Muleskinner

Issue date: 11/17/05 Section: Sports

Members of Central´s rugby club battle for the ball in a match earlier this semester. The players take the game seriously, but also use the time to have fun and joke around.

Rugby is "a serious sport, played by not serious people," said Grant Allan, a member of Central's rugby club.

And that's just what they are, a bunch of friendly guys laughing and joking around with each other.

"We're in it for the women," said Ahmad Polack, and obviously he is joking because everyone knows the rugby club barely has a hundred fans come out to the matches, much less a following of girls; that they joke, is reserved for the football team.

"The other teams usually have groupies that come out to watch our matches, they are like die-hard fans really," said rugby club president Seamus Gilligan.

But the team doesn't let the lack of fans and/or women get them down, they just go out and have a good time. And if that means drinking beer from someone's "spike" or running around the field naked, they are up for anything.

"One tradition we have is when you score your first 'try,' you have to run across the field naked; it's called a Zulu run," said Gilligan. "Although, technically it's called indecent exposure, I guess we aren't supposed to do that any more."

The other tradition, Polack remembers, is called 'shooting the boot' and that ritual is reserved for the after-the-game barbecues that the home team is supposed to host for their visiting opponents.

"We might be a little rough around the edges, but we are just a bunch of classy guys out to have a little fun," said the club's vice president Alan Boell.

These guys deserve to have a little fun after what they endure on the field-- if fun means chugging beer out of a used shoe.

Gilligan claims that compared to football, rugby is fairly mild.

"You get a lot of bumps and bruises, not really any catastrophic injuries like breaking a leg or something," he said.

Yet, the "bumps and bruises" described aren't quite as small as they sound. Boell described the type of things that go on in a pile up. He described cleating an opponent, which means stepping on him with your cleats, but not just stepping; it's smearing the cleat into the other person, causing terrible bruises and scrapes.

Continued...

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