I am teaching english in a small town in mexico and i rent a tiny house on a dead end Street that ends in the woods.

I am on the frontier. No internet, no fridge, no ac, just a fan and sweat and peace.

I am finally over the rage that filled me as a citizen of my former country. I finally have time to focus my thoughts and make one more great move in my life. To a tiny beach town. I am looking for a single mother who lives near the beach.

I am friggin John Wayne reincarnated, the quiet man, trying to settle in in Mexico. A foot taller than the locals, I walk hunched forward like a young teen girl just hitting puberty, slightly embarrassed by my physical beauty. Not wanting to show off. Humble.

It has been made abundantly clear that I should steer clear of the local cantinas with thier flocks of butterflies and soft taunts of 'gringo' and 'trump'. Soft taunts because I am such a physical specimen. Godzilla has landed. I don't want no trouble podner....

So I guess i better get to work on my autobiography while i have time and space. That rugby luxury, space to opérate and time to start some shit. I miss the game but i no longer care about twisting other humans backs into knots. I have never been this old. I tell myself i am a better person now, 50 pounds lighter, 200 percent less angry......

 

i will be writing words about rugby every day until someone steals my free time from me
thats why i live here in mexico
my time is valuable to me

here is something I shared with a rugby supply company...

who knows?

i am a force of nature transplanted to mexico post 50...

i would like to start a rugby team here in my adopted city of motul

we are located inside the lip of the crater that hit near Ch'x Chilub that wiped out the dinosaurs

i am the english teacher here and recently worked for the state of Yucatan in a summer sports program

they would love rugby here...

as they do not pay rugby teachers much, you would be donating a bag of balls, i would make sure you are the only people i ever order rugby stuff from in the future...

heres a real chance to be in on the ground floor 

i started writing about rugby here   i am a prop, or.........

i am a prop, or.........

---

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OK,

 SO IF YOU NEED A RUGBY COACH

COME AND COLLECT ME

          I am a collector of the rugby experience. If you need to upgrade your rugby experience, give me a call. I will need a place to hang my hammock, a karoke brunch/night and a poker fund-raiser night. Two money makers a week for the club. Keeping it fresh to keep the attendance levels up there. You name the concept, I will co-host a few parties with you and then get out of your way. I will teach your props to pass and bite and then get out of your way. You backs will become Maulers.

          Your club will be the featured club as I try to make money from this sport, paying the shit forward, you know, growing little rugby cultures around the world. Supportive people first communities. First tee shirt offering.

RUGBY

We turn socio-paths into citizens.

i gotta be me

 

 

as a big brother i was kind of tough on my brothers growing up

some one had to be

my dad was raised in a house with  6 women

it ain't easy being a bully

but when my brothers tried to pass it down the line

to my adopted sisters

was where the bully shit came in handy

i did what i could to save them from what i created

anyway, being a bully was perfect

i had to be the lead asshole on my team several times

if you were wearing the wrong color on saturday i am sorry

i'm just doing me

doing what i do 

that's what harry's are known for

if there is any one who thinks i have a selective memory, please share in the comments

i do not edit them

i will take spam out

i will take out attacks on my family and threats

but i welcome debate

so what do you do when an athletic team mate is bonding with a team from Virginia

kicking your team's ass

and laughing with his new team mates as he scores?

