The Imaginary Girlfriend by John Irving Page B

then I’d shoot a few more takedowns. Coach McCuskey didn’t like me resting against the wall.
    David Plimpton, who was as out-of-shape as I was, also enjoyed sparring with Coach McCuskey’s Iowa wrestlers. Plimpton told me that McCuskey was similarly disapproving of him. From Plimpton’s and my point of view, we were making a contribution: we were offering our aging bodies as extra workout partners for McCuskey’s kids. But it was Coach McCuskey’s wrestling room; he set the tone—and I respected him. No resting against the wall. As a consequence, my appearances (and Plimpton’s) in the Iowa wrestling room were sporadic—I went there only when I wanted to punish myself.
    A happy solution might have been for Plimpton and me to wrestle together, but Plimpton had been a 191-pounder at Yale (when I’d been a 130-pounder at Pitt); we’d both put on 15 or 20 pounds since then, but we couldn’t wrestle together—there was about a 60-pound difference between us.
    Seven years later, when I would go back to Iowa to teach at the Writers’ Workshop, the wrestling room was still in the girders of the old fieldhouse but the atmosphere in the room had changed. Gary Kurdelmeir, a former national champion for Iowa in 1958, was the head coach. In ‘72, Kurdelmeir’s new assistant coach arrived in Iowa City—Dan Gable, fresh from a Gold-Medal performance in the Munich Olympics at 149½ pounds. In Kurdelmeir and Gable’s wrestling room, there were lots of “graduate students” (as Plimpton and I had been in 1965-67) and other postcollege wrestlers. The years I taught at the Workshop (1972-75) were the beginning of Iowa’s dominance of collegiate wrestling under Dan Gable. (As the head coach, Gary Kurdlemeir won two national team titles for Iowa—in ‘75 and ‘76—but the head-coaching job would soon be Gable’s; he won his first team championship in ‘78. J. Robinson, now the head coach at the University of Minnesota, became Gable’s assistant.)
    Brad Smith, Chuck Yagla, Dan Holm, Chris Campbell—they were all in the Iowa wrestling room at that time, and they would all become national champions. That wrestling room was the most intense wrestling room I have ever seen; yet Gable and Kurdlemeir were happy to have you there, contributing—even if you were good for no more than two minutes before you had to go rest against the wall. In that room, two minutes was all I was good for.
    At several of Iowa’s dual meets, I sat beside the former Iowa coach, Dave McCuskey, who was retired; as fellow spectators, Coach McCuskey and I had no philosophical differences of opinion. Everyone admired Gable: with three national collegiate titles at Iowa State (just
one
loss in his entire college career), he drew a crowd—not only at Iowa’s matches but in the wrestling room. Everyone wanted to wrestle with him—if only for two minutes. In those years, I generally chose easier workout partners, but there were no easy workout partners in that Iowa room. Like everyone else, I couldn’t resist the occasional thrill (and instant humiliation) of wrestling Dan Gable. I never scored a point on him, of course. In this failure, I was in good company: in the 1972 Olympics at Munich, where Gable won the Gold Medal, none of his opponents scored a point on him either.
    To win the Olympics in freestyle wrestling without losing a single point is akin to winning the men’s final at Wimbledon in straight sets, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0; or perhaps a four-game sweep of the World Series, while holding the losing team scoreless. It’s rarer still that Gable’s dominance as a wrestler has undergone the transition from competitor to coach with equal success: in 1995, Iowa won its fourth NCAA title of the last five years—and its fifteenth national championship of the last 21. In ‘95, Iowa also captured its 22nd straight Big 10 crown; I