The Team Plays, the Bar Pays

For this semipro rugby club, the party never ends.

CHICAGO READER / DEC 2006

It’s a Saturday afternoon in early November and 15 men in red-and-black jerseys with rubber buttons are huddled at one end of a vast grassy expanse at the Schiller Woods Forest Preserve. This spot is the home field, or paddock, of the Chicago Griffins Rugby Football Club. Murray “Muzza” Roeske, a six-foot-two, 210-pound New Zealander with the visage of a Viking, is in the middle, offering a few encouraging phrases to his teammates. “Fack all the rest of the games, mates…fack all that–our season ends here! Let’s leave it all on the facking paddock!…Let’s get nut up!”

More than a hundred people are milling around on the home team’s sideline, most with drinks in hand. Under a tent is a makeshift canteen, with two bartenders, a keg of beer, and bottles of rum and whiskey and vodka. There’s a vat of hot chocolate with which to mix hot toddies. There are two portable heaters hooked up to propane tanks. Next to the tent, on a platform held up by ten feet of scaffolding, is a man with a video camera. A good friend of Griffins captain Brendan Brown, he records all the home matches so the team can study them later.

The only people on the sideline of the visiting club, the Pearl City RFC out of Muscatine, Iowa, are players and coaches…

Read the full story in The Chicago Reader

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