Rugby Paradigm

Column #4 (Originally published in Rugby, Vol. 22, No. 2, March 18, 1996)
By: Joe Lunievicz

"I'm resigned to the fact that I'll be in pain for the next two months. I'll limp to work, not have sex in the missionary position, devote two hours a night to icing and heating my shoulders, hips and knees. It's gonna hapen. It's gonna happen, so I might as well get used to it." - Anonymous.

Pain and woe of biblical proportions - the Rugby Paradigm.

All right. All right. I'll look it up for you. A paradigm is a model or a pattern. Bear with me. I'm going somewhere with this.

Rugby is a game. It's only a game. Really. It is.

All right, sometimes a game on Saturday can become more important than: the marriage of a friend or relative, a family funeral, a birthday, an anniversary, an overseas visit from friends or family (they can always come to the game, can't they?), or the needs of your wife or your lover.

And there is that thing about commitment, twenty some-odd Saturdays a year for games and tournaments, and forty Mondays and Wednesdays for practices. It's amazing how many guys can't commit to marriage but can commit to this.

I was on a job interview once and the interviewer told me I would have to work one Saturday a month. It was a good job and a good career move. Only, in my head, I'm thinking: "One Saturday a month - that's at least two games a season, maybe three, that I'll have to miss." So before the interview is even half over I'd decided I didn't want the job. That was a long time ago. I've since gotten my priorities straight. Right?

It's only a game.

It's not the Olympics, professional sports, or minor league ball. There's nothing at stake on Saturday afternoons at one and three o'clock except what we put up for ante.

My team, the Long Island Rhinos, plays on a small narrow field, a plot of mud really, especially when it rains - in a town called (of all places) Hicksville. We don't get paid. As a matter of fact we have to pay one hundred thirty dollars a year for dues plus eleven dollars for a CIPP card (to register in the union) to play. Well, on the back of the card it does say we get a 10% discount at Budget Rental Car, so I guess that's something to hold on to.

Most of us come back each season for just one more year.

This fascinates me.

Something happens on the pitch for eighty minutes.

The rules change.

The paradigm changes.

What was only a game becomes somehow something more.

Fifteen players together on the pitch become somehow greater than they were before. Two plus two equals five. It's the new math.

What's at stake? Nothing tangible. Nothing you can see or grasp, or put in your pocket.

It's there never-the-less.

I know it is.

Because I still can't sleep the night before a game, and I can't eat much the morning before, and I'm scared before I walk onto the pitch, still...

It's only a game.

It's the rugby paradigm. You can feel it. It keeps you up at night, makes your hands itch in the off season, and for eighty minutes on the pitch on Saturdays it turns you and fourteen other men into something logic, reason, and all rational thought can't measure.

My ass, it's only a game. Never was and never will be.