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 | | By Jeff Nelson
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 25, 2008; Page E01
As the Quantico Hooligans walk off the field, the first 30 minutes of their first spring game complete, they appear no different than any other rugby team. Maj. John Kelley is still bleeding from a gash above his eye. Capt. Todd Jacobs is sporting a makeshift eye patch after his contact lens was knocked out. Something isn't quite right in 1st Lt. Barrett Dupuy's knee, and there are two parallel streaks of blood down his shin, souvenirs from an opponent's cleats. | | | ...more info |
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| | On the Fields of France, Blood, Sweat and Beers (link)
By Robert V. Camuto
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, September 16, 2007; Page P01
In the world of rugby, it's said, everyone is family: the fans, the players, even the opposition. | | | ...more info |
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Posted on Sat, Sep. 15, 2007
Rugby makes NCAA debut.
For women, a far-reaching first in sports (link)
By Joe Juliano
Inquirer Staff Writer
Whitney Hartshorne of West Chester University plays rugby. Her school is one of only four that sponsor and support rugby at the NCAA level.
When fans show up today in the parking lot at Lakeside Field in Charleston, Ill., they will follow the normal September Saturday ritual: tailgating, waving the colors of their favorite teams, and watching a contact sport involving an oblong ball.
They will also be witnesses to history. | | | ...more info |
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| | Tonga Tops U.S. 25-15 in Rugby World Cup (link)
By MIKE CORDER
The Associated Press
Wednesday, September 12, 2007; 10:59 AM
MONTPELLIER, France -- The United States dropped its second match at the Rugby World Cup on Wednesday, losing to Tonga 25-15 in Group A play. | | | ...more info |
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| | U.S. refuse to blame schedule for rugby loss (link)
By Julian Linden
Reuters
Wednesday, September 12, 2007; 11:50 AM
MONTPELLIER (Reuters) - United States coach Peter Thorburn refused to blame the World Cup schedule for his team's 25-15 loss to Tonga on Wednesday. | | | ...more info |
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The above is the Sipi Tau, the Tongans' take on the pre-match war dance. It took me by surprise this morning. Very nice.)
Raise your hand if you were in line outside Fado before 8 am today to get ready for USA-Tonga in the Rugby World Cup. Yeah, that's right, I'm the only one with my hand raised, because I was the only one there at 7:45.
 Behold, the hair deficit. Luckily, a crowd of about a dozen folks showed up pretty quickly after that, including Michael Schieffer of Washington Rugby and Rob Farley, who played for the Eagles at RWC '91 in England. | | | ...more info |
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The Rugby World Cup is underway. As mentioned, I watched the Eagles play Saturday, and could not have more impressed by their level of play and the overall enjoyment of watching a game. Put it this way, a lot fewer TV timeouts than in that other popular sport I've been writing about all day. Still trying to find the largest watch party for the Eagles' winnable tilt against Tonga on Wednesday. Post where you'll be in the comments if you'd like. Guest blog items are also still being accepted. | | | ...more info |
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Funny, that could easily be a Redskins headline, right? But it isn't. Eagles boss Peter Thorburn has set his lineup for Wednesday's match in Montpellier. Pending the disciplinary hearing for Paul Emerick, it'll be the same bunch as took the field against England. Why not, right? Here it is. | | | ...more info |
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| | Lackluster England Beats U.S. Team 28-10 (link)
By MIKE CORDER
The Associated Press
Saturday, September 8, 2007; 3:47 PM
LENS, France -- Olly Barkley scored 18 points to lead England to a 28-10 win over the United States in a Group A match in the Rugby World Cup on Saturday. | | | ...more info |
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| | Watching the Eagles (link)
Since there were a few questions about where to watch the Rugby World Cup, I wanted to point people to Fritz Hahn's Going Out Gurus blog, which has a nice roundup of local viewing options. I'm trying to find the best place to watch the Eagles' game on Wednesday; anyone up for meeting out? I'm actually typing this from Solly's on U Street, where I've watched the USA Eagles play quite admirably, despite a 21-3 halftime deficit against England. There's a decent crowd here, too. Although I just got an e-mail from Setanta giving me a comp password to watch all the RWC online, which, let's be honest, is a nice perk of this job.
This, though, will interest all of you:
According to a study in the British Medical Journal, the number of heart attacks in Britain rose by 25 per cent when England lost to Argentina in a penalty shootout in 1998....A Swiss study found a 60 per cent increase in cardiac arrests among the general adult Swiss population during the broadcast of the 2002 FIFA World Cup. Psychological stress and anger are documented triggers for heart attacks.
So take it easy tomorrow with all these important televised soccer and rugby matches. And NFL games. And the rest.
