Down with the Clown
This is what we asked on the rugby team to see if the new guy could hang. To see if we wanted them around at 2am when the normals have left the party and the clown comes out to play. And don’t think you can protect your date from the clown either, if she’s not down too, you best slip away early. Make up an excuse.
Real ruggers marry girls who are down with the clown.
What’s the clown? The crazy, the unexpected, the unusual, the strange. ‘Keep it weird’ we would chant. There were no holy cows on the team—everything was fair game.
He wasn’t a mean clown. He just didn’t care about your feelings and sensibilities; about what you thought was too serious to be made of.
This was the same ethos I had been exposed to in the comedy world so I jumped right in. George Carlin had been my guardian angel when all the teachers took themselves too seriously at school. When I was told there were some words you were not allowed to say.
Keep it weird. It’s not about your feelings; have a sense of humor. Life can get really heavy and comedy has a magical power of lightening the load,of sharing difficult truths. We laughed to keep from crying and we laughed so hard we started crying.
I moved into the rugby house my junior year- 8 of us paid rent, but that was far from the house occupancy. We were jackasses, but our hearts were normally in the right place when we weren’t thinking with our dicks. I had an unfinished basement palace with a mattress on the ground. We picked up a couple couches and some furniture from a sale at the local Buddhist temple—and now I had a hang.
I could entertain 20 guys in the basement after practice, drinking beer, passing to the left, and reveling in the weirdness of the team. We could bring young guys into the fold. Show them the comradery of the team, the brotherhood of belonging to something, but we weren’t going to act normal on their behalf.
You can’t read about living in a rugby house, and expect to understand. You have to live it. The sheer chaos of the place. It’s an active meditation on the unimportance of stuff. Shit breaks. An improv comedy show pails in the creative madness of a peak rugby party.
We were all lazy bastards so we often let one party roll into the next, minimize how many clean-ups we did. Who cared? Thick skin and a smell tolerance had to be developed if you wanted to hang out with the rugby team.
As many aspects of our culture grow increasingly bland, I encourage us to keep the clown alive and remember that it is the strange and weird that define our experience.
