Generations and Other True Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  Sometimes, over their customary after-training beer (ruggers “train,” they don’t “practice”) at the nearby Across the Street Bar, a Harlequin will express a whimsical wish that Dallas would devote more fan attention and press coverage to the city’s most consistent winner. But then he’ll shrug. This is America, after all, where sport is dominated by big-dollar professionalism and media hype, and the ruggers, following a different code, still are doing it for love. None of the players gets paid. Neither do their coaches nor their trainers nor their administrators nor even their referees.

  “It’s truly the last of the amateur games,” Bill Smith says.

  The sport was born one afternoon in 1823, when lads of England’s venerable Rugby School were romping about the greensward in a ripping game of soccer and one William Webb Ellis committed a shocking transgression.

  “Well, there I was with the line in front of me, and I thought to myself how daft to risk dribbling the ball with the foot, so I simply picked up the thing and ran over the line and touched down,” Mr. Ellis is reputed to have written later.

  His fine disregard of the rules earned his team a penalty and Mr. Ellis a rebuke from the headmaster. But it also made the lad a pioneer of sport. By the 1830s, boys at Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and the other English schools were running with the ball and passing it from one player to the next, disporting themselves in what was being called “the game of football as played at Rugby.”

  Despite the game’s growing popularity, almost half a century would pass before representatives of the schools would sit down together and agree on a set of rugby rules. Until that meeting in London in 1871, each team devised its own rules, and the visiting team had to play the home team’s version of the game.

  It was during that period of anarchy—in 1859—that Princeton and Rutgers played the first game of rugby in the United States. Indeed, they played two games that year, one by Rutgers’ rules and the other by Princeton’s. And by the time rugby’s rules finally were established in Britain, Walter Camp and other American experimenters had turned the English game into “the game of football as played in America.”

  The similarities and differences between American football and its ancestor are as impossible to explain to someone who has never seen a rugby match as the variations between checkers and Chinese checkers would be to, say, a cocker spaniel. Suffice it to say that rugby is played on a field that looks something like a football field, but is larger, with a ball that looks something like a football, but is fatter, by two teams of fifteen players each who wear no helmets or pads. The ball may be passed from one player to another (but forward passes are illegal), dribbled with the feet, kicked, or carried.

  The object, as in football, is to score points by carrying the ball over the goal line or by kicking it through goal posts. A “try,” scored by carrying the ball across the goal line and touching it to the ground, is worth five points; a successful “conversion kick,” awarded to the team that has just scored a “try,” is two points; a “penalty kick,” awarded to a team that has been fouled, is three points; and a “drop goal,” a ball drop-kicked through the goal posts while it is in play, is three points. The opposing team tries to prevent the scoring of “tries” and “drop goals” by tackling whichever player has the ball. Play is continuous for two forty-minute halves, with only a five-minute break between them. There are no timeouts and no substitutions, except to replace badly injured players.

  Sometimes rugby resembles American football. Sometimes, because of its speed and the tactics involved, it seems as close to basketball or even hockey. Other times, because of the tangle of bodies and the grunts and cries of the players and the grind of bone on bone, it resembles the roughhouse game called “dog pile” that small boys play. One Harlequin—a Brit named Geoff “Chesney” Hawkes—describes it as “a violent ballet,” as apt a description as any.

  While American football has evolved into a game played by specialists, rugby has not. “That’s the beauty of it,” says Harlequins club president Bob Latham. “Everybody on the field has to do a little bit of everything, unlike football, where one guy is just blocking and one guy is just kicking. In rugby, everybody has to be able to handle the ball, everybody has to be able to tackle, everybody has to be able to field the kick.”

  For Brannon Smoot, a Texan who played linebacker for Rice University before he entered University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to learn orthopedic surgery, rugby is more fun to play than the American game. “In four years at Rice, I never got to touch the ball,” he says. “But in rugby, everybody gets to run with it.”

