The level dropped, and the leg was gathered — and Tomas gave it. That was the part of what followed that the room would argue about afterwards, in the corridor, in the car park, for weeks: he gave the leg. Every instinct the modern game has spent forty years installing said close the door, sprawl, retreat from the roll before it starts, and Tomas, who had spent the whole round learning exactly where the door was, opened it and stepped aside. Duarte took the invitation with the joy of a man whose signature has been requested, loaded his right shoulder, turned his left knee inward, committed his weight forward and down — and spun, beautifully, completely, into the space underneath Tomas's hips where his back had been taken a hundred times from a hundred men.
The space was occupied.
Tomas had not retreated from the roll. He had entered it. In the half-second of the hinge — the half-second he had bought with nine points and a round of being beaten — he stepped across and in, the way a man steps onto a moving walkway without breaking stride, and he sat down through Duarte's rotation instead of against it. His right hand found the shoulder line where Duarte's own weight was travelling. His hip came down not on Duarte but through the path of him, into the exact seam of the spin, and the two men rolled together as one body for one full turn — and came out of the roll in an order that made the whole room rise an inch in its seats.
Tomas was on top.
He was on top in a position that half the room did not have a name for and the other half had not seen since they were young: the old side pin, the scarf hold of the judo years, his weight driven down through Duarte's ribs at the angle of a falling wall, Duarte's near arm trapped and folded by the geometry of it, Duarte's hips — the filed centre of all his intentions — pinned under a man lighter than him who was, nonetheless, somehow, immovable. It was not a strong position. It was an old one. It predated the academy, predated the team's crest on Duarte's partners' jackets, predated nearly everything in the sport as the room currently practised it, and it was being done perfectly, with a craftsman's economy, as if it had been taken down off a shelf where it had been kept oiled for thirty years.
From the side of the mat, Duarte's two partners began to coach, the way corner men do, in short urgent phrases — the bridge, the far-side roll, the frame and the hip escape, the standard liturgy of getting out from under. Duarte tried each of them as they were called, in order, like a man working down a list, and each of them arrived at the same quiet refusal. It was Sato, in his chair, who finally said the thing that the corner men could not: "Stop. He is not holding him. He is accompanying him. The escapes are correct and they are all one breath too late, because the position is being answered before it is attacked." He spoke like a man translating from a text he admired. "I have seen this in film. Old film. From judo, from before the split of the games. I did not believe anyone living still did it."
George Antoniou stood up.
He did it without deciding to. The chair went back under him and he was standing at the referee's table with the stopwatch still in his hand and the pencil fallen where it fell, and Hannah Weiss, who had worked for him for eleven years, had never seen him stand during a round, not for injuries, not for champions, not for anything. His face had the look of a man who has heard his own name called in a street in a foreign country.
What he was seeing, he was seeing twice. Under the present mat there was another mat, older, thinner, laid in the same room when the room was younger; and on it his father, broad and loud and thirty years from his grave, stood with his arms folded in the exact place where the referee's table now stood, saying the thing he always said when the guest teacher took the floor: "Watch now. Watch the foreigner. He does not fight the throw — he attends it." And the guest teacher, who was not a guest, who was for two years the soul of this academy's evenings, demonstrated this very counter on men twice his reputation — sitting down through the spin, arriving on top as if the floor had handed him the position, his face wearing the mild expression of a man who has all the time there is. Antoniou had been twenty-four years old and too