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Here’s to ya, lads. Here’s to Swine and Pops and the Flying Taco and Big Oscar and the nearly 500 more of you over the years who sang yourselves hoarse and ran yourselves weary and bled and laughed tears during those precious moments of brotherhood. Here’s to games won and games lost and friends made and capers played. Here’s to the young ones coming on and the old boys long gone, but never forgotten.
So hoist it high, lads. Here’s to ya, and your Fort Wayne Rugby Football Club fraternity that turned 40 this year. May your scrums be strong, your glasses ever filled and your tries plentiful.
Todd Davis – a fireplug of a man with bushy gray hair from his 65 years and beard to match, except for the unique long wisp that extends from his chin a few inches beyond the groomed bristle – certainly wonders where the 40 years went. Inside a bar he once owned, he takes a sip from his short glass of dark Guinness and lets his thoughts drift across his own field of dreams.
Davis is reluctant to admit such things, but he, perhaps more than anyone, is why the annual Three Rivers Festival Rugby Tournament will be played June 18 at Concordia Theological Seminary.
If there is no rugby in Fort Wayne, there is no club, and consequently no tournament. And it was Davis who, in 1969, founded the Fort Wayne Rugby Football Club.
“There wasn’t anything altruistic about it. ... I just wanted a place to play,” said Davis, who had played the sport in Washington, D.C., but returned to Fort Wayne after military service.
So he went to saloons and hockey games and basketball games and other places where he thought he could recruit players the way a ship’s captain 200 years earlier would recruit a motley crew. And in late February, on what had been left field of the recently razed Memorial Stadium, a scruffy lot assembled for the team’s first practice and introduction to a new game.
Also sitting near Davis at the narrow, back-room table at O’Sullivan’s Irish Pub is Matt Doss, current club president and team forward, who adds, “Whether he admits it or not, everybody who plays for Fort Wayne rugby knows something about Todd.
“I tried to get together a T-shirt of the top 10 things we learned from Todd Davis.”
“I’m not sure I want to see that,” Davis shot back.
But Davis has seen plenty. So has Doss, 39, who has his attorney tie loosened at the collar. They speak their own language, underscored by an unsaid kinship that only fraternity brothers can decipher and appreciate. And although the eras are different, the shared stories are nearly the same.
All the while in this dark, graffiti-filled barroom where old rugby team pictures dot the walls and where both winning and losing teams would always come to rehash the game, Jim Croce’s poignant “Photographs and Memories” should be playing low on the jukebox.
Once a minor-league football player, Doss represents the middle ground of the Fort Wayne Rugby Club – young enough to still play but old enough that he’s well into the second half.
They practice twice a week; and in front of wives and girlfriends, mostly, play on a lined field at McMillen Park near the ice rink. The dream is to have their own piece of land with their own clubhouse, but that takes money, and that takes time, and the club has little of one and tons of the other.
Still, the team without a true home has had its moments.
Doss speaks in reverence of a victory last fall, when, playing at Traverse City, Mich., Fort Wayne scored twice late in the game to win and advance to the playoffs.
It was Jim Uecker, Doss says, who intercepted a lateral and ran in for the winning try.
“We had guys bleeding, limping,” Doss said. “We had one guy – we don’t believe in stitches, we believe in duct tape – we had one guy duct taped so he could play.”
And Davis recalls long ago – 1975, he says – when in the Three Rivers Festival tournament, Fort Wayne was playing the Indianapolis Reds – “a team we could never beat,” he said. “We tied them with a kick with no time remaining and beat them in overtime. That was probably as exciting a victory as we had.”
Reluctantly, he admits it was his penalty kick that tied the game.
There is a slight moment of quiet at this table, carved with patrons’ initials and names. Lean back a bit and you hope the walls could tell their own stories. Briefly, each man is lost in his own time with his own thoughts.
It’s not just the game, each of them will say. It’s those times afterward, the social, when your guys and their guys go from pitch to pitchers of Guinness, when they go from blood to blood brothers. It’s not the fraternity of greatness that makes it special, because, as Davis says, the Fort Wayne club is “the equivalent of ‘A’ ball,” but it’s the greatness of the fraternity.
“It’s the characters that make you come back,” Doss said. “You start to like these people that you’re hanging out with, and you start coming up with nicknames for some of the guys.
“And the stories. The older I get the better the stories get. Even with a new crop of guys, we love to play with the old boys because we get to hear their stories, too.”
So Swine, the Flying Taco, Pops, Big Oscar – and all the lads before or after – here’s to you on your 40th.
