Chapter 3: Bucket List Dream, Press Credentials to a Rugby World Cup

CHAPTER 3: Bucket List Dream, Press Credentials to a Rugby World Cup

Posting the memoir on the internet chapter by chapter and then interacting with people as the next chapter was being written shaped how the memoir evolved. Ultimately it turned into a mostly chronological journey through many parts of my life. I had originally planned to do this chapter early in the memoir journey because it was a Rugby World Cup year in 2019 when I started the memoir. Once again I was pursuing what was at one time a bucket list goal to obtain press credentials to a Rugby World Cup. I say “once again” because the goal was achieved in New Zealand in 2011 right after Carolyn and I left our jobs in Honduras and right before we realized we wouldn’t be teaching school ever again.

I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about reading and writing as an elementary student, but I don't think that was the fault of any teacher in particular. I have fond memories of many teachers before I went to military school. 

My eighth grade English teacher, Dr Ginn, was  assistant to the president of the University of Southern Mississippi when I pursued a doctorate there a couple decades after eighth grade. When I was in eighth grade, he had the class memorize Chaucer in "Olde English". He was also the eighth grade basketball coach and coach of the YMCA team. For YMCA games we didn't have a bus. He would drive several of us from Picayune to places like Lumberton or Pascagoula. If anyone had thought of seatbelts, it wasn’t an idea that had caught on yet.  He would drive the sometimes dark and rainy roads of south Mississippi with us reciting Chaucer in the back seat. When I saw him again over twenty years after eighth grade, I reminded him of having the class memorize and recite Chaucer. He looked sincerely apologetic and said he was sorry. I assured him the experience had been rewarding. It had oddly come up on several occasions to be entertaining to recite the introduction to the poem in something approximating olde English, and it inspired an appreciation for how language evolves.

"Whan that April wit dat surree sutaie 

The drought uv march at pierced to the rutaie 

Ahn bathed every vein in sweet liquor

Which virtue engendered is the flower"

Or something like that.

During my years teaching elementary school my classes would often write the school newspaper.  For the year of my doctoral internship at USM I was editor and primary contributor to the Mississippi Community Education Quarterly. In my late twenties I wrote and self-published a children’s book. When I was a young father, I wrote the Dad-to-Dad column for the Florida Parenting News. My interest in writing for publication ebbed and flowed through my developing years and mingled with, what some have called, a mania for the sport of rugby. The bucket list dream of getting press credentials to a Rugby World Cup emerged from a confluence of experiences. This chapter traces how I think the dream came about and the characters that played a part in helping me realize that dream twice.

For the ten or so years that I taught elementary school, I tried to encourage creative writing.  I had a contest every other week. On Monday we would pick the elements the creative writing would have to include: setting, character, genre, etc. The students would have a week to write a story that had at least as many sentences as years they were old. I would pick the stories up on Friday. If they weren't in on Friday, they didn't get read. At least that was the rule. I would edit them over the next week using colored markers,  so the kids could clearly see where the mistakes were when they rewrote it, and so I was clear on what the child was trying to say when I read it. The stories were to be completely anonymous. If there was a hint of letting people know it was your story, you were disqualified. At least that was the rule.

On Fridays I would read each story, and the kids would rate each one on a 1-5 scale. I could tell by ratings if some kids were telling others which story was theirs. Students also had to give their own story a one. This eliminated students who would give theirs a five and everyone else a one. I gave out points for the first five places with lots of opportunities to tie. I am a little competitive. There was a score card for the year on the wall. At the end of the year the writer with the most points got a medal. I gave out a lot of points, but only one medal.

This is when I first started analyzing writing. In a few schools where I worked, my class wrote the school newspaper, so I began to teach how to write a news article. My 5th grade class was writing the newspaper for a school in Immokalee, Florida. There was a large, and not always predictable, movement of students in the farmworker community of Immokalee. One year I started the school year with fifty students in a classroom made for thirty. Two weeks into the year we were going to press with our first edition of the Highlands Elementary Gazette. The student who covered our classroom wrote a story about how it was a good thing the school didn't have a fire because the students in our class would trip all over each other trying to get out. The principal was the publisher. He had final approval. He let the story be sent home to every parent in the school. I don't know if it had an effect, but within a week the class was split. The possibility for the printed word to make things happen was a reality, but could it take a boy from south Mississippi to the press rooms and sidelines of the great rugby stadiums of the world? 

Rugby connections will arise throughout this memoir. I feel I have been fortunate to watch the sport emerge in the USA and grow from an amateur sport to the professional and Olympic sport  it is today. The Rugby World Cup began in my lifetime and when the sport was still amateur. I think I was vaguely aware of the first and second World Cups.  The first was cohosted by Australia and New Zealand in 1987. It was by invitation only. The second was in England four years later and there were qualifying rounds for some places. The third in 1995 was a Rugby World Cup of legend and was the basis for the Hollywood movie “Invictus”. It  was held in South Africa not long after the collapse of apartheid. South Africa was in the final against New Zealand. I was teaching in Venezuela. A fellow teacher and good buddy, Mark Gurecki,  and I were on holiday on the island of Margarita when the final was being played. I heard that a bar in an international hotel on the island had cable sports. With some effort we located the hotel, but the cable connection was out.