  The pure form of rugby survived on the East and West Coasts and in a few isolated spots in the Midwest like Chicago and St. Louis, but there were only thirty or forty rugby clubs in the United States from 1871 until the 1960s, when the sport had a second American birth.

  “It was a time when a lot of young people were questioning their parents’ values,” says Mr. Spencer. “It also was a time when people were examining athletics and questioning what recreation should mean. It was a time of a lot of football scandals, a lot of Olympic scandals and that sort of thing. People were saying, ‘Recreation ought to be just for the fun of it. No commercialization, no money, no payoffs, no big-timing it. Let’s just go out and have fun just for the sake of it.’ College students began playing rugby, and after they graduated, they started their own clubs and kept playing. And it was purely recreational. Today there are between thirteen hundred and fourteen hundred rugby teams in the country, and the amateur code under which the game is played is much purer than the Olympic code now is.”

  In 1969, the Dallas Rugby Football Club, which fields the Reds, was formed and one of its members invited Mr. Spencer to drop by the band field at Southern Methodist University one afternoon and watch them practice. “I had a date with me,” Mr. Spencer says, “but I decided to just drive by and take a look. I wanted to see what a rugby practice was like. After a few minutes, I said to my date, ‘Excuse me, but I need to learn how to play this.’ I raced home and changed clothes and came back. By then, practice was almost over. But at the end, the captain called us together and said, ‘Anyone who can’t go to Houston, raise your hand.’ I didn’t think I was included, so I just stood there. And I got selected to go to Houston with the Reds. I scored a try in my first game, and we won, and I was well and truly indoctrinated.”

  After the 1970 season, Mr. Spencer decided to leave the Reds and form his own team. “At the time, there was only one rugby club in North Texas, and to play any sort of match at all we had to drive two hundred miles to Austin or College Station or Norman, Oklahoma,” he says. “Also, I had my own ideas about how a rugby club ought to be run, so I decided to set up a laboratory and try some of my ideas.”

  To recruit players, he took out an ad in The Dallas Morning News with the headline: “It Takes Leather Balls to Play Rugby.” The line had been popular for years among college ruggers, but it was new to Dallas. “All the DJs picked it up and talked about it on their morning drive shows, as if they were the only ones in town who understood the double entendre,” Mr. Spencer says. “It got a huge secondary effect. I managed to attract a number of guys who had played rugby before, and a great many more who hadn’t.”

  He named his team the Dallas Harlequins Rugby Football Club after one of the oldest and finest clubs in London and dressed the players in distinctive four-checkered green-and-black jerseys and odd knee stockings—a black sock on the right leg and a green sock on the left—that have become one of the most recognizable, and often imitated, uniforms in American rugby.

  “From the outset, the Harlequins were pretty good,” Mr. Spencer says. “We managed to beat the Reds, 15-11, in the first season of our existence. We got stronger and stronger. In 1973, we played for the Texas Rugby Union championship for the first time. We got to the finals and were defeated by Texas A&M. Two years later, we won it.”

  Then the club split three ways. Several Southern Methodist University st
udents left to form their own team at their university. Another group departed to form Our Gang, which today shares Lake Highlands Park with the Reds as their home pitch. “We had a very poor season in ’76,” Mr. Spencer says, “and it took us five years to get back to the top. But by ’80, we were strong again and have been ever since.”

  While amassing their record, the Harlequins also were building something else that Mr. Spencer considers as important as their victories. Talking about it, he sounds like those old-fashioned coaches who made speeches about football as a builder of character.

  “The Harlequins have a certain mystique in the rugby world,” he says, “which I attribute to their first coach, the late Mike Allen, a Scotsman born in Argentina. Mike put an indelible stamp on the club, urging the guys to be first-rate at everything. He established a code of trying your best to be gentlemen on and off the field. His personality was very strong, and he created a bond that seems to be inheritable. As guys join the club from other clubs, they seem to know that the Harlequin mystique is something a little different. Other clubs accuse us of being too regimented, but if it is a regimentation, it’s one the guys gladly submit to, and it doesn’t diminish their joie de vivre and the fun they derive from playing. They’re just very serious about their involvement in the game. They’re serious when it’s time to dig deep and pull out that something extra that it takes to win.”

