My parents are cleaning out my old bedroom, and in the process unearthed a bunch of, um, treasures, including a yellowing copy of the William Record from 1992. The main story on the front page is about the annual alcohol crackdown (I think that was the year the police threatened to arrest a bunch of Deans for allowing underage drinking), but that’s not why it was saved. It was saved for the back page (seen above), where you’ll find my byline on a story about the men’s rugby games against Dartmouth. (Amusingly, the women played Union (where I now work) that week. Small world…)
For context, this was the fall of my senior year, and the seventh of the eight semesters I played for the Williams Rugby Football Club. Being a somewhat distinguished elder member of the WRFC, I had been elected an Officer the previous year, specifically the Secretary, whose responsibilities were 1) putting together the Program for the Homecoming weekend game (together with the women’s club secretary; the program included a mock listing of all the members of the clubs, full of cryptic references to off-field antics, and also a bunch of ads for local businesses, which helped keep us in beer money), and 2) writing the news stories about the games for the school paper. We were a student club, not a varsity sport, so they didn’t assign a reporter to cover us, but would allow us to submit stories to run in the paper the following Tuesday.
(Also a consequence of being a club, not an official team: The jerseys we wore were copied from a British club who donated the initial set when the team was founded back in the late 1950’s, and were white with a claret and gold stripe across the chest. Thus “White Dogs” as a nickname for the team, where Williams is otherwise associated with cows and the color purple.)
This was a job well suited to my particular set of skills, though I’m not sure how highly considered a decision that was— I was nominated for a bunch of positions, and this was the first one I won. (Some later re-shuffling, alluded to in this article, made me the acting scrum captain as well, in charge of setting the pack lineups for the games.) Anyway, as a result of my election, I got to spend the year writing up rugby games, which sorta-kinda made me a sports journalist for a brief shining moment.
The way this worked was that I would make a few notes during the games I wasn’t playing in (we had multiple “sides” playing every weekend, one of the main selling points of the sporting aspect of the club— you were guaranteed a game every week)— who scored, who played well, who had done something ludicrous off the field that week that I needed to try to sneak into the paper— and then on Sunday morning, I’d shuffle down to the Record offices with a hangover and a giant Coke from the Snack Bar and write the story. Technically, I could’ve written it somewhere else and given them the text on a disk, but the deadline for that was earlier; if I showed up in person by (I think) 11am, I could type it directly into their computers and buy myself a couple extra hours of sleep. (This also let me skip the Sunday “brunch” in the dining hall, which was my least favorite meal of the week (I don’t care for eggs). By the time I was done writing the story, brunch would be over, and that missed meal would’ve been converted to Snack Bar credit I could use for food I actually liked.)
In a sense, then, this was more proto-blogging than actual reporting. What appeared in the paper was barely better than a stream-of-consciousness first draft, with a bit of editing from the sports editors (I believe they switched jobs halfway through the year, so it was a different guy in the spring than the fall) that year. Those were not my favorite people, as they would rein in some of my worst excesses in terms of prose style (I wanted to use a lengthy literary quotation one time, and they vetoed that) or inappropriate content.
That kind of became a game for me, though, trying to sneak stuff past them into the stories (you can find a few in the text from this one, which I’ll reproduce below). This was particularly true after they imposed a “no nicknames” policy thanks to the Water Polo club (with whom I had a friendly rivalry to see who could get more ridiculous stuff into the paper) after a story they wrote referred to Mark “Not De Trot” de Kanter and Michael “I Just Want To Be Loved Is That So” Wong. I started adding spurious initials to names and that kind of thing, and working nicknames into the descriptions of the play, etc. I had fun, but you maybe had to be there.
(Amusingly, one of the two guys responsible for the story that drew the ban was also a physics major, and my lab partner on my senior thesis project. Something something liberal arts education...)
Anyway, it was fun to look back on this and remember that period, and some of the guys who appear in the story who I otherwise hadn’t thought about in ages. Sadly, this does not include the current Senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy ‘96, who was part of a pretty good freshman class that year; I’m pretty certain his name would’ve been in other stories that year, because I remember him as a decent player, and I tried to get as many guys into the paper as I could. (If he remembers me at all, it’s probably as a terrifying jackass badgering him into drinking more…)
I’ll reproduce the story here (as a series of images, because I’m not transcribing all that), but feel compelled to add two caveats. First, as noted above, this is basically a first draft, written all in one go the morning after the games. Second, regarding the prose style, I was deliberately trying to do an ironic version of the lofty tone in some old British stories about rugby that we had and found hilarious. (The commentary from the legendary 1973 All Blacks vs. Barbarians game was also a frequent reference point…) It’s still kind of amateurish even factoring that in, but that’s at least partly a deliberate choice.
Anyway, here it is. Enjoy:
If you’ve made it this far through this exercise in weird nostalgia, here are some buttons you might click:
If you would like to critique my youthfully exuberant prose stylings, I guess you can do that in the comments.
I am SO glad you brought up Michael Wong. Was his nickname coined by Andrew W. Kirkpatrick, or by Trevor W. Pound? (Regardless, I am VERY pleased with myself for coming up with those 2 names...."