If anyone is interested in the RWC but needs a brief primer, this is a pretty nice introduction from The Independent. And if you want some machinations, people are already suggesting that it would be in Australia's best interest to fall down during group play to get an easier path to the finals.
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| | Mark Crick's Rugby Journey (link)
 Crick playing for New South Wales.
The Rugby World Cup is here; the Eagles start tomorrow. From now until the RWC's end, or at least until I run out of material, I will be attempting at least one rugby post per day. Let me know if you can provide on-site color, or if you can invite me to an embassy RWC watch party, or if you can comp me into a bar showing every match, or if you have any other coverage ideas. Bear in mind that, if you're still reading this, you know more about the actual game than I do.
When the U.S. begins play Saturday morning against England, Mark Crick will have trouble watching. That might not be totally shocking, considering the D.C. resident and co-owner of Balance Sport and Fitness in Kalorama is a native Australian. The thing that makes it surprising is Crick is an alternate on the Eagles, who came within one step of fulfilling a lifelong dream by making a RWC roster and who could yet be called up if injury strikes.
"It's just difficult to watch, just purely because you can't help but see yourself in there," he told me. "I'm in a tough situation; if there's an injury, I'm on the first plane over there. Here I am, one part of me is just like, 'Let it go, it's done.' You feel like you've got to--I could hardly talk to anyone for two days [after getting cut].
"[But] the realistic situation is, it's a month-long competition against some of the most brutal rugby players in the world. Injuries occur. You don't sit back and watch the TV and wait for guys to get injured, but in the back of your mind, you know. I've been told, 'if there's an injury, be ready to go.' And that's tough, because at the moment, I just want to go and drink, I really do. I don't want to worry about being fit, doing all the hard work. But that time will come."
If you're wondering why he ever left Australia, you wouldn't be the only one--"Terrible place: sunny and beautiful and beaches and mountains and beautiful women," as he explained.
He's played the game relentlessly since the age of 7, making the Australian national U-19 and U-21 teams. After school he played professionally for the New South Wales Waratahs, then went to Ireland and played for Ulster. He had some visa problems in Ireland and was once met coming off the field by immigration agents and made "a hasty exit" back to Australia. He had planned on finishing his playing career in Europe and was down in the dumps, so he decided he'd travel and see the world while playing rugby.
Over the Internet he got in touch with the guys from PAC rugby, a D.C. club, played for them briefly during his worldwide tour, then went back to Australia and made arrangements to come play for a longer time with PAC. There's some sort of assumption in parts of the world that U.S. rugby players must get paid well--what with all our bling-bling athletes over here--but obviously, Crick discovered that not to be the case.
"I went from playing in 30,000-packed stadiums, to basically guys rocking out with the goalposts in the back of their yards and nailing them into the field before practice," he said. "I'd tell people I play professionally, trying to pick up chicks, and they'd just laugh at me. They just imagine bums at university. It was kind of difficult to explain to people."
That was about 3 and a half years ago. Almost immediately, his teammates asked Crick to become a player coach, "which was a real pain in the [bleep], because it was a lot of work," he joked. But he led PAC to the Super League playoffs, and ran rugby camps, and opened a gym, and about a year ago decided he'd give up his PAC responsibilities and take a real crack at making the Eagles' World Cup roster. He fell back into the life of a professional player, training and working out nearly full-time. For a while he was the Eagles' No. 1 hooker, and he was convinced that at the age of 32--after a broken neck and an epidural hematoma and shoulder reconstruction and torn knee ligaments and pins inserted into his hand--he was on the verge of making it to the highest level.
Then about a month before the Cup, he found out from another player that he wasn't going to make the squad.
"Probably the worst feeling I've had for a long time," he said. "I was really just dumbfounded."
Anyhow, he came back to D.C., and went back to the gym, and when I talked to him he said he would root for both the U.S. and Australia, but that watching rugby on TV wasn't really his thing, never had been.
"I'll be honest, I will watch a game, but if I'm not playing it I'm not really that interested," he said. "I've always been like that. I love the game, I love a lot of things about it, but there's so much more I want to do with my life. Every Saturday since 7 years old has been dedicated to rugby. There's plenty more places I want to go and not worry about rugby, just do something different."
But if you think he's bitter about the process, he's not. He still thinks the sport could have a future in the U.S.--"when American guys first experience rugby, it's like they've just seen God," he said. And he said he doesn't regret having spent the last year of his life in pursuit of a World Cup spot that still seems just out of reach.
"It's been a great experience," he said. "American rugby, to me, is the personalities that you meet, there's nothing else to it. The game is still developing here, there's no real supporter base for the U.S. national team as such. I would literally walk into a rugby tournament, and no one would know that I played for the U.S. team, because no one really cared. They care about their own club, and that's great.
