Ultimate Sports Read online

  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!”

  The ref considered for a moment. Then slowly, a smile broke across his face. He walked back to the wrestling mat, blew his whistle, and called for the next wrestlers.

  And that’s how Sultan High pulled off the greatest upset in the history of high-school wrestling in Washington State. If you can’t be good, be lucky. If you can’t be lucky, stink.

  Carl Deuker

  When he was ten years old, Carl Deuker rode with his uncle Joe and his cousins Jimmy and Joseph, along with their dog, Cindy, from Philadelphia to the New Jersey coast. When they stopped for lunch they left Cindy in the car. Just as the boys did in “If You Can’t Be Lucky…,” when they returned to their car, they found the surprise that Cindy had left for them. Years later Deuker resurrected that memory as part of this story about a losing wrestling team.

  Carl Deuker was never a wrestler himself, though he says he loved watching Big-Time Wrestling on Channel 2 from San Francisco. He did, however, participate in several sports; he was good enough to make some teams but not good enough to play much. “I was a classic second-stringer,” he says. “I was too slow and too short for basketball; I was too small for football, a little too chicken to hang in there against the best fast-balls. So by my senior year the only sport I was still playing was golf.” As an adult now living in Seattle, he plays tennis, golf, and volleyball.

  Married and the father of a daughter, Marian, Mr. Deuker has been a teacher in Bothell, Washington, and is the author of two award-winning novels for young people: On the Devil’s Court and Heart of a Champion, both named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association. In fact, On the Devil’s Court appears on the ALA’s list of the 100 Best of the Best Books for Young Adults published between 1967 and 1992. That novel also was named the 1992 Young Adult Book of the Year in South Carolina. It’s the tension-packed story of a high-school basketball player who offers to sell his soul to the devil for one year of basketball greatness—and then is terrified that the devil might have taken him up on his offer! Heart of a Champion, Carl Deuker’s second novel, tells the story of two friends who share a love of baseball and also struggle with alcohol abuse.

  Why does Sun’s dad spend more time coaching her little brother than helping her? She plays basketball too. It isn’t fair….

  Stealing for Girls

  It’s country, right? I choose my clothes (sixties retro), I choose my shoes (Nikes), I choose my CDs (Hendrix and Nine Inch Nails), I choose my friends (you know who you are). If I were an adult (which I’m not—I’m a fourteen-year-old eighth-grade girl named Sun) I could vote, could choose my car, my career, whatever— like I said, a free country, right?

  Wrong.

  Quiz time: Please take out a number two lead pencil; do not open the test booklet until you’re told. Seriously, my question to you is this: What’s the most majorly thing in your life that you can’t choose? The answer is as simple as the eyes and nose on your face: your parents. Your parents and your brothers or sisters. That’s because no matter how free you think you are, the one thing nobody can choose for herself is her own family.

  Here’s another way of putting it: Being born is something like arriving at a restaurant where there are no waitrons and no menus. Your table is set and your food is there waiting for you. It might be fresh shrimp, it might be steak, it might be macaroni hot dish, it might be all broccoli; for some kids there might be no food at all, maybe not even a table.

  Me? I was fairly lucky. My parents are (1) there, and (2) at least semicool most of the time. My dad’s an accountant and my mom’s a college professor. Both are in their middle forties, physically fit, and usually unembarrassing in public. My gripe is the old basic one for girls: My father spends way more time on sports with my brother, Luke, than with me.

  Luke is in sixth grade, is already taller than me, and can pound me at basketball. At Ping-Pong. At any sport. You name it, he crushes me. I want to say right here I’m not a klutz. I’m nearly five feet six and have at least average coordination; on our basketball team I’m third off the bench, which is not that shabby considering that our school, Hawk Bend, is a basketball power in central Minnesota. But I won’t play one-on-one with Luke anymore. No way. Who likes to lose every time? It’s not like he’s mean or wants to humiliate me—he’s actually pretty decent for a twerpy sixth-grade boy—it’s just that he’s a natural athlete and I’m not.

  I am thinking these thoughts as I sit next to my parents watching Luke’s team play Wheatville. Luke just made a nifty spin move (of course, he’s the starting point guard) and drove the lane for a layup. My mother, who comes to most games, stares at Luke with her usual astounded look. She murmurs to my father, who comes to all our games, “How did he do that?”

