I'm sitting alongside my teammates in a stadium in Tbilisi, Georgia. We’ve lost two games in a rugby tournament so now we’re watching the rest of it, eating complimentary hot dogs. It’s raining, but I can’t feel it. I’m basking in a bliss of endorphins from exertion and epiphanies. Once my muscles cool down, I’ll discover my ribs have been fractured – a consequence of catching a wayward pass in the firing line of a bipedal Georgian homing missile.
A doctor will tell me that I can’t do anything for my cracked ribs; that they’ll heal over time. For the next two months, as my body goes about its internal panel beating, I’ll be reminded of that tackle whenever I laugh. But that’s fine; I want to remember this day for as long as I can.
Twenty years earlier, I was dropped from the u/14 team. Being substituted mid-game for a Korean exchange student ended my rugby career and its minutiae: clattering studs on change rooms floors, omnipotent powers of Deep Heat, half-time oranges, posters from SA Rugby Magazine.
During the walk to the sideline, I experienced a feeling I hadn’t felt before. Later in life – after being late-tackled by life’s surprises – I’d recognise it as heartbreak. But at 13, I thought heartbreak was reserved for guys who could talk to girls – a problem that acne graciously excused me from.
In hindsight my rugby career had all the makings of unrequited love: obsessions and delusions, followed by conjured scenarios, bouts of nostalgia and yearnings for closure.
The infatuation began in 1995, when I was 10, with Joel Stransky’s famous drop goal that crowned South Africa as world champions. Rugby revealed a collective joy in a confusing country. Rugby was an outlet for youthful restlessness. It was the basis for my brother and I to bond on. I was given idols in green and gold, and a zealous belief that I’d become one. To this day, if I can’t sleep, I imagine my own drop goals sailing over the posts in soothing slow motion.
Two decades after being relegated from player to spectator, I moved to Georgia – a country in the Caucasus Mountains, bordering Russia – to work as a photojournalist. I met Dominik, a news editor from Poland, who wanted to play rugby. He spoke Georgian but didn’t understand rugby. I didn’t understand Georgian but spoke rugby. We pooled our expertise and joined the Chalybes Rugby Club.
The Chalybes – named after a tribe of ironsmiths who encountered the mythical Argonauts – train at the Tbilisi Hippodrome. Once a horse racing track in the 11th century, the Hippodrome is a sprawling park where weeds sprout from the cracks of concrete built in the Soviet era.
Next to a cluster of poplars is the Chalybes headquarters – no clubhouse or rugby posts, just a patch of ground.
I arrive to see someone changing from army fatigues into rugby shorts.
We’re not in touch rugby territory any more, I noted.
Georgian men are well suited to rugby: grizzly, exuberant and built like henchmen in James Bond movies. It’s in their nature to put up a fight. For centuries, they’ve fought off Ottomans, Persians and Russians. The Georgian greeting "garmajorba" doesn't mean "hello", it means "victory to you".
I make a note to volunteer myself as a wing.
The shin-high grass gets rucked to a stubble as we follow the drills set by our coach, Vakho. The first practice ends. I’m exhausted, unscathed and eager for next week.
Practice makes purpose; I start running to get fitter. I haggle for training gear at the chaotic Dezerter Bazaar, named after soldiers who abandoned the Red Army in the 1920s and sold their guns there. I find a second-hand rugby jersey from an Irish school in a bale of clothing donated by the EU.
Georgian rugby is centred around charging into contact. Given that I haven’t grown much since I was dropped from the u/14s, my go-to move is to chip-kick the ball over defenders and run around them to catch it. This looks impressive but it’s mainly flight disguised as fight.
Coach Vakho says I’ll play flyhalf. I’m overjoyed and terrified. Training becomes nuanced and we start inventing backline moves. When I call “tevsi!” (Georgian for “fish”) at a scrum, the blindside wing runs to join the backline to form an overlap.
A news channel comes to film us one day and a reporter asks me why I play rugby. I say something along the lines of rugby being a sport for anyone. While that might sound like a cliché, I believe it. Rugby caters for the fat kid, the skinny kid and the 33-year-old kid doing it for his 13-year-old self.
We’re invited to play in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea. Dominik and I get to the stadium early to practise kicking with a tee I made from a plastic two-litre Coke bottle. While we stretch, we eye out the competition. They’re bigger, plus they have matching socks.
Coach Vakho tells me there’s a new game plan. If we get the ball in our half, kick it out.
We’re not in tevsi territory any more.
In our huddle, Dominik translates bits of Vakho’s team talk: “Even if they are big, you will still scare them if you run at them fast.”
We suffer a comprehensive defeat, which is a diplomatic way of saying we didn’t score any points. But nobody is too fazed as we drink beer and eat puri – traditional Georgian bread – in the parking lot. Plus I got loads of practice with kick-offs every time Batumi scored.
We play more games, and while we’re yet to win, it’s the practices I look forward to most. Rugby has brought some normalcy to my life amid photographing protests in the capital, uprisings in Armenia and conflict in Ukraine. It has allowed me to see Georgian life beyond the guidebooks and hipster bars. Through broken English, basic Georgian and body language, I’ve learnt about fathers, students, men in politics, men looking for jobs. Each man living with the complications of a sprightly country in a volatile region.
One rainy morning, we run out for a tournament. I get late-tackled by someone who looks like he’s 40.
“How is he still playing?” I ask myself after I get up.
"How am I still playing?"
We lose the first game to a team – again – with matching socks. In the second game, we score a try. I’m supposed to kick the conversion. I don’t trust my home-made kicking tee so I opt for a drop kick. The ball just makes it over the crossbar. I’m elated.
The other team wins. We shake hands and walk off the field to become spectators. A man gives us hot dogs. Thinking how it’s taken me 20 years to score two points, I realise that this is the first loss I’m not upset about.
In fact, losing seems more apt in this scenario, because to take part in amateur rugby is to give things up. Players and coaches sacrifice time, money and future mobility in their knees to be here – in the mud with friends.
Amateur rugby relies on improvisation: turning unclaimed earth into training grounds, haggling for second-hand gear, sculpting kicking tees with a Leatherman. Working with what little you have. Giving it away.
I’m one of millions who fantasise about being a professional athlete. We envision slow-motion drop goals but know nothing about sponsors’ fine print, armchair opinions and agents’ cuts. Maybe this ragtag crew of ad-libbing amateurs making do with what they’ve got is rugby at its purest. Maybe the closure of becoming a spectator on your terms is something professionals fantasise about.
The word “amateur” comes from 18th-century French, meaning “one who loves”. This might explain why sitting on the sidelines feels different to when I was 13. Back then, walking off the pitch was the realisation of love lost – dumped by my own delusions.
But here, now, splattered by rain, and surrounded by a language I can’t speak, I find my mind sliding to the kind of conversation that former lovers might hope to have. To talk about how it was and how it is, and to part ways by choosing the present over the pangs of the past or the projections of the imagination.
My teammates hug and take photos and congratulate each other.
I try to swallow a bite of this hot dog but the lump in my throat won’t go away.
This column was published in Go Magazine.
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