"To me, the U.S. team was meeting the people....I'd have to say without a doubt it's probably the most unselfish, most committed and just [ego-free] group I've ever met in sports. No one stands above the rest, no one's getting paid a million dollars. We're all getting paid $100 a day, doesn't matter if it's the captain or what, and everyone acts like that, you know? It's just something that you don't see in sports.
"Honestly, Im disappointed, but [heck], I made so many good friends....I don't think there's a place in the U.S. that I could go without knowing someone, and that's an incredible kind of thing. The thing about rugby players, it doesn't matter who you are or what you've ever done, if you play rugby, you're guaranteed you'll have a place to stay that night. It's just an incredible thing."
(As for the Eagles' chances against England, "I'm not saying it can't happen, but when it comes down to it they have all the resources and we just don't have anything over here," Crick said. "It's literally guys who have jobs-- who in their spare time try to play rugby at a professional level--playing against guys who are full-time professionals, superstars in their own country, earning upwards of a million dollars a year....Put it this way, if the U.S. even came close to beating England, I'm sure that Disney would make a movie about it....
"If they can go out there and play good rugby and just earn the respect of the guys from these other professional- playing countries, I'll be so happy for the guys. They've worked so hard. Who knows? You never go out there and say, 'Oh my God, we're going to lose.' You go out there to compete. In the end, that's what playing sport is: you just want to compete.") | |
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| | Rugby World Cup in Major Trouble (link)
Uh oh. Some blogger's gonna make a killing if everyone else goes away.
Leading international news agencies on Thursday launched a boycott of the 2007 rugby World Cup, plunging the event into controversy on the eve of its opening game.
Agence France-Presse, Reuters, the Associated Press, Getty Pictures and the German agency DPA said no text, photo or video news on the World Cup would be sent for 24 hours in protest at restrictions imposed by the sport's governing body, on the transmission of photos during games.
The International Rugby Board (IRB) restrictions will particularly hit the use of action pictures on the internet.
"Fundamental rights are at stake, there is no question of letting them be flouted in the name of the protection of the financial interests of the IRB," said AFP chairman Pierre Louette.
Here's the RWC's response:
"It is regrettable that certain members of the media should have decided to suspend pre-tournament coverage. This unjustifiable move is being presented as the direct response to allegedly unreasonable constraints on reporting imposed by the organisers of the tournament. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We (the IRB and RWCL) have been in dialogue with media organisations for over a year and we have made a number of concessions. There is nothing in the media terms and conditions that prevent media organisations carrying out their core business and covering the tournament."
So, uh, better sign up for Setanta, I guess. | |
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| | Today in Rugby: A U.S. Team Preview (link)
The Rugby World Cup begins on Friday. From now until the RWC's end, or at least until I run out of material, I will be attempting at least one rugby post per day. Let me know if you can guest-write a team report, or if you can invite me to an embassy RWC watch party, or if you can comp me into a bar showing every match, or if you have any other coverage ideas. Bear in mind that, if you're still reading this, you know more about the actual game than I do.
 Basauri in training. (Charlie Neibergall - AP) There was no rugby post yesterday, because I had to work on a feature story about Whitman High's Inaki Basauri, a 22-year-old pro player in France who will be with the Eagles for the World Cup. There's not much point in me repeating that information here; you can just go read it, or buy the paper.
I will say that Inaki has managed to garner some British press headlines in recent days. From The Daily Mail:
United States flanker Inaki Basauri has urged his team-mates to "be courageous" when they face a daunting World Cup opener against defending champions England on Saturday....
Basauri said: "I believe we have the team that can take it to them, as long as we play to our potential."
"And I think the fans back at home are behind us. They expect us to play to our potential.
"We are all going out there to show the world what we have, and what we have been preparing for over the past four years. It will be a great experience. I think we just have to play what is in front of us and do our best, be courageous, make tackles and make plays. It is about making everything happen."
Ah, the courage of youth. On the other hand, an ankle injury to English star Jonny Wilkinson apparently has the defending champs "in a tailspin."
While we all look forward to Saturday's game, here's a U.S. team primer from reader and actual rugby fan Chris Jenkins, who highlights an implacable truth: a single win at this RWC will be considered a major triumph for the Eagles. Chris's words after the jump.
Drawn into possibly the toughest group at the 2007 Rugby World Cup finals, the USA Eagles head off to France with low expectations, excellent fitness and high morale. Our team, mostly comprised of amateur rugby players, many of whom have given up their jobs in order to represent their country at this world cup, will spend the next four weeks playing some of the finest professional players in the rugby world. First up opponents are reigning world champions England who await in Lens on September 8th, to be followed four days later by Tonga in Montpellier. A break of a full two weeks is followed by matches against Samoa, one of the most physical sides in this most combative of sports, and then after a rest of just three days, the mighty South African Springboks.