ADD A LITTLE HARRY

the ball was in his hands when i hit him late in the lineout

but 

THAT'S WHAT TROLLS DO

that's why i never paid dues

i did the heavy lifting

so, I slowed this fella down alot

and when in the middle of a tackle

on a dead play

who in their rugby mind chooses NOT to land on dude

who chooses not to slow down the GAZELLE

for the others in the hunting pack

my neck on the line every scrum

because im the type of bastard that has no fear

thats what rugby was

me facing my fears and sharing the violence with the world

thank you rugby

it's the nature of the game

unless i missed a day 

please help me understand my flaws

i'm getting really zen in my 50's

rugby provided me some of the finest moments in my life

a freedom of expression

a place to grow 

a place to flower

Violent Opportuities

     If it seems like I have a chip on my shoulder sometimes, there is a very good reason for it. I was a smaller than average bear until I got to college. The clowns I hung out with in high school were a diamonds in the rough. I ran into my egg throwing buddy while I was home from college a couple of times. He was still the same size roughly at 132 where he was quite the competitor. I was over 210 at this point having shot up and out 4-5 inches. My 28 inch waist in HS was now 34 and I thought for sure I could handle this tiny old friend. Not a chance. Slippery and quick he kicked my ass on the front lawn. Then after some adult beverages we tried on the back lawn. My theory was that my beer muscles were superior to his. They weren't. It is fun to get your ass kicked every now and then. It keeps you humble.
    He told me about taking his wife to the diner catching their kid, and then his wife, from the bathroom window in a classic up date on the dine and dash. The next time we met he was telling me of his new used bicycle business. "They just leave them on their porches in this town', they never lock them up! I have a garage full.!' Being a victim of bike theft as a youngster wasn't enough to make me break the code. Losing a bike teaches  you a very zen like detachment from objects. You either have a code or you don't. When I have a code I buy two pineapples and a bottle of tequilla. Both slay viruses in a fun way. Mandarin juice is my second choice, but any vitamin C does the trick.
    The last time I ran into him I was carrying a quarter keg up the hill to the dorms from the distributor in my dad's army duffel. Army duffels are very handy in this regard. If you can't fit your life into one you have attachment problems. He was on parole. He was less enthusiastic about the area because "the cops were being real dicks." The last I heard was something about construction in the west. He missed the 25 year reunion. I wish I had.
     So this was one example of a low risk violent opportunity for macho mayhem. My dad was a different kind of veteran. My Uncle strafed water buffaloes in Nam. His kids called him "Sir," as in "Can I have more potatoes. WHAT?"  I had a Dad. They were fun to listen to at the beach with my Grandad and all of us cousins just running wild. So I wasn't exactly encouraged to play the sport I wound up loving. My Dad came to one game. It worried him. He goes to my nephews football games because the violence is not as sustained. It has order. They stop every five seconds and re-organize. The flowing, chaotic, poorly reffed game he watched in the 80's was too much for him to take in.
     I wanted to talk about violent opportunities because I was remembering a newsletter I read from my days of yore. Days when I had a job because of my sensitivity. My sensitivity to an insult, to the wrong color jersey, to a New York or North Jersey accent. I would hear that "funny tawkin"  and want to kick their ass for the time the Jets fans shit on my car. Or for their Capitalistic, world polluting attitudes, or just  because they needed to be beat on on account of general practices. Get a bunch of them together and it is a fine, bruising day of fun. People who were a perceived threat to "Tiny high school me" did not know that this fully operational death star neanderthal was targeting them because of something that happened years ago, or some tv show about New York attitudes that I recently watched the rubbed me the wrong way. It was not always a lot of fun to be mad at the world, but rugby provided relief. I could not very much pound on the frustrating little kids at work, now could I?
     The newsletter called me  "one of the most opportunistic players" he had ever seen. I extended that attitude into all areas of my life. No one else was going to do what I was going to do all day Saturday. Dealing with the bullies on the other team. Containing them, striking fear into them or at least trying to give our colored shirt the advantage in this one facet of the game. Being better than the dude across from me my first priority. That's what's easy about rugby. I would also try to terrorize their dainty woodland creatures whenever possible. There was a rumor that I was a little "over-strategic" sometimes. But that's the game, find their weakness and exploit it. Use your strengths. to do so while hiding your own softer rugby players.
     When you look at your team and there is a lot of hard physical stuff to do in scrums and rucks and there is no one who you trust to do it better than yourself, that's when you stop playing wing forward and start playing prop. Like a saint. Saint Harry, the asshole. yeaaaa. The stereotype of fat dudes playing prop is only found on beatable teams. Rugby is about running. Fat slow dudes are an exploitable liability. If  you let them disrupt your game, I feel sorry for your rugby experiences, you missed some wonderful moments.
    

Slow Motion

     This is supposed to be tiny little vignettes of rugby reality. A lens of reality.  Three of my vertabrae  are fused, c6,c5, i forget which way the sequence goes. They used to let us slam into each other in the front row. And I was sitting on the shoulders of a massive individual known as the love beast, among others. Sometimes it takes a minute for me to turn my head and the signals still get to the same place, but they take a detour, that's all.  Doctors bore me. Here is a true account of what happened when I weighed what a fat prop weighs and had  a tiny little stroke-ish thing that I fought off. Paralysis is no fun. A collapsed scrum is no fun.

                              .....something happened to me in a scrum collapse.....

     Rugby became my only reality in the mid-eighties sometime. I am using this post to get things down that are triggered by other memories as a sort of rough draft, so sorry if this is choppy, this isn't close to finished...

