Why Every Rugby Moment Matters: From Personal Triumphs to Lifelong Impact
I promise this isn’t a blog about my personal rugby reminiscences—otherwise it would be a very short contribution to the annals of the Rugby Rant. But sometimes the best place to start is with personal experience.I have not been a very good rugby player. I started playing later in life, I wasn’t very fast and I certainly wasn’t very strong. It was the last game of my first matrix season and we were up pretty big. I subbed in around the 65 th minute. I was in for a less than two minutes and I got called for a high tackle. It was the first after a team warning, so I was sent to the sin bin. I saw my season ticking away from underneath the goalposts.
I was released from rugby time out with a couple minutes to go in the game. I was playing on the backside wing. We were driving down the pitch pretty well and we started sending the ball down the line. As the ball traveled, I realized three things simultaneously: we were approaching the try line, we had an overload, and I was going to get the ball. The ball continued down the line until it was just my teammate on my left, the ball in his hands, one defender in front of him, and me. All I would have to do was catch the ball and fall over and I would score. All I could think was, don’t drop the damn ball.
The ball came to me. I didn’t drop it. I scored.
That try remains my only career try. I moved to scrum half and was a distributive scrummy, I wasn’t built for many pick-and-go’s. So that remains, at this point, my only instance of glory in the try zone.
I share this story not to reinforce my ineptitude on the pitch, but rather to share how little moments can have large meaning. In the scheme of things, my try was meaningless. The game was well in hand. By all accounts, my teammate could have easily taken the ball in himself rather than pass it to me. That try changed my life in absolutely no measurable, meaningful way. I still went to work that Monday and absolutely no one at work cared. My family was proud, but moved on quickly. At night, I replay that try sometimes, but I’m a little embarrassed that it’s my only one and most everyone I played with has many more of those experiences.
But to me, it mattered.
To me, walking across the chalk lines mattered. And what I have found so beautiful about our game is that my experiences matter to the men and women I’ve talked to who are fellow ruggers. They get it. Whether they played amateur or Olympics, they get it. I don’t know many other communities with the egalitarian sense of camaraderie that rugby has.
So, here’s your chance. What is your moment? What is the scene you would want in your rugby biopic, the one where the music swells and maybe a little bit of slow-motion kicks in? Leave a comment, shoot us an email, comment on our social media, pretend we just sat down at the social and I just bought you a Guinness or a PBR and we’re swapping stories, as ruggers tend to do. Tell me that moment that encapsulates rugby for you. It might not be the most glorious and it might not be anything that would make Dan Lyle envious of your prowess and accomplishments.
But it damn well matters to you. And that makes it important in my book.
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