South Africa are in most rugby pundits' eyes the joint favourites, with New Zealand, to lift the William Webb-Ellis trophy at the final match in Paris on October 20th. No rugby team in the world would wish to play Samoa and South Africa just three days apart, and the Eagles' group highlights what many critics view as the key flaw of the format for this tournament - that is that the timetable favours the top ranked professional teams and leaves the so called minnows, such as the U.S., with almost no chance of causing any kind of an upset.
South Africa for example will have had a full seven days of rest prior to their meeting with the U.S. on 30th September. Their shortest break between matches is five days between their first and second matches. No team would want a break of two weeks between matches either, as faced by the U.S., during which time match sharpness will decline and boredom set in. A quick look at the schedule shows decent rest periods for top-rated teams such as England, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland. Perhaps next time, each of the teams should be seeded and the lower ranked teams should receive the easiest schedule?
The above being said, the U.S. go into the tournament as fit as any amateur team could be, and with enough experienced players to be at least able to give a good account of themselves against the toughest of opponents. Key to their game is their first up defence and a set of forwards capable of dogging it out with the best of them. The forward unit is built upon the sturdy foundations of Mike McDonald, the Berkeley-born prop who plays for Leeds in England, and highly experienced second row Alec Parker of Aspen Colorado who will play in his third Rugby World Cup finals. An exciting back row sees the hard tackling Louis Stanfil, a student at UC Berkeley, and Todd Clever - a standout U.S. 7's player from Palm Springs, augmented by newcomer and man mountain Henry Bloomfield.
The team will be led by Mike Hercus, a native of Falls Church, Virginia from the position of fly half - essentially the quarter back equivalent in Rugby. Hercus, on his second trip to a World Cup, is well on his way to scoring 400 points in international rugby. As the team's first choice kicker and play maker, his form after a spell recuperating from recent surgery will be key to the team's success.
Other standout players for the Eagles include American-born backs Paul Emerick and Chris Wyles, who play with professional teams in Wales and England respectively, and the electric wing Takudzwa Ngwenya, who has the priceless ability and speed to break the gain line and cause real problems for opponents. Many of those who follow rugby in the U.S. will be hoping that Philip Eloff, the centre and another potential line breaker who has an excellent try scoring record at international level, recovers from a broken ankle in time to be fit for the first match against England.
The Eagles played their final warm up match against former European Club Champions Munster of Ireland last weekend in Chicago. While somewhat ring rusty -- this was their first competitive match for some time -- spectators saw signs of the strengths of this team in that first up tackling was strong and at times the forwards looked like they had the ability to dominate their opponents at the set piece. Hopefully team coach Peter Thorburn will be working hard to rectify the unfortunate number of handling errors which occured at critical times and probably denied the Eagles at least three tries.
For pretty much the first time ever, U.S. Rugby fans will be able to watch every single match of the 2007 Rugby World Cup live as all matches will be broadcast live on Setanta Sports North America. Additionally, Versus will be the national cable TV broadcaster showing all four Eagles matches and the quarters, semis and final on tape delay.
The Eagles will no doubt play their hearts out - I've yet to see a U.S. team either give up, or ever have a player sent from the field for foul play, whoever the opposition. However, even Tonga, the weakest opponents we face in this year's competition, will take the field with fifteen full-time professionals drawn from the top clubs of Europe and Australia/New Zealand. Having made tremendous personal sacrifices to get to the tournament the mostly amateur members of the U.S. squad deserve your heartfelt support for just turning up. Any victory will just be icing on the cake. | |
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| | Worth a Try
Basauri Has Taken a 'Pretty Crazy' Path to the World Cup
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 5, 2007; Page E01
(link)
Inaki Basauri had just finished a condensed retelling of his rugby adventures. He had explained how a kid born in Monterrey, Mexico, and raised in Bethesda had gone from an awkward American teenager who didn't know the rules of the game to a rugby professional in France. He had detailed how a once-aimless Montgomery College student had ended up training with the U.S. national team for the upcoming Rugby World Cup.
"Now that I actually listen to me saying it, it's pretty crazy," he said, as if considering the idea for the first time.
There hardly is a standard path to a place on the Eagles -- as the U.S. team is known -- who begin group play against defending champion England on Saturday in Lens, one of 10 French cities that will host games. In four previous trips to what organizers call the third-biggest sporting event in the world, the Eagles have 11 losses and just two wins, both against Japan.
