Although I’m far from conceding that the Olympic Games as a corporate structure occupy the moral high ground on most any issue you would care to discuss, I find the afterglow of rugby being included as a full-medal sport in Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Summer Games to provide a healing light.
The part of the visible spectrum that works best for the portly gray dude in restoring emotional well-being while facing yet another summer without local rugby has proven to reside in the neighborhood of indigo on a street called lilac. Any port in a storm, as they say.
Actually, the frequencies involved with the moderately purple hue itself have less profound effect than those of the olfactory process. For whatever reason, a few snorts of lilac and I’m floating. The weight is gone.
By including a hybrid version of the sport that features seven players per side rather than the normal 15 and is somewhat more exciting and easier for the uninitiated to follow, the Olympic hierarchy has fashioned a quite marketable product.
As anyone who watched the weekend coverage of the USA 7s Collegiate Rugby Championships can attest, NBC has made educating newcomers on the rules of the game a top priority. At every opportunity, audiovisual resources were brought to bear to explain why and how “line-outs” and “scrums” are employed to restart play following a stoppage as well as assorted other esoterica inherent to the sport.
Featuring 16 Division I traditional powers and having the University of Utah side returning as defending national champions, the two-day tournament carried a lot of local interest. The Utah side’s overtime victory over Cal-Berkeley last year was truly one for the ages and their day-two drubbing of this year’s undefeated Cal side proved equally memorable.
The Utes ended up taking third place, however, after falling to Army in the semifinals by poorly executing both scrum and line-out plays late in the match and, then, by defeating Central Washington in the consolation game.
If the weekend tournament proved anything, it’s that rugby is growing exponentially across the country and the skill sets evident on the collegiate level bode well for the future of the game here in the ol’ USA. Of course, with national teams like those that will compete in the 2016 Summer Games, the bar is raised considerably.
And if all the elegant violence of televised rugby didn’t get you off, there was always the sweet smell and healing light of lilacs in bloom. They were everywhere! It was a sign! Even while out wandering in the seemingly-gated local community of sagebrush, the healing fragrance sparked an incredible lightness of being.
How far and at what speed can that singular bouquet travel? Each time it shows up, always unannounced, it completely rewrites the thought process. It freezes your motion on first whiff and the initial reaction is always to locate the source. Lilac grows all over the hood, of course, but only within the landscaping that surrounds each house — not out among the sage-dominated local plant communities.
So there you are like a prairie dog, between televised rugby matches, nose perked up, sniffing out the environment, getting a sensory lay of the land, as it were. Each plant in the community contributes something on its own as far as the ever-so-subtly changing aromatic blends, but the sporadic infusions of lilac set the tone. Something’s up, it tells you. Come this way. First one’s free!
You almost need a napkin out there. The fragrance is thick and moves through the air like an invisible fog. You begin hallucinating. You see club rugby taking root everywhere, with introductions to the sport beginning in physical education classes at the elementary school level. Following a similar model, youth rugby becomes as commonplace as youth soccer.
Maybe, within a generation or less, it might even once again become a focal point in the Park City community with Saturday gatherings at City Park, road trips to other ski towns (where summer rugby also makes the most sense), and an annual tournament held each fall.
Over the next few years and beyond, 7s rugby ought to be making somewhat of a splash on the small screen as NBC, the network of the Olympics into the foreseeable future, with sponsors hopefully lining up to get a piece of the action, attempts to build a following. In an ideal world, essence of lilac is always in bloom.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.