Free The Imaginary Girlfriend by John Irving Page A

middle of the mat. I had no trouble recognizing who they were—they didn’t have to introduce themselves. At a glance, I could see they’d swum forth from the same gene pool for enormity that had spawned their son. Cliff saved me.
    â€œIf you understand nothing else, you can understand one rule,” Cliff told the heavyweight’s parents. “It’s just
one
rule and I’m only going to tell you
once.”
(I could see that he had their attention.) “This is a
mat
,” Cliff said, pointing to where we were standing. “And
that
,” Cliff said—pointing to the scorer’s table where the heavyweight had thrown his opponent—“that is a goddamn table. In wrestling,” Cliff said, “we do it on the
mat.
That’s the rule.” The heavyweight’s parents shuffled away without a word. Cliff and I were alive until the finals.
    The finals were at night. Scary people from the middle of Maine emerged in the night. (My good friend Stephen King doesn’t make up
everything;
he knows the people I mean.) The fans for the finals that night made the disqualified heavyweight’s parents seem mildly civilized. In rebellion over the illegal headlock, our fellow referees had gone home; Cliff and I alternated refereeing the weight classes for the finals. When he was refereeing, I was the mat judge; Cliff was the mat judge when I was out on the mat refereeing. A mat judge can (but usually doesn’t) overrule a referee’s call; in a flurry of moves, sometimes the mat judge sees something the referee misses—for example, illegally locked hands in the top position—and in the area of determining the points scored (or not) on the edge of the mat, before the wrestlers are out of bounds, the mat judge can be especially effective.
    There can be 11 or 12 or 13 weight classes in a high-school wrestling tournament. Nowadays, in the New England Class A tournament, the lightest weight class is 103 pounds—there are 13 weight classes, ending with the 189-pounder and the heavyweight (under 275). But in high schools there is occasionally a 100-pound class—in some states today there is also a 215- or 220-pound class, in addition to 189 and 275—and in Maine in ‘65 the heavyweight class was unlimited. (The weight class used to be
called
Unlimited.)
    In the first three weight classes, Cliff and I gave out half a dozen penalty points for the illegal head-lock—apparently a feature of Maine life—and Cliff bestowed one disqualification: for biting. Some guy was getting pinned in a crossface-cradle when he bit through the skin of his opponent’s forearm. There was bedlam among the fans. What could possibly be more offensive to them than a no-biting rule? (There were people in the stands who looked like they bit other people every day.)
    That night in Maine, Cliff Gallagher was 68. A former 145-pounder, he was no more than 10 pounds over his old weight class. He was pound-for-pound as strong as good old Caswell from Pitt. Cliff was mostly bald; he had a long, leathery face with remarkable ears—his neck and his hands were huge. And Cliff didn’t like the way the crowd was reacting to his call. He went over to the scorer’s table and took the microphone away from the announcer.
    â€œNo biting—is that clear enough?” Cliff said into the microphone. The fans didn’t like it, but they quieted down.
    We had a few more weight classes (and a lot more illegal headlocks) to get through; we kept alternating the matches, between referee and mat judge, and we kept blowing our whistles—in addition to the headlocks without an arm, there were over-scissors and full-nelsons and figure-four body-scissors and twisting knee-locks and head-butts, but there was no more biting. In the 177-pound class, I called the penalty that determined the outcome of the match; I thought the fans were going to rush me on the mat, and the coach of the