2014-11-10 Two Oaks, or In Mobile

2014-11-10          Two Oaks, or In Mobile 

                'It's' DW said it to Cin better as they entered the upstairs Two Oaks clubhouse, 'my 50th year / with the Club', to which Cin replied 'attaboy', and then, followed by a suitable respectable silence - which by rugger standards is about three seconds / and a half, respectable or not, it's a function of all of the body-blows and beer and hits / to the head, and we weren't that bright, innit DD, to begin with, before we forget what we were 'assupossed to say and / or are cinterrupted by some other noise, some other / distraction some other shoulder-tackle - said 'I've been Club Secretary / for twelve' and then the punchline, 'not that it means that I'm any good / at it', to which DW was kind and truthful enough to reply back, 'twelve years of anything means / you're good at it', and between his 50 years at it to Cin's 12, DW's / right.

                Course Club Secretary's not the glamourous Executive position, 'my wife' DW said it better to Cin following their entrance into the clubhouse, 'was Club Secretary / once', slights like these, inadvertent or advertent, young 'uns like Cin have to take on the chin as they make / their bones on the Club.  Cin's only reply to DW - a multiple-term Club President and one of the original founders of the Two Oaks facilities, who according to legend picked out the rocks from the fields half a century ago, before they became the immaculate match pitches that they are today - might have been, 'yeah and my girlfriend's / Club Captain', but that would have been not only untrue, though barely, but discourteous as well, and 'discourtesy' Dr. Lecter says it better in Jonathan Demme’s film of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs to Agent Starling after Anthony Hopkins' Dr. Lecter's asylum / cell-block neighbor is rude to Agent Starling, played by Jodie Foster, 'is unspeakable / to me.'

                Yes it was time yet again for Rugby Club's Annual General Meeting, held this year at the Two Oaks Clubhouse.  Founded, well, fifty years ago give or take a decade, by the five local clubs, whose most dedicated members at the time came out to the farmers' acres at that time, and picked out / the rocks from the fallow fields by hand - there may have been a tractor and / or tilling device / plough involved in these legendary stories, but knowing these founders as Cin does, the version with the hand-picking of the rocks is not / a stretch / to imagine - the Two Oaks Clubhouse, with its bar and kitchen upstairs and five locker rooms and two shower rooms downstairs, looked every one of its fifty years of age, give or take a decade, but it still stood proud, and its roof and fields still / shone in the sunlight that peeked through the clouds of this early November morning.

                Doing a job for twelve years doesn't mean you're any good at it, but at least Cin, over his progression of twelve AGMs, had become more reasonable when it came to the amount of time required to prepare on the day of an AGM  - 'I prefer' someone else said it better after being called / lazy, 'resourceful' - and he showed up a half-hour before the appointed meeting time, mostly to staple the various reports, and ensure that the seating was horse-shoe style, and not the Membership facing the Executive, classroom-animosity style. 

                One year, a fellow-Executive member had finished out his term during the course of that year's AGM - that was part of the point of the meeting, part of its raison / d'etre -  and then, following his announcement and the election of his successor, had risen from seat at the table where the remaining members of that year's Executive were sitting, taken three steps forward, sat down in one of the seats facing said Executive, and then proceeded to rip the Executive a new / one, innit Flash, Agenda item by agenda item, question / by question, the crowd loved it but as a rule this kind of avoidable histrionics was to be / avoided, and the horse-show seating arrangement seemed to work the best.

                Two Oaks is a hop, skip, and / a jump from O-town - 25 minutes from the West end, even with the new highway that brought Club members much closer to the exit that used to take 45 minutes from same - and as a result the Club AGM was never SRO / Standing Room Only, that and the fact that it was November, never the most pleasant time of year up on out on up on out up here.  Still, there were just short of twenty Rugby Club members who showed up for the meeting - of a paid membership that year of 150, including the parents of the Club's Junior and Mini players - and though the Club Constitution was as almost old as the Club itself, celebrating 50 years as a going concern two years / ago, and demanded a Club quorum of '20 members, physically present' for any Club votes held at the annual meeting to be considered ratified, this rule did not seem to foresee the likes of e-mail and text messages to swell those ranks, and ©in as Secretary had received 30 proxy votes, mostly from the night before the meeting, which would seem to cross that 50-year old threshold and insistence of live human beings being / present.

                Still, it was decided to delay the meeting for twenty minutes, to allow for the possibility of having at least twenty warm bodies present, and sure enough, as these things tend to do, said members showed up just after ten o'clock, and the meeting / was on, and official / to boot, 'we're deputizing' Cin said it better as the 18th Club member, long-standing team-mate Flash - fellow Club member, good friend, and former fellow Executive member to boot - came through the door with his one- and two-year old sons, 'those guys', though in the meantime two other Club members had also shown up, and this deputizing business became / academic.

