Lights blare at the Westwick Rugby Complex southwest of Lawrence during an evening practice. The Jayhawk Rugby Football Club practices Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The fall season that is underway has produced several cold, rainy and windy practices.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Birds — in the hundreds, possibly thousands — shriek as the men approach. Cleats tap across the parking lot until weathered pavement gives way to earth. Late arrivals sprint to the pitch.
Portraits of former Kansas Jayhawk Rugby Football Club players and life-members rest on the clubhouse wall at Johnny’s Tavern, 401 N. 2nd St. The afternoon scene is a far cry from that of regular team gatherings after games and practices.
It is a particularly cold and windy evening at the Westwick Rugby Complex, south of Lawrence on County Road 458 and kissed by the Wakarusa River. Johnny’s Tavern owner and sponsor of the Kansas Jayhawk Rugby Football Club Rick Renfro is filling in for coach Matt Schwartz, presiding over team stretches, warmups and passing and tackling drills.
Phlegm is discharged and drags are taken off water bottles when rest is afforded. Students and alumni commingle on the pitch as the college and club (post-graduate) sides both practice together.
Their drills present as many crisp tackles and swift scores as dropped balls and crushing collisions.
The team has passed the fall season’s midpoint. Tuesday and Thursday evening practices only grow colder, wetter and windier and maintaining a steady stream of participants — at times this season the team has had to play with two fewer players than the 15 that line up on the field — has been a constant challenge.
Like footnotes, Renfro’s words of advice amend and address any errors that occur.
“Whenever you have the rugby ball you use two hands…why?” Renfro asks as a circle is formed for a passing drill. “It’s so you can have control of the ball and pass it when you need to.”
It has been more than 35 years since Renfro joined the club. Now holding “life member” status, his occasional instruction at practice, the fields he operates and the clubhouse constructed on the top level of the first Johnny’s Tavern at 401 N. 2nd St. continue to invite — and often hook — the new and prospective members and keep alive a tradition of rugby on a campus that saw one of the Midwest’s first teams fielded.
Rugby was nonexistent between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains until 1964. That fall George Bunting came to the University to study law after a stint at Dartmouth. An encounter with the sport at the New Hampshire campus compelled Bunting to place an ad in The University Daily Kansan seeking students interested in the sport — an ad later met by 20 volunteers who would fill the roster of the first Kansas club rugby team.
Rick Renfro, above, rests an elbow on the bar in the Jayhawk Rugby Fooball Club clubhouse. Renfro, a life-member of the club and owner of Johnny’s Tavern, constructed the clubhouse in the 1980s to serve as a place for the team to meet after practices and games.
The team began play in the Western Rugby Football Union’s Central Division after Gerry Seymour, a British expatriate who founded the Kansas City Rugby Football Club, conceived the league.
Forty-five years since the Kansas club’s inception, that 20-member inaugural side has evolved into a 150-person organization with five teams: men’s college, men’s club, men’s Under-19, women’s and a side for the more seasoned alumni, or “old boys.”
“The sport has gotten a lot more technical and professional,” Renfro says. “Back then I would say the third half was more important than the first two halves but now the first two halves are more important. There’s more athletes involved.”
By “third half,” Renfro is referring to the after hours spent socializing at the clubhouse tossing back bottles of beer.
That’s not to say the top floor of Johnny’s doesn’t grow spirited after games and practices and that there aren’t a few empty bottles as casualties. Only through the years, Renfro says the club has moved beyond the perception that it’s made up of a bunch of beer-swilling ruffians.
Ask most of the team’s players how they began the sport and their responses often mirror one another. Renfro transferred to Kansas after growing uninterested in playing football at Ottawa University, about 30 miles south of Lawrence. Watching a friend play rugby helped hook him.
The college club’s president, Brandon Holland, Lawrence junior, also played football in high school before discovering the sport with a group of friends. They began by passing the ball around and tackling each other, but Holland says a friend’s parent soon linked him to the club’s under-19 team during his sophomore year at Lawrence High School.
Nick Mancini, Los Angeles senior, says he was pulled aside by team representatives at Union Fest two years ago and was persuaded to give the sport a shot.