The Americans are among the longest of long shots in the 20-team quadrennial event, which has historically been dominated by Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. New Zealand, which hasn't won a World Cup since the inaugural event in 1987, is a heavy favorite; other powers include France, Ireland and England.
The Rugby World Cup is front-page news in many of the competing countries. When the English beat host Australia to win the 2003 World Cup, a crowd estimated at 750,000 flooded central London for a victory parade and team members visited 10 Downing Street to meet then-prime minister Tony Blair. Organizers predict a global television audience of more than 4 billion by the time the final is played in Saint-Denis on Oct. 20.
The sport's powers boast squads made up of professional stars with personal sponsorship deals. U.S. players, on the other hand, receive modest stipends of several hundred dollars a week and say they can attend large rugby events in the United States without being recognized.
Basauri, 22, will be surrounded largely by amateur teammates on leave from their regular jobs as landscape technicians and plant managers and salesmen. The Eagles have long relied on foreign-born players, and so this year's team includes players born in Zimbabwe and South Africa, in Tonga and Fiji and New Zealand.
Many of Basauri's American-born teammates learned the game at an even later age than he did. "It's really par for the course in this country," said national team coach Peter Thorburn, a native of New Zealand. "A lot of them don't play until they leave high school or they leave college."
Which doesn't make Basauri's ascent through the sport any less unexpected. Five years ago, the Walt Whitman High School graduate was studying liberal arts at Montgomery College and wondering what to do next.
"I was kind of confused of what I wanted to do with my life and stuff," he said last week before the U.S. team left for Europe. "I had no clue, no clue whatsoever. I was a bit lost."
That professional rugby even became an option was itself something of a fluke. Basauri had been your typical baseball- and football-playing suburbanite until middle school, when an Italian friend invited him to a youth practice with the Maryland Exiles.
"Very tall and very awkward," remembered Dan Soso, the longtime coach of the Exiles' youth teams.
"A big, gangly kid," said Jason Maloni, another Exiles coach who encountered Basauri a few years later.
"Honestly he was kind of tall and goofy looking," said Tom Sanders, who played with Basauri in his early teens.
Because of his weight and height -- Basauri was taller than 6 feet by the time he entered high school -- football coaches always had plugged Basauri into the offensive and defensive lines. And like countless football linemen shuffled off to grunting anonymity, Basauri was unused to offensive stardom.
So even though he didn't know anything about rugby, "When I got to run with the ball, I pretty much fell in love with the game right away," he said. "I liked it because you hit the [stuffing] out of people, you run into people. I was completely lost about the rules. They would pass me the ball, and I just ran, ran over kids, and finally got tackled. I wouldn't let go of the ball. . . . Kids would start yelling at me -- 'What the hell are you doing?' "
Then Basauri went home, and his body began to ache, and he decided maybe this wasn't the sport for him. Despite playing football, he said he was "a fat slob the first time I went -- totally out of shape. . . . After the first practice I was sore as hell."
He made up his mind not to return until Soso began hounding his house, calling him over and over. Basauri's parents didn't know the game either, but they thought it would be a nice complement to football, and so Basauri was soon back with the Exiles. Based largely on potential, he was quickly elevated to the first team, and by the summer before his junior year of high school he had been invited to try out for the U.S. national under-19 team in Colorado.
He spent his final two years of high school as a starting lineman for Whitman in the fall and an Exiles star in the spring, making various rugby all-star teams as he grew to 6 feet 5 and about 240 pounds.
"He was a big kid out there, and on the field he was like an animal, you were afraid to go up against him," said Chris Pacious, another former teammate with the Exiles. "Rugby season comes along and he's just foaming at the mouth, waiting for it. He was one of those kids that just lived and breathed it."
In his first year at Montgomery College, he was chosen a vice-captain for the U-19 team that played in the world championships in France, his second trip abroad with a U.S. team. He figured he'd come home, work on his grades, try to get into the University of Maryland and keep playing for the Exiles. Then came the offer from Massy, a third-division French club in the suburbs of Paris. The club would give him accommodations and a small stipend if he would join its youth side while going to school in France. His French was limited to "bonjour" and "my name is," but he didn't care.
"This was coming out of nowhere," he said. "I knew I liked to play rugby -- getting offered to come and live off of rugby was amazing."
He had always considered himself "an average kind of player" in high school, but when he began playing year-round he settled into the game. He lost 40 pounds of fat and eventually began replacing the lost weight with muscle. Only a handful of Americans have the chance to play full time in Europe, and when Basauri returned to play with the Exiles during the French offseason he had long, shoulder-length hair and a year's worth of European experience.