  The Harlequins’ seriousness about the game and their willingness to submit to the rigorous training demanded by their coaches over the years are the very attributes that have attracted some of their best players. “With a lot of clubs, the socializing is the main thing and the playing is kind of a second thought,” says Mark Gale. “I used to play with another team, but I was getting beat up too much. I wanted to get into some serious rugby, so I joined the Quins. When you join the Harlequins,” Mr. Spencer says, “you inherit a tradition, and you want to perpetuate what everybody else has worked so hard to build.”

  They are about to travel to Nevada for the Las Vegas Challenge, a tournament they lost in 1991 to James Bay, a Canadian team, by one point in the final match. If they win the Challenge this year, the Harlequins say, they’ll know they’re good enough to enjoy an undefeated spring and make a serious run for the national championship.

  Meanwhile, their last cup game before their Christmas break is against the Dallas Reds, on the Reds’ home pitch at Lake Highlands Park. So far, the Quins are unbeaten. A week earlier, their second side—B team—had defeated Our Gang, 28-7, and the first side—A team—had skunked them, 76-0. Indeed, the Quins haven’t lost a cup match to any Texas team in eight years, but their rivalry with the Reds remains so intense that the Harlequins never take them for granted.

  “We get along fine off the field, but on the field we still hate each other,” says the Quins’ 6-foot-4, 230-pound forward Norbert Mueller, taping his ears for the battle. “It’s always a grudge match.”

  Lake Highlands Park is a mess. A driving rain has been falling for many hours. Large pools, some of them inches deep, dot the pitch. A handful of die-hard fans in slickers and rubber boots stand along the sideline. A few women wearing Reds jackets huddle under a soggy tarpaulin, hugging themselves. A few others watch from the windows of cars parked along the street. But the Harlequins and the Reds, covered with mud from head to toe, romp through the water like thirty huge Labrador retrievers.

  The Quins second side wins its game, 11-0. As their exertion ends, they begin to shiver, too. Finally, as they stand along the sideline, they peel off their wet, muddy jerseys, strip to the buff, towel off and change into dry clothes. Nobody seems to notice.

  As the first sides take the field the rain stops, but the wind grows immediately strong and raw. The ball sails crazily through the air, splashes into puddles, thuds dully on the drowned grass. Scoring is almost impossible. The Harlequins lead only 7-0 at halftime, and Mr. Gale, their bulldog-built captain, delivers a spirited and profane pep talk in a British accent that he believes, after his years in Dallas, holds a tinge of Texas twang.

  “Let’s not go to sleep now, all right?” he says. “We’ve got at least thirty or forty more points to put on these buggers! We are preparing for bloody Vegas right here, right now! I don’t know about you guys, but I’m having fun out there! I’m having damn good fun!”

  The Harlequins go on to win, 43-13. After they’ve scraped the mud off their bodies, they reconvene at the Stepladr Pub on McKinney Avenue, the Reds’ regular watering hole, where the home team, in accordance with ancient rugby custom, picks up the tab for the beer.

  At 6:15 a.m. the Quins are gathering in an out-of-the-way corner of the huge Las Vegas Hilton lobby to tape their wrists, hands, fingers, ankles, ears. Their hair is tousled, their eyes bleary. They scratch, blink, yawn, trying to clean cobwebs and hangovers from their minds. Mr. Gale is haranguing them to hurry. At 7:00 a.m. they pile into two rental vans and head for Freedom Park on the outskirts of the city, where several soccer fields and softball outfields have been refashioned into rugby pitches.

  The previous night, snow fell most everywhere in the West. Cajon Pass, on Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, has been closed by the weather, and in the casinos newly arrived gamblers are telling horror stories about their journeys. The surrounding mountains are covered with snow, but in Las Vegas it only has rained. Hard. All night. More rain has been forecast for this Saturday morning, too, but so far the sky is only overcast.

