Free Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher

still mad at me.”
    Chris puts a hand on his shoulder, and Petey notices she’s almost as tall as he is. “Me, too. This should be aninteresting experience. I’ve never wrestled somebody I knew before. Or liked.”
    If the tires on Petey Shropshrire’s Dodge Dart touch the road on the drive home, he is not aware of it.
     
    “Is Chris Byers there?”
    “Just a moment. Could I tell her who’s calling?”
    “Peter Shropshrire.”
    Silence.
    “There’s nothing I can do about it,” Petey says. “It’s my name.”
    “Hello?”
    “Chris?”
    “Yeah.”
    “This is Petey Shropshrire. Remember me? We talked on your porch this afternoon. I was—”
    “Of course, I remember you. It was only two hours ago. God, you can be strange.”
    “Yeah,” Petey says. “Everybody says that.”
    “Really.”
    “Listen, if I came up with an idea that would get me off the hook for wrestling a girl and helped you end your career with a flare, would you do it?”
    “I don’t know. Tell me—”
    “Would you consider it?”
    “Petey, I don’t know. Tell me—”
    “Just say you’d consider it.”
    She sighs. From her little experience with him, she already knows there is no derailing Petey Shropshrire. “Okay, Petey. I’d consider it.”
     
    The Coho Wolverines and the Silver Creek Grizzlies line up across the mat from each other in ascending order, lightest to heaviest. In accordance with tradition, each wrestler locks on to the eyes of his opponent directly across the mat and stares him down Mike Tyson style. The orange and yellow of the Wolverines’ warm-ups stand in bright contrast to the softer brown on brown of the Grizzlies. Johnny Rivers rocks imperceptibly from heel to toe, beginning his slow ascension to the frenzy that will overtake him moments before he steps onto the mat to devour his challenger. Locked in battle, he is devoid of his loony and often insensitive sense of humor, though the insensitivity remains. There is little question of the outcome of his match tonight, only question of its length.
    The result of Petey’s match is an equally foregone conclusion, though Petey is the only Wolverine who knows that.
    Owing to the unusual nature of Petey’s and Chris’smatch, an agreement has been reached between the coaches. One-nineteen will wrestle out of turn tonight—wrestle the final match—to equal the import the local media have already heaped upon it.
    The two teams seem nearly equal in ability and sport identical win-loss records. It will be very close. The wild card is the Shropshrire-Byers match. Petey is an unknown, having labored most of the year and all of last down on JV. Byers is an unknown talent. She has wrestled two close matches, which she lost by one point, and surprised three other opponents with pins. Is she legitimate? Or did she get a quick drop on her opponents while they were figuring the “gentlemanly” way to take her down? Conventional wisdom indicates the former. Chris Byers has amazing natural strength for a person her size, male or female. Her 12 percent body fat is low even by standards set for youthful, well-trained male athletes, and she can crank out a hundred uninterrupted push-ups as well as fifty chins. She is likely not as quick as Petey Shropshrire, but Coach has warned him consistently he better not let her get ahold of him. Plus what Petey said to Johnny Rivers two weeks ago is true; Chris Byers has to gain on her natural weight to hit 119, Petey has to starve. He could be weak. If all goes as predicted, theirs could be the deciding match.
    Al Greer pins his man at 103 for Coho; but Brian Sears’s shoulder blades dig into the mat at 1:37 of the first round, and the score is tied. Petey and Chris skip at 119; the rest of the middleweights trade off all the way. Johnny Rivers pins his man at 160 almost before either of them steps out of his warm-up, but by the end of the heavyweight match, Coho is down two points on the strength of fewer pins.
    Within seconds of