In 1999 I was living in London. Carolyn and I moved there from Togo in the late summer of 1998. I had a job lecturing, as they say across the pond, on primary science education at Goldsmiths College, part of the University of London system. It was a World Cup year, and I was where it was happening. I had been a rugby fan since I began playing at Tulane in 1970. Now the best players in the world were coming to where I lived to see which country had the best team. 

While I was living in Togo, I played in a World Cup qualifying match. The countries of Togo. Ghana, and Benin had a tournament to see who would go to the next level and play Ivory Coast. Ghana came to the tournament with thirteen players. They asked if any of the spectators knew how to play. This was an opportunity that would not come again. At the age of forty five I played in a World Cup qualifying match. We didn't win and, personally much more important, I didn't get hurt.  Togo won the tournament. They easily beaten by Ivory Coast the following month. Ivory Coast would go on to play in the 1999 World Cup.

Soon after the start of the 1999 World Cup a good friend, Fran "The Man" Thompson, flew over to London to go to a few matches.  I met Fran in the early eighties in New Orleans. He was playing rugby for the Tulane team, and I was playing for a city club, NORFC. At the party after the match it was tradition for teams to have a drink together and sing songs. Several of the songs were rather bawdy. When I went to Tulane, the rugby side had the reputation of being an excellent singing team. This was in no small part due to the memory and vocal ability of Dr. Stan Smith. Stan was now playing for New Orleans, also. 

That day New Orleans took Tulane too lightly and lost a close match to a team they had never lost to before. The match was on the Tulane grounds in front of the student union. Tulane was hosting the party in the university's Rathskeller. The New Orleans side was older players. Many were starting families. Most had a beer or two, chatted a little with the opposition, sang a song, and left. The only two New Orleans players left were Stan and me. Stan was the grandfather of the Tulane rugby choir, and I had been studying with him for years. We might have lost the match, but we were not going to lose the singing.

We sang songs for over two hours. The limerick songs like, "There once was a man from Nantucket", seemed to go on forever.  Then came the song trading, The Tulane Trilogy - "Let me Call You Sweetheart, Bill Bailey, & Wild Rover",  "Charlotte the Harlot", "On the Good Ship Venus", and on and on. We weren't college boys any more, but no one had ever matched Stanley's "Eskimo Nell" finale. We planned to set them up with "Ivan Skavinski Scavar" then look like we were closing with "Salome". Fran matched with a beautiful "I Am From Pittsburgh", and all the verses to "Black Velvet Band." Who was this tall (and I'm sure Fran would want me to add handsome) young man who was swapping songs with the grandmaster. Stanley gathered strength and timed the ending. Fran's support from the Tulane side was waning. Then Stanley struck with the epic poem, "Eskimo Nell". 

The room was silent for the fable of the Eskimo prostitute who visits the Rio Grande to emasculate two legendary gunslingers, famous not just for shooting but also their sexual prowess. 

And when he ended with, "When a man grows old and his balls turn cold and the end of the knob turns blue, And it bends in the middle like a one string fiddle,

I'd say he was fucked, wouldn't you?", you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone slowly turned to Fran who climbed up on a chair. He sang four goofy syllables, and all we could do was stare.

 "Rang-a Dang Doo", is what he said.

The Tulane squad jumped to their feet and cried,

"Pray what is that?"

Fran was off in the melodic multi-verse ballad about a poor sweet young girl who is ruined in New Orleans. The entire Tulane team danced. They sang in harmony the chorus about the woes that fell upon her because of her, "Rang a Dang Doo."

Stanley and I finished our beers and slunk out of the Rathskeller.

Fran wasn't a student at Tulane and by the fall season he was playing for New Orleans. We became good friends. He came on rugby tours I arranged to the Bahamas and South America. 

When I was living in the Bahamas, the New Orleans Rugby Football Club (NORFC) came down to play in the Freeport spring tournament. Several of the players stayed with me and Tony. Fran was one of them.

A week before New Orleans arrived the Freeport Rugby Club hosted a team from England. I usually played with the Freeport team and would let the team use the property to have a fundraising social on the beach in front of the house. The real estate agent knew about it. He would come to the beach and buy beers from the Freeport team. Usually everything was fine.

The team from England had a game they were playing on tour called, "Dead Ants". The rules of the game were the person who was "it" wore a goofy hat and shirt until he completed a dare and called, "Dead Ants!" Then everyone had to lay on their back and kick their feet in the air. The last person to lay on their back was "it" and had to complete a dare, usually something like chug a beer.

The England team was playing this game when they came down for the social on the beach. The real estate agent was there with his wife and two young daughters. He got a couple beers from the Freeport guys, and they settled in the shade under one of the trees in front of the house for a picnic. 