                For Flash - as was the case for almost all of the Rugby Club members present, including probably Flash's one and two-year olds sons, if Cin / knew Flash as well as he thought he did, and he did - this AGM was not his first / rodeo.  Nicknamed 'Flash' for his slow-as-molasses delivery style pulling pints - a style he perfected during a season spent playing Rugby and tending bar in England, where they have those draft-line beer delivery systems that require a little more skill and / or patience than the North American version of pour-tilt-pour, back in the early 1990s, 'at 3 PM' Flash had told Cin the story better, and more / than once, 'the pub would shut the doors, and lock / me in', a story whose veracity Cin doubted at first but then came to know as the truth of how things are done in England, innit Sir Percival  - he was known also on the Club and with good reason as one of its most faithful and stalwart members.

                Nicknames came and went of course on Rugby Club, though mostly they stayed, and 'Flash' was the moniker used for his friend Andy,  while others preferred the more toxic 'Poison', pardon / the pun, this nom de guerre well-earned after Flash - following a tournament summer schedule of 3 matches in one day - approached a member of the group of lady ruggers who had been warily eyeing Flash and his team-mates over the course of an afternoon and evening as both groups played the Oldest Game in the World, chasing tail, and said flat-out 'I think our group should get together with / your group'. 

This line, innocous as it was, backfired, and both groups dispersed, but not before Flash was immortalized for all Club time for the toxic element that surely prevented every last one of both groups from getting to know one another even better and then falling / in love, immortalized forever / as 'Poison.'

                There were worse noms de guerre, and better ; 'Sir Percival', bestowed immediately by monsieur debonaire upon the English teen-ager who showed up at training one day with a pair of lily-white Nike cleats and the attitude, and talent, to match, currently playing professionally in France ; monsieur debonaire himself, so-called by (y)our man ©in the humble(d) narrator of this Take This Thing Back to Baltimore me-moirs and Two Oaks, or, In Mobile for his suave delivery and ferocious on-field style of play ; 'Big Army', named both for his size 14 cleats as well as the miltary-grade adventures that he would recount to his team-mates of a Saturday morning.

                Others were called simply by their last name, it was a natural familiarity and function of their personality.  Cin was just 'Cin', though when paired with his playing partner MP he was one of 'the Hounds', as in 'release / the Hounds', Cin and MP who, when released from captivity would unleash all manner of misfortune on opposing team players, roaming from the outskirts of the scrum, especially in the days before their natural prey - the fly-half of the opposing team - was given an extra ten-yard zone of protection into which the hounds could not penetrate until the ball had left the back of the scrum, and been delivered into said fly-half's hands, 'protecting' the NFL, Rugby's bastard but wildly succesful progeny called their equivalent new rules better, 'the quarterback', but the Hounds called it / weak tea indeed.

                As a matter of tradition - and as a way to draw out more players and Club members to Two Oaks Park of a November afternoon - Rugby Club Annual General Meetings had for some time been followed by another annual tradition, this one the Over / Unders Match, named as of late 'the PM Classic' after Cin's fellow Hound, who ®IP’ed before his time only 5 years hence, and though as in a Hound's life, a year in a rugger's life is the equivalent of seven or so of the rest of ours up on out on up on this Dog and Pony Show, Cin had started howling at the news of his fellow Hound's passing, and has not ceased howling, to this day.

                What it is is that though the benchmark for the age after which an Under becomes / an Over changes, depending on the demographic of Rugby Club on any given year - Cin recalls when it was the age of 30, older saws remember it being 25, 'that must have been' Cin said it better of that year's match, 'a bloodbath' - it is always the 'young 'uns' as Flash calls anyone under 30 better, vs. the old saws, and as a rule there is no love / lost between these groups, and this year was no exception, this year's match's most memorable image in what's left of Cin's mind being that of his 250-pound team-mate lumbering up behind the match Referee - the arbiter of what goes, and more importantly what does not go, on the Rugby pitch, arguably the toughest job / in sports - and then pushing the referee from behind, calmly and deliberately and forcefully, right into / the ground, notwithstanding the fact that the referee, an Over player himself, had been doing exactly what was expected of him, from the first whistle on, namely favoring the Over side shamelessly on every decision, and calling fouls on the most blameless of the Unders' mistakes.

                Course the Under side had 11 players to the Overs' regulation 15, this overlap a function of who had shown up at Two Oaks that afternoon, the Olders more likely to need / the release of a good brawl of a November after, 'I'm 'a have a good season this year' Cin's fellow-hound had told Cin better during their drive out to Two Oaks a decade earlier, and Cin knew exactly what his fellow Hound / meant, 'I'm / angry.'

                Thanks for reading this Take This Thing Back to Baltimore me-moirs and Two Oaks, or, In Mobile.