It stuck and he soon assumed the role of recruiter, coaxing Chris Farley, Leavenworth freshman, to play his first team sport since he was a high school sophomore.
The game’s physicality (sans pads) and lengthy list of laws prove a formidable hurdle to clear when beginning the sport.
Mancini’s positions of prop and lock ask that he be among the team’s largest and strongest athletes. Yet it took a mere three practices into his rugby career to find himself dazed on the receiving end of a devastating stiff-arm.
“The first time you get your clock cleaned without pads on is an interesting feeling,” Mancini says. “You’re either out here to play and hit people or you’re getting run over.”
Farley has had to rebound from two injuries this season, the first a sprained AC joint in his shoulder after he took a knee against Kansas State and the second a pair of sprained wrists against Truman State.
“The physicality definitely took a while to get used to,” Farley says. “I didn’t get used to getting hit that hard until probably the third game.”
If drinking and buffoonery have largely comprised the casual observer’s perception of rugby in the states, its physical style of play wouldn’t fall far behind.
“Most people, especially Americans, think we’re stupid for playing and that we’re just beating each other up,” says Conor Taft, Chicago freshman. “It’s a lot less barbaric than it seems. It’s a thinking game and is very crafty. It’s a lot less of a collision game like football.”
Mancini traveled with the team to New Zealand last spring in its first overseas tour in more than 12 years.
It’s a tradition that Renfro has been a part of since he went on the first tour as an 18-year-old to England.
“We learned a lot and bonded over time,” Mancini says. “It was an amazing place to see and to stay in the other players’ homes. It was a really cool experience to meet some people with a common bond playing a game.”
Upstairs in the clubhouse at Johnny’s, Renfro looks at a team picture taken during the South Africa trip. It’s one of a wealth of artifacts that include neckties exchanged after matches abroad, old newspaper clippings and a large globe with the locations of its tours through the years.
“To me this is what rugby’s all about,” he says. “You’re in a foreign country, you’re experiencing it – their culture. It’s not like you’re a tourista, you’re down with them. You’ve got your team, you’ve got your family and your friends and all age groups.”
An April 1978 University Daily Kansan article depicts a scrum where Rick Renfro can be seen vying for the ball. The actual article is one of numerous framed artifacts hanging in the team’s clubhouse and are also being digitized.
Before this year’s tour of New Zealand when the team played four games against local talent, club rugby focused more on winning its merit table, or division.
Renfro would like to see the club fully return to its touring ways.
“Hell, the best teams that we had were during the mid ’80s when we were touring all the time,” he says. “Everybody wanted to play with us because we were doing that.”
On another cold, wet night they practice as scheduled — at least the few who show. Sheets of mist fall to the field and the water returns to the air with each player’s step or crash to the ground.
Sure, the weather proves a heavy deterrent for some, but keeping new players committed has also presented a challenge in itself.
Renfro again dropped by the complex he and others helped raise $120,000 to construct to observe and lend counsel when needed.
“If you get enough guys out there you can teach them and make them learn,” Renfro says. “It’s always about people making the commitment to be there and practice. But if they don’t ever have guys there at practice and they can’t work on technique and do stuff, they just stay mediocre.”
The ones who do stick around — and recruit others to join — play a sport that provided the origins of American football.
They play a sport that Dr. James Naismith excelled at before inventing basketball — which is fitting as Renfro likens the two sports that seem on the surface to be violently different.
“Everybody’s a quarterback so I like the personal flare of rugby that yeah, you have practice, yeah, you have a coach and yeah, you have a few plays but basically you’re just out there going,” he says.
Later that night players from both the college and club sides converge in the clubhouse as usual. Budweiser longnecks bathe in a sink filled with ice as practice and past games are recalled.
Pizza is shared in concert with ample amounts of ribbing.
The weather outside hadn’t improved much but it didn’t seem to matter. Actually, it never did.
“After games and after practices there’s a feeling I’d miss a lot if I let go of it,” Taft says.
Added Holland: “This is more than a sport. It’s more than camaraderie. It’s a brotherhood.”
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