Rogue Rugby.

Introduction

What you are about to venture into is my barbaric world of high adventure, glory, pain and tragedy as a Rugby athlete. For those of you that don’t have a clue as to what the sport of rugby is I’ll drop it to you in layman’s terms. Rugby is like a cross between keep away street ball, soccer, hockey, and professional football but without the helmets and pads. Each eligible player has the option of using kicking the ball like soccer, the option to knock the shit out of somebody like in hockey, and tackle full speed like in pro football – now imagine someone with the tenacity of Ray Lewis - linebacker of the Baltimore Ravens - at 5’8” and 215 pounds hitting you full speed without pads or a helmet. Yeah, that’s me. No you’re not getting up anytime soon from a hit like that.

My nickname on the team is “The Duck of Death” because I always clown around during practice and before and after the game. But during the game I  hit opponents head on like a Mack truck. I’m the only teammate that had two nicknames; the other nickname is “LEGS” because I could squat close to 600 pounds and deadlift 800 pounds. I also got that nickname because I’m usually the one that would push the scrum off balance. It’s immense the amount of strength, speed and stamina you need to really get in the game. My position as  prop forward requires a man to play what would be the equivalent of playing offense, defense and running back or wide reciever (if you have wheels) all rolled into one in pro football.

The ball isn’t dead after a tackle as in football. In rugby the ball is live even after the tackle and anyone on either side is an eligible reciever until someone scores or makes a penalty, which means you may be running for a good 2 to 4 minutes at a time – an eternity when you’ve already played nearly an hour. There is no second and third string of players in rugby as in football. It’s just you (unless you suffer a broken leg or arm) from beginning of the match to the end.

Due to a few minor infractions committed by various teammates like vehicular manslaughter, assault and battery (throwing a guy through the plate glass window of a bar), and a bar room brawl that resulted in 3 starters of the football team receiving injuries that kept them out of a couple of games (3 to 1 odds and we still beat the shit out of em’), the university declared our rugby team defunct. The bad news is we no longer receive university funding, which means we have to pay for transportation to all away games, fees, equipment, lodging, and everything else all the way down to our cleats.

The good news is we answer to no one like Ghengis Kahn. There’s no curfew the night before the game so, it’s common to go bar hopping until 4 o’clock in the morning and yet still be standing well enough to make the match the next morning at 9am. Supervision is at a minimum - our head coach is too busy getting head like there’s no tomorrow from some British chick he met at a match in Memphis . Our assistant coach is a different story. The dude looks like a textbook Pirate of the Caribbean – he haunts the bar whenever we happen to stay at a hotel where there’s a lounge, and he knows where every hole-in-the-wall bar is in every town we play in.

As for us we drive in our own cars - filling up our trunks with every kind of hard liquor and beer imaginable. My favorite is Cisco, a “flavored wine product” that contains as much alcohol as five one-ounce servings of vodka. For a time it was called liquid crack on campus because carelessness with this wine led to cases of alcohol poisoning where victims required hospital emergency care. After two bottles I’m hallucinating like I had dropped several hits of acid. Oh sure we kicked everybody’s ass all up and down the SEC schedule and some on the side. We played the Navy Seals, UCONN, and gentlemen’s teams (middle-aged leathernecks). We won the SEC championship in 1995 but for me the lure of playing rugby is the parties after the game.