LJ rugby: Visceral contact

By Ed Piper

When I covered the Vikings' rugby game against Coronado at home Feb. 3, this was the first time I heard and felt the depth of the hard contact that Leighlan Ramirez, Marc Oriol, John Hartford, and the other La Jolla "15" were making in a contact-full game.

It's not that I wasn't paying attention during the previous couple of games.

My only other brush with rugby, besides this season, was in 1972, when I was a freshman at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and I watched part of a club game on campus.

The conditions are this: I've read up on the sport, just to figure out what is going on on the field, by consulting Rugby for Dummies, which lays things out pretty clearly.

That has helped my rugby IQ go from zero to larger.

But then, also, I have been so busy getting to the games (a few re-scheduled or cancelled) and wanting to take photos that my attention has been directed mostly to those activities.

Finally, Friday, I could feel it. L.T. Roby-Cano, crunch. I was staying near the "line of scrimmage", whatever that is called in rugby--the interface of the two teams--and trying to get closer action shots of the Viking players.

I could feel the massive jolt when one player, skin, bones, no padding, hits another, and the other resists. No soft touches. No bouncing "boing" like in cartoons when one body extends as it collides with another, the animator making it look like bodies bend that way--but they don't.

I witnessed from the sideline the kind of body collision that resulted in the broken collarbone by another team's player at the round-robin scrimmage back on Dec. 17 at Edwards Field. He was joking and interacting, but he was grimacing and his pain was real. They had arranged a rigged-up sling for him, neck and left arm looped, as he waited for someone, finally, after the scrimmages to take him to the hospital.

Asked by a reporter what the probable after-game destination of that player was, the on-site medical person said, "Oh, yeah, going straight to the hospital."

That's the kind of contact I saw Feb. 3. Real-world. Exciting, but real.