  “I like this weather,” says Geoff Hawkes. “The first match I played in Texas, it was ninety-five degrees. I was used to playing in sixty-degree weather in England. I nearly died. I couldn’t cope with it.”

  The Harlequins’ first side is to open the tournament at 8:00 a.m. against the San Fernando Valley Rugby Football Club in the first, or Aces, division. The second side will follow immediately with its game against Olde Gael, from North Oakland, California, in the second, or Kings, division. Each Harlequin side will play three games today. If they keep winning, it will take a total of nine victories for both to win their divisional trophies.

  “Tournaments like this test your depth,” says Bob Latham. “You don’t want to use all your best players in any one game. You’ve got to pace yourself throughout the day, so that all your best guys won’t be too tired out and will be available for the final.”

  As they warm up, the first-side players psyche themselves for the game. “Come on! We’ve got to bury these guys right off the bat!” someone says to nobody in particular. “We can’t give them room to breathe, they can get fired up! We’ve got to stick it to them right away!”

  And they do. The Harlequins demolish San Fernando Valley, 43-0, and Olde Gael, 40-3. After their games, the ruggers lounge about the grass, resting, mending wounds. “I have green blood running through my veins and black blood running through my arteries,” Norbert Mueller muses, lying supine, eyes closed.

  Within forty-five minutes of their victory over Olde Gael, the second side is on the pitch again, this time playing a team of Marines from Camp Pendleton, whom they beat, 32-7. The first side demolishes the Camelback Rugby Football Club from Phoenix, 42-0.

  Throughout the day, the Las Vegas paramedics are busy, moving from field to field, examining fallen ruggers, hauling some away in ambulances. But none has been a Harlequin. As the shadows grow long and disappear, as the sun sinks over the western mountains, as the field lights come on and the temperature begins to slide, both Quins sides are still playing their third matches of the day. The only spectators left are a few Harlettes and players from some of the clubs the Harlequins have beaten. At last, well into the night, the second side squeaks by Fort Collins, Colorado, 18-17, and the first side defeats the host Las Vegas team, 20-10.

  As the matches end, each team raises a cheer for its opponent, in accordance with rugby custom. Then, in keeping with Harlequins tradition, the men in black and green bellow their victory chant:

  I was born on a mountaintop, raised by a bear!

  Got two
sets of jaw teeth, two coats of hair!

  Swing a fist like a hammer, got a (unprintable unprintable)!

  I’m a mean (unprintable), I’m a Harlequin, by God!

  The first side must win only one more match now to win the championship trophy. The second side must win two. It opens the second day of the tournament in the semifinal match against Langley, British Columbia. It’s a low-scoring affair. The Harlequins lead, 6-3, with only a few seconds to go, when Kevin Phillipson, their young forward from South Africa, goes to the ground for the ball and is buried under a pile of bodies. When the pile is removed, Mr. Phillipson is flat on his back, lying unconscious and frighteningly still.

  The paramedics are unable to revive him. The ruggers watch them work for a few minutes, then move to another field to play the game’s remaining seconds. The score doesn’t change, and the Harlequins win. An ambulance hauls Mr. Phillipson away.

  The second-side captain, Keith “Flussen” Engelbrecht, tries to phone Mr. Phillipson’s parents, but is unable to reach them. Rumor has it that they’re somewhere in Wisconsin, travelling in a Winnebago.

  The other Harlequins are worried about their fallen teammate, but take his injury stoically. “You get a lot of bumps and bruises in this game, but this still is quite rare,” says Bill “Flounder” Bartok. “Yet, it does happen, you know.”

  And they must prepare for their final game, in which they soon will face the Mavericks from Arlington, Texas. “Go figure,” says one of the Phoenix players, standing on the sideline. “These guys came halfway across the country to play in the finals against a team from across town.”