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Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man: Guts, Glory, and Blood in the World's Greatest Game, by Jay Atkinson
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If all sports are really about war, then rugby is a heart-thumping epic of bayonet charges and hand-to-hand fighting. In Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man, bestselling author Jay Atkinson describes his thirty-five year odyssey in the sport-from his rough and rowdy days at the University of Florida, through the intrigue of various foreign tours, club championships, and all star selections, up to his current stint with the freewheeling Vandals Rugby Club out of Los Angeles. Jay has played in more than 500 matches, for which he's suffered three broken ribs, a detached retina, a fractured cheekbone and orbital bone, four deadened teeth, and a dislocated ankle. Written in the style of Siegried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Atkinson's book explains why it was all worth it--the sum total of his violent adventures, and the valuable insights he has gained from them.
- Sales Rank: #516897 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Thomas Dunne Books
- Published on: 2012-04-24
- Released on: 2012-04-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.57" h x 1.19" w x 6.49" l, 1.12 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“Mr. Atkinson has written a hymn of praise for the rugby game and the rugby community that will ring true to anyone who has played rugby at any level, and will grip even those who haven't.” ―Wall Street Journal
“Atkinson's stylish, unabashedly macho memoir is fueled by two passions: his love of grind-it-out athletic competition and the obvious joy he takes in the high-testosterone, alcohol-fueled comradeship of his fellow rugby players…. Seeded throughout come lessons and insights gleaned from three and a half decades of broken bones and bruised hearts, soaring victory and stunning loss…. Nobody has better explored the game (and the life) of rugby better than Atkinson.” ―Boston Globe
“As a thirty-five-year veteran of the sports, the author's passion translates easily to the page, providing a reflective look at his entrance into what he dubs the ‘blood fraternity' . . . A testosterone-laden tale deserving of an audience well beyond the locker room.” ―Kirkus
“Raucous… With intermittent nods to his fiction classes with famed novelist Harry Crews, the brash writer lists his many injuries from the game, but he remains loyal to this sport requiring commitment, skill, and discipline. There is a short stint in jail, drinking and brawls aplenty, and arguments that spill into the streets. Still, Atkinson, wised up from lessons on the rugby field and off, has created a brawny, engaging treat for followers of the sport and the curious.” ―Publishers Weekly
“A reminder of what the game's all about: the friendships you make, the places you go, the lengths you go to to get your weekly fix, the financial sacrifices those of us not swept up into the white card-infested, gouging claim-ridden, money-infected world of professionalism have to make in order to play. It's a reminder that playing and loving rugby, from top level to bottom level, is a lifestyle choice from which few return and even fewer would want to: on that principle alone, it's a bloody good read. Find it and enjoy.” ―Planet Rugby
“A bona-fide masterstroke.” ―Publishers Weekly on Ice Time
“[Atkinson] seamlessly weaves his past with current events, detailing the team's fortunes while lovingly recalling his own at that time of life.” ―The Virginian-Pilot on Ice Time
“An evocative, bittersweet, poetic journey of a grown man trying, as we all try, not to recapture youth but to remember the splendor of it.” ―H. G. Bissinger, author of the bestselling Friday Night Lights on Ice Time
“Atkinson keeps his plot moving at a good pace, offering enough twists to keep the reader's attention, but it is the humor and insight of his characters that make the novel work.” ―The New York Times Book Review on Caveman Politics
About the Author
A former two-sport college athlete, Jay Atkinson is the author of seven books, including the bestsellers Legends of Winter Hill and Ice Time, as well as the classic rugby novel, Caveman Politics. He teaches writing at Boston University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The Vandals
A few months before Dr. Phillips screwed my ankle back together, I was at the Mardi Gras tournament in Louisiana playing for the Vandals. Fifteen minutes into our first match, the sky was low and dark as we spread across our goal line, waiting for their forwards to attack. The referee marked the spot and they ran a fake to the right, freezing the stiffest part of our defense, the heavyweights. Then their biggest player—roughly half my age and twice my size—charged straight at me as the scrumhalf flipped him the ball.