"He was quite the sight, stampeding down the field like a giraffe on the loose," said Maloni, who became a teammate of Basauri's on the Exiles' senior side. "I always thought he was just a nice high school kid; he came back and he was just operating at a different level. . . . You don't know really what someone is capable of until they're thrown into a situation like an overseas team where everyone's good, sink or swim. I was hopeful, but frankly shocked."
The following summer he was back again, now a starter with the Exiles' men's team and a legitimate star.
"After a second year overseas, he was a real dominant force," Maloni said.
"He was an absolute beast that summer," Sanders agreed.
In France, he continued adding weight, spent a second summer at a skills camp in New Zealand and moved up to Massy's senior roster. This February, in the middle of Basauri's fourth season in France, Thorburn e-mailed to ask for some DVDs of his league highlights. Basauri eventually made three trips back to the United States for national team training camps and tournaments before being among the 30 players selected for the final roster. There are other Eagles who share Basauri's flanker position, but Thorburn said he has "no doubt" that Basauri will receive playing time this month.
Basauri sees this World Cup as a personal audition at his sport's biggest event. He'd still like to play professionally in the Southern Hemisphere one day, maybe in England, too, before he returns to the United States to enter coaching or athletic training. In the meantime, he's now fluent in French and recently signed a contract with second-division club Agen, with whom he'll earn a salary in the mid-five figures. Which is why he decided that the past few years have been "pretty crazy."
Without rugby, "I probably would have gone to college, like all my other friends, gotten a job," he said. "But that's pretty boring compared to what I'm doing, you know?" | |
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| | The Hooker Likes Pastels (link)
The Rugby World Cup begins next week. From now until the RWC's end, or at least until I run out of material, I will be attempting at least one rugby post per day. Let me know if you can guest-write a team preview, or if you can invite me to an embassy RWC watch party, or if you have any other coverage ideas.
 That's Owen on the left. He's not teaching art at the moment.USA Rugby's Owen Lentz may not be the biggest guy on the rugby field--he's 5-foot-9, 211 pounds--but he's no slouch, either. "He's a physical guy and he doesn't shy away from anybody," said Jason Maloni, Lentz's manager with the Maryland Exiles. "He's hard. He's hard, and he's committed."
Committed enough that he played professionally for three years in South Africa, logging time with both the Border Bulldogs and the Eastern Province Mighty Elephants. He'd play professionally in the States, too, if it were possible, but it's not. So instead he does the next most natural thing for a young rugby star: he teaches art.
"He also gets made fun of a lot," noted Lentz's wife, Bethesda native Erin Johnson. "He's like this rough guy--he's big, he's a hooker--and then he's an art teacher too. It doesn't fit a rugby player's profile, really, to be an artist."
Many of the sports backers would disagree, of course, pointing to the PhD's and physicians and engineers who play their game, but this isn't about them, this is about Owen Lentz. He took up the sport when he was 6, played for his provincial squads and eventually graduated to the national U-21 team. But after three years of being a South African pro, his body had taken a pounding, and so he decided he'd take a break and see more of the world by coming to the States to play for the Exiles.
Then he met Erin, a former honorable mention All-Met soccer player from Whitman High who played collegiately at Brown while studying visual art. She had bounced around after college, for a time teaching ceramics and photography at Whitman, where she instructed a future USA Rugby call-up named Inaki Basauri. Around the time she met Owen--who had also studied art in school--she decided she wanted to open her own teaching studio.
After they were engaged, they opened Bethesda's Artworks Fine Art Studio together. And so, between his pre-dawn training runs and evening weightlifting sessions, Lentz helps aspiring artists ages 5 and higher learn the fundamentals of drawing. He prefers pastels, and specializes in realistic scenes from South Africa. I asked whether he'd rather be playing his sport for a living.
"It's kind of a difficult question to answer," he said this week from Iowa, where the Eagles are training for the Rugby World Cup, which starts next week in France and England. "Rugby's been the love of my life, you know? I've always thought of it as my most passionate thing. But my wife is in America, and you don't really get paid to play rugby in America, [so] I guess art is my work. If I had a choice to play professionally, yeah, I'd play rugby here."
Being in America, though, did give Lentz a chance to play in a World Cup. He had lived here long enough to qualify for the U.S. side, and after months of training camps and scrimmages and cuts he was included on the 30-man final roster this month, fulfilling what he called "a childhood dream." The U.S. side, of course, is in a five-team pool that also includes South Africa. Lentz knows several of the Springboks from playing on the U-21 team; he regularly gets up at 3 in the morning to watch South African matches online, collects South African uniforms and cheers on his countrymen whenever they're playing anyone but the U.S., making this whole proposition a bit odd.
"His whole family's pretty torn; they want to root for Owen, but they also want to root for South Africa," said Erin, who is pregnant with the couple's first child and unable to travel to Europe for the Cup. "They're all proud and supportive of him; at the same time, they're torn between who they should root for."