  “Head fake right, plant pivot foot, big swing with leading leg, and bingo—he’s by,” my dad whispers. A quiet but intense man with salt-and-pepper hair, he speaks from the side of his mouth, for there are always parents of other sixth-graders nearby.

  “He amazes me,” my mother says. She has not taken her eyes off Luke. I hate to agree, but she’s right—all of which clouds further my normally “sunny” disposition. I remember Dad and Luke working last winter on that very move in the basement; I went downstairs to see what was going on, and they both looked up at me like I was an alien from the Weekly World News. My father soon enough bounced the ball to me, and I gave it a try, but I could never get my spin dribble to rotate quickly enough and in a straight line forward to the basket. Not like you-know-who. “Watch Luke,” my father said. “He’ll demonstrate.”

  Now, at least it’s the third quarter of the game and Luke already has a lot of points and his team is ahead by twenty so the coach will take him out soon—though not quite soon enough for Wheatville, or me. At the other end of the court Luke’s loose, skinny-legged body and flopping yellow hair darts forward like a stroke of heat lightning to deflect the ball.

  “Go, Luke!” my father says, half rising from his seat.

  Luke is already gone, gathering up the ball on a breakaway, finishing with a soft layup high off the board. People clap wildly.

  I clap slowly. Briefly. Politely. My mother just shakes her head. “How does he do that?”

  “Ask him,” I mutter.

  “Pardon, Sun?” my mom says abstractedly.

  “Nothing.” I check the scoreboard, then my own watch. I’ve seen enough. Below, at floor level, some friends are passing. “I think I’ll go hang with Tara and Rochelle,” I say to my parents.

  “Sure,” my mother says vacantly.

  Dad doesn’t hear me or see me leave.

  As I clump down the bleachers there is more cheering, but I prefer not to look. “Sun.” What a stupid name—and by the way I do not ever answer to “Sunny.” I was allegedly born on a Sunday, on a day when the sun was particularly bright, or so my parents maintain. I seriously doubt their version (someday I’m going to look up the actual weather report on March 18, 1980). I’m sure it was a Monday; either that or I was switched at the hospital. Or maybe it was Luke—one of us, definitely, was switched.

  Rochelle, actually looking once or twice at the game, says right off, “Say, wasn’t that your little brother?”

  “I have no brother,” I mutter.

  “He’s a smooth little dude,” Tara says, glancing over her shoulder. “Kinda cute, actually.”

  “Can I have some popcorn or what?” I say.

  “Or what,” Rochelle says, covering her bag.

  They giggle hysterically. Real comediennes, these two.

  “When’s your next game?” Tara says to me, relenting, giving me three whole kernels.

  “The last one is Tuesday night,�
�� I answer. “A makeup game with Big Falls.”

  “Here or away?”

  “Here.”

  “With your record, maybe you could get your little brother to play for your team.”

  “Yeah—a little eye shadow, a training bra,” adds Rochelle, “everyone would think he was you!”

  I growl something unprintable to my friends and go buy my own bag of popcorn.

  • • •

  At supper that night Luke and I stare at each other during grace, our usual game—see who will blink first. Tonight it is me. I glare down at my broccoli and fish; I can feel him grinning.

  “And thank you, God, for bouncing the ball our way once again,” my father finishes. “Amen.” If God doesn’t understand sports metaphors, our family is in huge trouble.

  “Well,” my father says, looking at Luke expectantly.

  “A deep subject,” Luke says automatically, reaching for his milk, automatically.

  Both of them are trying not to be the first one to talk about the game.

  “How was your day, Sun?” my mother says.

  “I hate it when you do that.”

  “Do what?” my mother says.

  “It’s condescending,” I add.

  “What is condescending?” she protests.

  “Asking me about my day when the thing on everybody’s mind is Luke’s usual great game. Why not just say it: ’So, Luke, what were the numbers?’ “

  There is silence; I see Luke cast an uncertain glance toward my father.

  “That’s not at all what I meant,” Mother says.

  “And watch that tone of voice,” my father warns me.

  “So how many points did you get?” I say to Luke, clanking the broccoli spoon back into the dish, holding the dish in front of his face; he hates broccoli.

  He shrugs, mumbles, “Not sure, really.”

  “How many?” I press.

  “I dunno. Fifteen or so.” But he can’t help himself: He bites his lip, tries to scowl, fakes a cough, but the smile is too strong.