Memorandum- To my dear, understanding, and admittedly-hypothetical readership: those of you who perhaps feel debased and emptied by my exclusion of a relevant quotation have to understand that my library, while unusually well-endowed and endlessly versatile in most respects, is most impoverished when it comes to the thematic content of this piece. Convention is meant to be flaunted, anyway, you infatuated groupies....

The rugby agglomeration that is constituted by our prestigious, unique, oh-so- complementary five colleges seems to be operating on a contradiction in terms. On the one hand, the assembled punters are not so squeamish that they would so much as bat an eyelash when confronted with the tittilatingly raunchy revelation that they’ve been know to coerce their rookies into drinking out of a Nixon-administration "vintage" cleat. In fact, in the face of even more depraved and perverse prior barbarisms committed on the team’s behalf, the boot-consumption episode seems relatively innocuous and sanitized.

Public decorum, in the true Douglas C. Niedermeyer sense of the phrase, prevents me from even enumerating the atrocities that were performed on a young and impressionable Michael von Guilleaume ’01 during his initial rugby campaign. Needless to say, the painfully obvious radicality of the personality alteration that was precipitated in Mark Cantwell ‘01, an alteration brought about through the grotesqueries enacted upon him by various leaders of the squad during the ‘97-’98 season, is a subject too wretched to even contemplate. In other words, the actions sanctioned by the rugby outfit at these schools over the past couple of seasons have done nothing to warrant a substantial overhaul of their essential nature; wankers they most certainly are, and wankers they’ll almost doubtlessly remain.

Yet Steve "The Crazy Pirate/The Seven-Year Plan" Salmon ‘00 petitioned, cajoled, and practically begged this scribe, during the rugby tilt two weekends ago vs. USC, to write a fawning, effusive, quintessentially suck-up piece detailing the everlasting virtues of this year’s team. Apparently, this hack was sufficiently touched by the heart felt emotion of Salmon’s request that he decided to authorize the Christmas-in-October tone of this week’s column. (I know, it’s sickening how sycophantic this address has been so far in singing the praises of these wankers...)

In turns out, though, that a funny thing happened on the way to this piece becoming the worst afterbirth of yellow journalism and muckraking combined, I recalled that the rugby team is actually going on an enriching and stimulating Southern Hemispherical Tour this year. Okay, so they’re only playing something like three games in three weeks, and if that doesn’t sound like a plush, fraudulently motivated junket, then I don’t know what does. But the point is that there’s Culture to be had on this swing wayyyy down South. And if these rugby players had their druthers, they’d suck that Culture through a straw, until they were so helplessly aesthetically-enhanced that they could actually carry on semi-meaningful conversations with any member of the Art History department.

Of course, that begs the question, what was it that was so lacking in these rugby players’ previous educations that made the need to turn them into the biggest culture vultures this side of the Getty such an imperative one? Or is there just something in the psychological make-up of a rugby-inclined personality that necessitates cultural force-feedings such as the one in the works? After all, there’s incontrovertible evidence that three-quarters of ruggers wouldn’t hesitate at checking the box marked "None of the Above", and then dutifully pencil-in Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal in the space provided, when given the census question "Indicate Your Nationality Or Ethnic Identity". But bipeds whose knuckles scrape the ground when they walk still need cultural sustenance, don’t they? Either way, it’s obvious that the rugby squad around here isn’t merely the leading collegiate-organization in beer consumption per capita anymore; it’s now soon to be the leading collegiate organization in beer consumption per capita, with more culture than any one rugby team could possibly want to possess. The delineation couldn’t be any more crucial.

So the next time you happen to find yourself in a pretentious art gallery in Soho, listening to some foppish diletante prattle on incessantly about the Deconstructivist-Neo-Marxist-Structuralist-Post-Colonial-Romantic elements of a half-masticated Twinkie encased in Lucite, remember that the rugby squad is/has already doing/done all of that, and played rugby on the side. It’s that highly cultivated, artistic refinement, combined with the obligatory taped together butt cheeks of the freshmen players, that will make this year’s rugby team at the Claremont Colleges an irresistible double threat. This fan, for one, will be sorely disappointed if this year’s players fail to introduce an espresso-break, followed by the reading of selected passages from Ulysses and an exhibition of their very own installation art, during the half-time festivities of their matches. But a keg of Natty Ice might still suffice, if only for nostalgia’s sake.