parking lot with our heads down and our hands in our pockets. Uncle Joe put the key in the side door and pulled it open. The smell from inside the van was so bad guys gagged as they took their seats. “Cindy,” Uncle Joe said, hugging her affectionately, “were you worried we weren’t coming back?”

Back on the road we rolled down the windows. The fresh air helped a little, but only a little. For some reason the smell just wouldn’t go away. And Cindy was behaving mysteriously. Instead of jumping around, she lay on the floor in front of me, her tail between her legs, a guilty look in her eyes.

When we reached Seattle High, Dinky discovered why.

“Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!” he shouted when he opened the rear door to get our uniforms.

“What is it!” Uncle Joe cried.

“Look!” Dinky yelled, stepping back. “Look!”

There were our uniforms, our spotless uniforms, strewn about. Brown paw prints covered them.

“What’s that brown stuff?” J.P. asked.

Uncle Joe picked up one uniform, brought it to his nose. “It’s poop,” he said. “Poor Cindy had to go poop when we were at McDonald’s. She must have come back here. Then she stepped in it and… well, the rest is history, boys.”

We groaned.

“We can’t wrestle now!” I said.

Uncle Joe looked aghast. “What do you mean you can’t wrestle? Just because of a little number two? I take care of number two every second of every minute of every day of the week. This is nothing.”

Uncle Joe borrowed sponges, towels, and a couple of buckets of hot water from the Seattle High coach. We got to work. Cindy barked encouragement. Ten minutes later our uniforms were cleaned off—sort of. Everybody had little brown splotches here and there. Dinky had a long streak down the right side of his.

“All right, boys,” Uncle Joe called out. “They’re as clean as they’re going to get. Time to suit up!”

Pulling that uniform on was the most courageous thing I’ve ever done.

“Do I smell?” J.P. asked as we entered the Roughriders’ gym.

“I don’t smell you,” I answered. “But I might not be the guy to ask.”

•   •   •

Wrestling is never a big draw, but when you’re the state champions in any sport, you get some attention. There were probably two hundred people in the Seattle High gym. We took our seats in the front row of the bleachers and waited.

The Roughriders entered the gym a couple of minutes after us. They looked awesome—every single one of them had a perfectly sculpted body of steel. They somehow managed to strut, flex their muscles for their girlfriends, and smirk at us all at once.

Dinky, all ninety-five pounds of him, was to be the first victim. As he stepped onto the mat, he reached out to shake hands. The Roughrider, scowling, slapped Dinky’s hand away.

The whistle blew. Dinky’s opponent, fast as lightning, executed a picture-perfect penetration step, got his head under Dinky’s right arm, and was about to pull off a high-crotch, single-leg takedown when he suddenly reeled backward. The cockiness was gone; confusion was in his eyes.

Dinky, sensing his advantage, charged forward, thrust his right foot in between his opponent’s legs, dropped to his knees, wrapped him up, lifted him off the ground, and took him down. Two points!

For an instant the rest of us were too stunned to do anything. Then, all at once, we found our voices. “Go, Dinky, go!” we shouted.

And Dinky went.

He chased that guy all over the mat. The Roughrider wanted no part of him. It was so bad the referee penalized him, first for stalling and then for leaving the mat. In the
second period Dinky pulled off a single-leg takedown. Starting the third, Dinky was up 7-3.

Watching that third period was excruciating. Dinky had the points. He was going to win—no doubt about it—if he could just keep from getting pinned. Those 120 seconds crawled by.

Then, unbelievably, the horn sounded. Dinky had won, 10-4! We had our first points of the season! We weren’t going to make the history books!

We charged the mat and carried Dinky off on our shoulders. Winning a state title couldn’t have felt better.

Dinky’s victory turned out to be only the beginning. After a rocky opening, Horace Humpdon chased his opponent around the mat for six minutes. The Roughrider was penalized twice for stalling. Horace won 8-3.

We won at 119 pounds and again at 126. Even when one of the Roughriders had the advantage, he didn’t press it. They backed down and backed down and backed down. In the stands the Seattle High fens first grumbled and then started booing their own team. J.P. grabbed my arm. “It’s Cindy! Uncle Joe was right! Wrestling her has made us better!”

I wrestle at 132, and I was so pumped up when I stepped on the mat I almost forgot to shake hands. Everything I’d always wanted to do, I did. In the first period, I pulled off a far-ankle, far-knee breakdown and got a near pin with a cross-face cradle. The Seattle High wrestler scored points for escapes, but he always seemed to be pulling away rather than coming after me. I won easily, 13-4.

I came back to the guys, grinning ear to ear. “Is this a dream?” I asked to Dinky as we watched J.P. win his match at 138 pounds.

“I don’t know,” Dinky answered. “But if it is, I don’t want to wake up.”

Right after J.P.’s victory, the Seattle High coach called the ref over to him. The coach was steamed about something. He kept pointing over at us, jabbing the air with his finger.

“What’s his beef?” J.P. asked me.

“Beats me,” I said.

Finally the ref came over to Uncle Joe. We all leaned in so we could hear.

The ref blew his nose loudly. “I’ve got an unusual complaint about your boys,” he said as he put his handkerchief away.

“What
about
my boys?” Uncle Joe asked.

The ref stuck out his lower lip. “Well, Coach Garcia claims your boys stink so bad his boys don’t want to wrestle. He says your boys smell like… well…like excrement, though he didn’t use that word. He claims you’ve smeared it into your uniforms. Now I’m fighting a bad cold and I can’t smell anything, but look.” The ref nodded toward the empty rows of bleachers directly behind us. “Nobody seems to want to get anywhere near you. Coach Garcia’s asking me to disqualify your team for poor sportsmanship.”

We held our breath, wondering if our miracle was about to be taken away.

Then Uncle Joe rose to his full height. His face became majestic; his eyes gleamed. He motioned toward us as we looked up to him. “Sultan is a farm community. These are farm boys here. And they’re proud to be farm boys. Me, I work for the Sewer Department. And I’m proud to work for the Sewer Department. All right, so maybe we do smell. So what? As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing
wrong with the good, honest smell of poop. Where would we be if we didn’t poop? Answer me that!”