The Zen Rugger

...and then there's the flow of the colored jerseys, the stripes and the harlequins, the reds, the blacks, the whites and the blues, back and forth, up and down the field, sometimes cracking like a whip and sometimes fluid like water running down clapboard on the side of a house. Do you know what I mean? Have you smelled the expiring breath of grass ripped and torn by aluminum cleats? It hangs in the air afterwards, like the way the earth does as it rises up into the air just before it rains. Have you given blood, as they say? Do you know what it's like to run with the white ball, eyes half closed, legs pumping, kicking up the torn earth and grass?

Torn earth and grass. Is that all it takes to make you bleed?

Sometimes on damp days, when my knee and shoulder ache, and I have trouble breathing because of the crooked air passage I have that I call a nose, I think of rugby as a kind of war. A war of lost souls with something to prove. Maybe. A fake war? My knee doesn't think so. My nose certainly doesn't. Its been broken eight times. Neither does my ego. I don't remember when it was I last put that back together. Do you ever think about it that way? Rugby I mean. I usually do, when someone asks me why I play. I can never really answer that to satisfaction, either theirs or my own. It's unexplored territory. A lifetime's worth, I guess. Ancient. Elemental. Primal. I play because I do. It's rugby as Zen.

I've been with the Long Island Rugby Football Club (Rhinos to those who've met us on the open plains of the rugby pitch) for nine of the last twelve years. I took four years off as healing time (defined as the period of time following the long gasping sigh our bones make after the last game of the season is over until the next season begins). I think I played on the LIRFC team that won the division II cup over ten years ago. I might have had a concussion for that game so my memory is shaky. I don't remember for sure. I was young then and thought I was a wing forward, just like everybody else. Fortunately the team decided I was a back instead. I followed the Rhino's down to division III and back up to division II almost ten years later. It's been quite a trip. I stepped in a lot of Rhino dung along the way. But that's the way rugby is for me. It's the dung that I step in along the way that intrigues me. The broken noses, the torn cartilages, the separated shoulders, the stitches, the black eyes and the split lips. There it is. There you go. Rugby as Zen.

I remember last fall standing on the sloped pitch of Morristown, New Jersey, sucking in great gasps of air, telling myself over and over the whistle blew. The game's over. The game's fucking over. I kept looking at my hands wondering why the ball wasn't there. That's the way it goes sometimes. Sometimes I find the white ball in my hands and sometimes I'm grasping air. These are ailments of the heart and of the soul, the rugby soul. The kind that leaves scars like railroad tracks on your hide. That's what life's about; pain and suffering of biblical proportions, at least from a rugger's perspective. And that's the perspective of your's truly, Joe Nose, The Zen Rugger.