At 52, most guys are watching their kids play high school sports or riding in carts across the local golf course. But as the young behemoth tucked the ball under his arm and hurtled forward, I bit down on my mouthpiece and lowered my center of gravity and scrambled toward him. I didn’t have any real thoughts, just an instinct to step into the gap. In rugby, you lace ’em up and take your chances.…
* * *
Five miles east of downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Independence Park is a vast, flatiron complex of athletic fields and jogging paths, with five rugby fields lined and laid out beside the main parking lot. That weekend, I was competing in the annual Mardi Gras Rugby Festival as part of the Vandals RFC, a team assembled by my old friend Frank Baker, an Associated Press editor in Los Angeles. Shortly before our first game, Baker announced the starting team and after pulling on the red and black Vandals jersey, I swigged from a gallon of water and set off at a jog, past the concession stands and the medical tent and a portable stereo playing zydeco music. In the stench from the local oil refineries, I ran along with the pancakes from breakfast leaping around in my stomach, trying to steady my heart rate and take the edge off the jitters.
If all sports are really about war, then rugby is an eighteenth-century epic of bayonet charges and hand-to-hand fighting. On an expanded football field without any yard lines, the teams line up facing each other like infantrymen wearing cleated boots. And every few minutes the combatants must steel themselves for a fresh assault into the teeth of the enemy. Faintheartedness is easy to spot: the player who shirks contact is hooted from the sidelines and often injured. I’ve been playing rugby since Gerald Ford was president and these days I’m the oldest guy on the Vandals roster, an invitational side made up of players from all over, many of whom are in their twenties and early thirties. Current Vandals hail from Ireland, Australia, Kenya, New Zealand, Uruguay, Cuba, Rhode Island, Colorado, Louisiana, Tennessee, Florida, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. It’s a pretty good club, one of the best I’ve ever played for.
I hear the voices on occasion, saying that I’m too old and too slow, my best rugby long gone. Certainly I have the responsibility of a career, a sixteen-year-old son who needs and deserves my attention, and a body that’s intact but constantly on the verge of major breakdowns: ankles, knees, neck, hamstrings, upper back, and the rest. But rugby gives me something that I can’t get anywhere else: the feeling that, while I’m out there, I’m living the truth. Sure, it’s a young man’s game, but that’s no reason to surrender something you love. What compels my passion for rugby at this age is the dividend from grit: the months of training exchanged for one or two golden moments of performance.
After jogging half a mile, I stopped among some trees and pissed on a holly bush, coming out to a baseball diamond to stretch in the dust near home plate. Away in the distance I could see the rugby fields grouped together and the other Vandals moving back and forth in a red-shirted mass. Seven of this year’s nineteen Vandals come from my home club, Amoskeag RFC of Manchester, New Hampshire. Then there’s thirty-one-year-old Tom “Reggae” Rege, who was born in Kenya, and Lyle Jones, thirty-three, from Renova, Mississippi. My old college roommate Surfer John Hearin from Cocoa Beach, Florida, and Super Dave Laflamme of Rhode Island, and Spencer Cackett, a commercial deep-sea diver from Australia. Tennessean Daniel Carter, who talks about as fast as a possum does arithmetic, enjoys regaling us with stories about his hometown. “In ‘Sweet Lips’ you order food and they bring you gravy—whether you want it or not,” says Carter, who owns a coon-hunting mule named Festus.
But the undisputed chieftain of the Vandals is forty-two-year-old Frank Baker, the son of a newsman who’s originally from Upstate New York. With his mobile features and white-blond hair, Baker looks like a younger and more rugged version of the actor Ed Begley, Jr., and was once a four-letter man for the Voorheesville High Blackbirds. A couple of times a year, he invites his favorite ruggers to join him under the banner of the Vandals, and players converge from various points to witness Baker’s monumental place kicks and offbeat sense of humor.
Baker invented the Vandals back in 1995, when he was playing for Amoskeag, by combining our sturdy pack of forwards with Providence RFC’s shifty backline, which produced a tournament victory in Portland, Maine. (I didn’t play in that first game, but I’ve played for the Vandals on just about every trip since.) The idea caught on and soon, excellent rugby players with exceptional social skills—funny, charismatic guys that Baker had encountered over the years—were clamoring for a Vandals’ invitation. As he roamed the country in various assignments for the Associated Press, he added ruggers from the Deep South, Washington, D.C., and California and Colorado to the mix. It was a perfect rugby storm for me: high-level tournament competition two or three times a year, with representative level players who didn’t take themselves too seriously and loved to have a good time. I’d tried Old Boys rugby with various over-thirty-five and over-forty teams and it wasn’t for me. Fat guys huffing and puffing around the field, sloppy play, and bad jokes; nothing like the kinetic, forward-driven rugby I’d always thrived on. And just when you caught on to the joke and relaxed, some 230-pound moron would knock you senseless. Fuck that.