    
    In my senior year in high school, I wrestled at 124 and could have gone lower but there were two freshman "legacies" at those weights. A zimmerman and a bieber, both from wrestling families, brothers to sectional champions, purebreds. So it really started to surprise me to be called "big guy" when I started attending Community College of Philadelphia in 1981. I thought they were calling me fat. I had the typical small dude  chip on my shoulder and walked around in a rage when people would call me fat. 

       It wasn't long before I met the great-great-great-great-great- grand nephew(twice-removed)  of the Roman God Of Wine, who recruited me for Blackthorn Nation.

     My first rugby practice was somewhere in the northeast, and they quickly determined that I was a second row and told me kneel and to put my hand between some fat dudes legs and grab. A scrum seemed kind of meterosexual from the second row, frankly(thanks for the years of support, big Metro AC).

    An  elfish, yet tubby, rugbytuffguy wing was nice enough to pick me up that Saturday in a car full of sugary treats, We wound up at Burholme.  I got into that game in the last ten minutes on the wing and it was a great place for a total novice to stand, in borrowed shorts, cleats and the fabulous wool green and yellow knee highs. As it usually goes on the wing, it was a great place to watch some rugby and get some sun. My experience at wing was so pleasant that I started to think that maybe I was some kind of rugby tough guy. Out there with the butterflies.

     That night at the Mermaid was a night of singing, Elephant walking and "ALL WE OWE, WE OWWWE HER" The party was probably the second bar I had been to. The first bar Was across from CCP and was called Froggies. The cops came in. I cried that I was only in there playing the video game while I waited for my bus. I think I embarrassed the cops and they let me go. Thanks Cops! This the first REAL party I had been to as an "active" participant and a signal from the future that THIS WAS THE SHIT THAT I WOULD BE DOING FOREVER. This is where I learned about Fraternal love. Girls, I dig you now about how loving men is never easy,  they are such assholes!(nohomo).

    The next week was even more legendary as it was a bus trip to DC to play SUD. Club Sudamericana de Rugby.  I was handed a magazine with rucking and other techniques to read and I was good to go! Someone on SUD must have sniffed out my new car smell there on the wing in a borrowed kit.   I soon was fielding a kick. I did what came naturally. Run as fast as I could into the closest group of opponents. Not a good idea, I found out. These dudes were much meaner than the neighbor kids and the our unending "kill the man with the ball" marathons. We had a fine party at the Bottom Line and a boozy bus-ride home. I was the one drinking brandy and puking in the black plastic HUFFY trash bag all the way home with my hyper extended elbow that didn't move for a week or so. Some kind soul dropped me off in Swarthmore on my Aunt's porch in the wee hours of the morning. She was a trooper and didn't say too much. There is a bit of a family history in this arena and her tact and lack of judgement was just one of the reasons that I loved my sainted aunt, Aunt Kitty. She also loved wordplay. So that's who I suppose I am writing for. It could have gone much differently.

   I started to really get rugby Kutztown a year later. This one is easy to pinpoint because, shortly after I dropped out they got a legendary Eagle coach and got a lot better at rugby. Kutztown forged my innate big brother bully machine into a fast mean dude after a summer of running every night. B-side was not cutting the mustard for me. There I was, at my natural position, wing forward, eating light bulbs with West Chester, serenading rugby queens and jumping off roofs with Reading Rugby and the pig who caught on fire. The fathers of Readings finest today. I was dangerously close to graduation and stayed at the beach that summer instead of returning to school. That prompted a move to DC. I was drinking at the Bottom Line and feeling deja vu and the President of the club, approached me and it like sorcery or something.

A man Called Clueless

     "What are Ya? A bunch of Pussies?"
   
     This modern day Henry the fifth, on the morning of Saint Crispin's Day, was a dude we called "Clueless"
It worked wonders. We were also coachless, that crisp October morning in Lehigh. A bunch of us had jumped into some cars the night before for some psychological warfare. I mean, why just win the post game party? Let's take over the town for the weekend. No one was interested in another Friday keg surrounded by corn. There was corn everywhere in Kutztown in the Fall. Our field was surrounded on three sides by corn, which was how we got away with the goat sacrifice on the Summer Solstice that one summer when we all took summer classes to try to graduate within 6 years. The 6 year plan. D for Degree. We weren't geniuses, but we were not a bunch of pussies either. Lehigh never had a chance.