"Saturday night, after the first game of the season, I sleep with ibuprofen, extra strength, by my bed. I know I won't sleep well. The muscles in my legs will cramp and my head will be splitting with randomly occurring A-bomb explosions (tempered by the ibuprofen and lots of water). It was worse when I used to drink. My right side will hurt than my left because I favor that side when I tackle. If the pain's too bad I'll have to sleep on my back (and that's bad because I have trouble breathing on my back - it's the broken nose thing). I'll wake up every couple of hours until daylight comes through the blinds that shade my existence from the outside world and know that I've lived through the night.

I'll open my eyes, scrape my tongue against the dry insides of my mouth, roll out of bed, eat some carpet and crawl towards the bathroom. I call the shambling, lurching, twisting movement I make across the floor the rugby crawl. It's the first ritual of the season.

The real test is to see if I can make it from the bed to the bathroom, a journey measured in feet that seem like miles. I gauge my condition by how high I can raise my head up off the floor. It depends on a number of factors put together in an Einsteinian formula (E=MC/Rugger) multiplied by the number of tackles I made, the number of times I was tackled (don't forget to factor in the number of illegal hits received and given) whether I can raise my arms above my head (prior to a visit to the chiropractor) by themselves or need a pulley, how bad my elbows and knees are scraped and whether or not I believe I have any internal injuries. If I was a second row, which thank the lord I'm not sir, I'd have to check to see if I still had my ears.

After the first game of the season the rugby crawl is usually all carpet. Of course once I've been to the bathroom (checked to make sure there's no blood in my urine) I have to eventually get back to bed but that's another story. For me, Rugby is filled with rituals like this. They are familiar and in some way (yes friends it's true) comforting. It means the itching in my hands has stopped and the season has started. It's like my body is just exhaling.

I'm trying to factor this all into my psyche as I write this month's column on the plane ride home from the Tampa Bay Tour. Don't you love starting a season with a tour? Everyone's passed out around me or on the way to doggy Valhalla, scratching and itching in their sleep. If somebody lit a match we'd all fry in a fireball of methane. Thank God for small favors and no smoking signs.

So I was thinking about this game we play and I had to ask myself yet again, having had my double-shot of rugby crawl (games on Friday and Saturday) why I continue to play this sport?

A woman asked a group of us this very question earlier while we were sitting around the hot-tub together, lining up the dead soldiers, wincing as we shifted in the hot water, exposing new cuts to the chlorine, griping about chomped legs and crooked noses. She even gave us a list of possible answers to work with: male bonding, comraderie, a way to get out our aggressions. Some nodded their heads like lawn jockeys with slinky necks. Some pondered in near brain lock strangling from oxygen deficit. And some, like me, simply stared.

The End