Even in a public place, a rugby team is a closed society, talking in a kind of shorthand that outsiders are never privy to. On this particular trip, several of the Vandals visited Bourbon Street in New Orleans and as we proceeded among the masked revelers and funky, pie-eyed tourists, Baker jerked his hand upward, pointing to a middle-aged woman on a balcony overhead. She had a cup of beer in her hand and a pair of red plastic horns attached to her head.
“A housewife from Ohio is, in fact, the devil,” said Baker.
“Get behind me, Mrs. Satan,” I said, as we went past.
Minutes before the opening kickoff, I joined the other Vandals beneath the goalposts with a sense of mortal dread running through my veins. There’s a fair chance you’ll get hurt or maimed in a rugby game, and a remote possibility you’ll be killed. Over my career, I’ve known three very athletic guys who ended up in wheelchairs and before every game I kneel down, make the sign of the cross and whisper, “Dear Lord, please keep me, my teammates and our opponents free from injury and help me play to the best of my ability, as a glory to God. Amen.”
Being in a scrum, especially right up front—at hooker, where I play—is particularly dangerous. The two packs line up a yard apart, a total of eight men on each side intricately bound together with three men forming the front row, the hooker in the middle. When the referee shouts, “Ready. En-gage!” and sixteen guys collide with the thump of bone on bone, there is absolutely no way to remain half interested in what’s happening. As soon as the scrumhalf puts the ball into the tunnel between the two sets of forwards, it’s my job to hook the ball back with my foot, at the right speed and in the right part of the tunnel, so our scrumhalf can get it out to the backs. Once the two packs come together at that velocity and with that much force, the joy of risk crowds out the dread.
The two props—the Argentines call them pilars—are expected to protect the hooker no matter what. That weekend in Louisiana, I was playing between two longtime teammates from New Hampshire. Butch McCarthy, six foot one, 285 pounds, is a former Plymouth State College Academic All-American in football who lives by the credo: high intensity, short duration. Like-sized Fred Roedel played football and rugby at Norwich University and has the on-field temperament of an enraged moose. I’m five foot nine, 165 pounds and for the past twenty-three years, I’ve trusted life and limb to Freddie and Butch. In the scrums, we hang on and squeeze until our fingernails bleed.
Our first match was against a team of buzz-cutted navy flyers from Pensacola, Florida, who won their preliminary game by a score of 67–0. They kicked off and Bill Bishop caught the ball and the onrushing Pensacola boys hit the breakdown and we all went down in a heap. In rugby, the area surrounding you is exaggeratedly clear, absent of sound and slow moving like syrup. Outside that circle everything whips past at incredible speeds. The game moves with the quickness of thought, the ball spun from player to player, suddenly appearing in your hands. Decisions are made on the crest of an instant—run with it, pass it, take a tackle or go to the ground—and mistakes bring that blurry violence right to you.
The first few scrums of the Pensacola games were tight and breathless; all I can really think about is doing my job, executing the skills I’ve acquired over the years in precise little steps. I’m not a star, and never have been; I know ...
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Rugby has never been so etertaining
By Steve
In Jay Atkinson's highly entertaining new work,we see the lengths that grown men will go to in order to prove their mettle to others and to themselves. These are not the prima donnas of professional sports, but the guys who play ("play" hardly seems an apt term for the sport these guys engage in-maybe who "wage" the game)for love of the competition, and for the the beers and fellowship that follow. Atkinson is at times a wise-ass, at times a philosopher, (he was still a philosophy major when he played his first game in 77) and always a keen observer of the human condition and a story teller who can bring scenes and people to life. Hemingway's bull fighters got nothing on Jay Atkinson's rugby players, and you don't need to be a bull fighter or a rugby player to appreciate either.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
It Is Not a Sport, It Is a Bloody Religion
By Chris Roehm
Been waiting for Atkinson's book to arrive for several weeks now;it came today. I have only read two pages and I already know that this is a great book. Like Jay, I have had an intimate relationship with rugby for over 30 years. The introduction brings back all of the excitement and emotions of the first time I met the sport and how it was love at first sight. I am mentioned in the book and I hung around the fringes of the characters that make up the core of this memoir and that makes it fun to read. Jay is a gifted writer and a hard-working writer and I know there will be a lot more to this work than nostalgia.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Memoirs of A Rugby-Playing Man
By El Brocko
I guess I was hoping for more rugby and less of how bad ass Jay and his teammates were. All of us who have played rugby for a very long time did all those stupid things when we were young. I also didn't like how he trashed a couple of his teammates (by name) and described others as if they were world class rugby players. In Jay's day, rugby in the south and northeast was still evolving.
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