Anyhow, Lentz thinks he's in the U.S. for good, and after the World Cup is over and his daily stipend of about $100 disappears, he'll be back to teaching art in Bethesda. The studio focuses on instilling proper artistic techniques, which Erin and Owen think are prerequisites for more advanced experimentation. Owen's presence helps convince some of the younger lads that going to art class isn't a girlie endeavor; "it really helps the boys in our class say 'Oh, this is ok'," Erin said. Plus, the moms just love him. | |
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| | The Eagles Vomit (link)
 (Courtesy USA Rugby.)
The Rugby World Cup begins next week. My travel request to go cover this live in England and France was turned down. But from now until the RWC's end, or at least until I run out of material, I will be attempting at least one rugby post per day. Also, let me know if you can guest-write an interesting post, or if you can invite me to an entertaining RWC watch party, or if you have any other coverage ideas. Bear in mind that, if you're still reading this, you know more about the actual game than I do. And write here to join my RWC Fantasy League.
The Eagles (that's what you call the U.S. team) spent the end of July at an Aspen ranch, camping in tents and doing such team-building things as baling hay and flipping tractor-trailer tires and hauling boulders and going orienteering and dragging cranes and other heavy objects around. There's nothing quite like Strongman events to build camaraderie. There's a tremendous photo album at USA Rugby.
USA Rugby also has a camp journal, cobbled together from various Eagles, which made vague references to illness. "Tuesday began with the team recovering from a 24 hour virus that decimated ½ of the squad," Mike French wrote. "People, including myself, got sick and today others are feeling ill," Henry Bloomfield wrote. What was this illness, you're wondering? "Basically the whole team was [pooing] and spewing," said D.C. resident Mark Crick, who was in camp at the time.
Last night, I had a long talk with Crick, the former coach of local squad PAC Rugby, who came within inches of making the U.S. RWC side. I didn't even ask him about the virus, but it was the very first thing he mentioned.
"Guys were basically vomiting and [the reverse]," he told me. "There was one toilet for 30 guys. It was just mayhem. It was pretty bad....The twist on it is, guys were really sick, but we kept training."
Not just the healthy guys, either. Mark told me that there were IV's set up in the training camp, and that about 20 of the guys fell ill, and that a few guys--including him--had to be taken to a local hospital, and that since someone in the Aspen area had recently tested positive for cholera some Eagles had to submit to blood tests.
Mark vomited 10 or 20 times himself, just constantly throwing up, and said that he lost about 15 pounds in four or five days. And naturally, the altitude made it worse; "hard to get oxygen into the lungs while continually throwing up," he pointed out.
But as mentioned above, the players healthy enough to play managed to still go through their drills, and some guys who weren't all the way back would still practice, meaning there was not an insignificant amount of vomiting on the training pitch.
"Obviously it was a big deal," Mark said of the training camp. "It's the third-biggest sporting event in the world. Everyone's not backing down, so you had guys vomiting and in all sorts, session after session....It was pretty awful, but it was kind of fun. The whole situation was funny to look back on.
"I suppose these are the things you kind of look back on with rugby. There's no easy rides, there's no prima donnas, there's no guys burying Ferraris and living in million-dollar condos and playing rugby. They're there because they want to be there. Everyone was in the same boat: we had no amenities out there, it was kind of rough, and we all basically just had to deal with it."
If you've spent any time around ruggers, you'll have noticed that they speak in utopian terms about their sport, about the friendships and the brotherhood and the character and the sense of perspective and the sense of humor and all the rest. Partly, I'm sure, this is just because the money isn't there; if rugby players had a CBA and guaranteed minimum contracts and Drew Rosenhaus, you can bet some of them would buy Ferraris and hold themselves out of preseason practice and look down their noses at vomit-filled tent camps in Aspen. But they don't, and they hold this grand vision of their sport, which is why an amateur from D.C.--who just came up agonizingly short in his bid to make the most important team possible--can now look back on a week of absolute vomit-filled $100-stipend-a-day mayhem and say "it was kind of fun."
Much more on Mark Crick later this week. | |
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| | Join My Fantasy Rugby League (link)
The Rugby World Cup begins in 10 days. My travel request to go cover this live in England and France was turned down. But from now until the RWC's end, or at least until I run out of material, I will be attempting at least one rugby post per day. Also, let me know if you can guest-write an interesting post, or if you can invite me to an embassy watch party or a non-embassy watch party, or if you or your friends are going to the RWC and can provide eyewitness accounts, or if you know a particularly interesting player worth profiling, or if you see a tremendous rugby link from the world at large, or if you have any other ideas. Bear in mind that, if you're still reading this, you know more about the actual game than I do. And yes, I know about the two guys with links to The Exiles, and will be providing extensive Exiles-related verbiage in the near future.
Sadly, I was not able to make my RWC wager in Vegas, so instead I will be attempting to form a Fantasy Rugby League through the RWC site. Lemme know if you want to join. I can tell you that, after four fantasy football drafts, and with a fifth on the horizon, it was very mind-clearingly therapeutive to choose my first fantasy rugby team.
The first thing that's great about registering for a RWC fantasy team is that you have to put your birth date in front of your birth month. The second great thing is that one of the security questions is "What is your favourite hobby." (Another question: "Which make was your first bike?" Since when did having a RWC fantasy team require so much personal history? Certain things should be left private.) The third great, and greatest, thing is that you get to design your team's kits, which is amazingly enjoyable and took me much of the day. The worst thing is that you have 85 "Visa Credits" with which to purchase your team. Not sure what the financing rates are, but I plan to default.
Anyhow, choosing your fantasy team will be a bafflingly complex endeavor; you can only wind up with two players from any country, and the budget is ruthless, and I kept having seven or eight Fijians, which was tough to fix. The winner of the league will possibly get a free t-shirt from me, so you should e-mail me immediately so I can invite you to join.
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| | Rugby Players: For the Love of the Game, and a Party (link)
By Jeff Nelson Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, August 9, 2007; Page SM09
After Will Clapp retired from a well-traveled military career, it seemed a bit odd to find him at an athletic field in Lusby, preparing his 52-year-old body to defend a few square feet of dying grass and dried-out dirt.
The retired master gunnery sergeant could be spending his Saturday morning sipping a smoothie by the Chesapeake Bay or eating crab cakes the size of baseballs at a restaurant down the street. Instead, he was preparing for a collision with 21-year-old Chris Pacious, a 5-foot-11, 240-pound rugby player who said: "I could try to sidestep him, but big guys don't do that. So I just try to step over him."
After the impact, both men appeared unaffected as they got up, but that moment raised the question: Why would anyone do this in retirement?
Simple, Clapp said. "Camaraderie."
That was the common answer from members of the five rugby clubs at Mill Creek Middle School, where the Patuxent River Lions hosted the Phatback 10's, a tournament to help prepare teams for the fall season.
The other participants were Clapp's Quantico Hooligans, made up entirely of Marines; Pacious's club, the Maryland Exiles under-23, a group of college-age players from the state; the Washington Renegades, a U.S. team that recruits gay players; and Iron Rugby, a makeshift team that includes Patuxent players and others not affiliated with a specific club.
Patuxent, Quantico, Maryland and Washington are part of the Potomac Rugby Union, a regional league that, according to its Web site, is made up of 115 clubs from Maryland, Virginia, the District and Pennsylvania.
Saturday's tournament was an exhibition, but that did nothing to prevent roughly 80 men from traveling to the southern tip of Maryland to spend almost six hours mauling one another in 90 degree heat.
"There's no other game like it," said Renegades founder Ned Kieloch. "You beat the hell out of the other guys for 80 minutes, then raise a glass with them afterward. The bond you have with these guys is like nothing I've ever experienced."
"Right now, you're kicking some guy in the face," said Gary Costanzo, president of Patuxent River. "Two hours later, we'll be socializing."
The visiting teams paid an entry fee, partly for supplies and the rest for eating and drinking together late into the night at a local bar.
That postgame ritual is one of many reasons rugby players are passionate about their sport. They note that a person of virtually any size can participate and be as important as anyone else. "There's not a star quarterback or star running back," Clapp said. "Rugby is a game for everyone. It's the last true team sport."
It's also a game most anyone can learn quickly. Several newcomers to the Quantico club figured out the rules as they played. Such was the case for players from each team, in part because of the transient nature of the Washington area.
"I've never seen a rugby team turn away an inexperienced player," said Patuxent's Brian Postus, 28, who taught a few of his new teammates between matches the art of the scrum -- when competing sides jostle for possession of the ball.
"It's going to hurt," he told one apprehensive player.
Despite the physical demands of rugby and the competitive nature of those participating at Phatback, players said they were most concerned with fair play and respect for the game. One incident substantiated that.
After a match between Iron and Quantico, a dispute arose between the referee and an Iron player about whether the final result was a tie. As soon as a player from Quantico made it to the sideline to listen to the heated discussion, he quickly quelled any controversy by saying he had missed a kick. Thus his team had lost, and Iron had won.
"It's like a big family," Clapp said of the admiration rugby players have for one another. "And if some guy here needed a place to stay tonight, he'd have one." | |
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