I was down the beach a ways talking to the first girl I ever kissed. I was trying to distance us some from the developing chaos of the English "Dead Ants" game. We were having relationship problems. She had recently moved out of the mansion which was a little ironic because she was the one who found it and arranged for us to live there as caretakers. Over twenty years after that delicious first adolescent kiss a chance meeting in our home town led to us spending a few months together in the Bahamas to see if we were meant to be together. To this day I'm not sure what went wrong. There are possibly a lot of right people out there to grow old with, but you are not growing compatibly when you meet. That has probably been said a lot better by other people. Adele comes to mind, "Sometimes it lasts in love, sometimes it hurts instead."

While we were failing to figure out where our relationship and lives were going, I missed the first dare. I heard about it later. It involved a tampon, a bare ass, fire, and swimming. The second dare I saw from down the beach.

A player had been dared to climb a tall tree in the front yard and urinate. The tree hung out over the beach some. It was hanging over where the real estate agent and his family were sitting. They got up before the urination, but they hadn't picked up all their stuff. I talked the guy out of the tree and shut down the social. 

The real estate agent said never again. I promised,  knowing that the following week I had a large part of the NORFC staying with me. Fortunately the NORFC boys were, for the most part, well behaved. There was an evening when some were involved in streaker races from the front door  to the beach and back. Fran was one of them. The girls from the casino show would often sunbathe very close to naked in front of the house, so nudity was not such a big thing.

Now years and many adventures later Fran and I were flying to Edinburgh for a World Cup match between Scotland and Uruguay. The airline, for some unknown reason, upgraded us to  business class which gave us access to the lounge and hard liquor. We had some scotch for breakfast in honor of going to Scotland. We arrived and took a cab into town to a restaurant where the cab driver said we might find rugby fans. We did. They bought us some scotch for lunch. Then we were off to the match. It was very poorly attended, maybe six thousand people in a sixty thousand person capacity stadium. You could sit anywhere. We sat with our new Scottish friends and cheered our heads off for Scotland. They brought in flasks of ... well, you can probably guess. I wore one of those souvenir tartan hats with the red hair sticking out the side and cheered like crazy.  Because attendance was so low, Murrayfield was piping in recorded cheering. It was not needed in our section. 

Scotland was destroying Uruguay. I think they were up by five tries (touchdowns for non-rugby readers) at half. For the second half I moved to the first row on the Scottish try line. I wanted a front row view of Scottish tries. Uruguay began putting up a fight and the defense stiffened. There were no more tries. It was quieter, and I was missing the joviality of the old section. Fran had stayed with our new friends and a whole section of new new friends whom he had formed into some sort of choir. The match was ten minutes from over when there was a try right in front of me. Kenny Logan was kicking for Scotland, and he had been near perfect on the day. He lined up the kick right in front of me and sent it through the posts. I scampered off to meet up with Fran and our new friends. 

We were going to head over to a pub which was renowned for having a very good scotch collection. I had lost the tartan hat with the fuzzy red hair on the sides and went back to get it.  Fran waited for me. When I returned our new friends became this memory. We caught a cab back to the airport arriving in time for a visit to the lounge for a wee dram of scotch before the flight back to London.

After several years in New Orleans Fran had moved to the Florida panhandle and worked in the newspaper business. He became the publisher, editor, and often chief contributor to a newspaper on the Alabama Gulf Coast called the Mulletwrapper. We're on the plane talking about the day, sipping some business class scotch, when  Kenny Logan sits across from us. He was the star of the game we were just watching. We decide to see if he would give us an interview. The idea was to write it up and put it in a travel and sports piece in the Mulletwrapper. He was kind enough to answer a few questions and to laugh a bit when we tried to get too personal.

The tube ride from Heathrow to Waterloo Station and the walk to our flat on Westminster Bridge Road must have happened.The next day is also very vague as rumors that you don’t get hangovers from good scotch seemed to be false. Carolyn kindly drove us to Wales. We tried to sleep in the small rental car. 

Friends I knew from playing rugby in Quito, Huw and Celia, hosted us in Wales. We watched Wales play in the new Millennium Stadium and then had beers at the old Cardiff Arms Park clubhouse tucked under a section of the new stadium. Huw was a member and had played for Cardiff years before. Pictures of the greats of Welsh rugby hung around me. I could feel that many had stood and had a pint right where I was standing having a pint at that moment. The club choir began to sing with a harmonious thunder that would have made Tom Jones proud. The next day Huw drove Fran and me further into the heartland of Welsh rugby. We went  to Llanelli to watch Samoa vs Argentina. What an incredible trip! 

A couple months after our 1999 World Cup experience Fran and  I met in New Orleans. It was Christmas time and we were at Tipitina's for a Radiators concert. During a break in the music while we were reliving the fun of the World Cup experience and the Kenny Logan story we never wrote, the idea hatched to start an online rugby magazine and use it to get press credentials to rugby events and hopefully one day to a World Cup.

The idea disappeared for several years as working lives took over. In 2007 I was substitute teaching and repairing our Katrina flooded house. The World Cup was approaching and Carolyn and I decided to take a break from Katrina recovery and go to France for part of the World Cup. In an attempt to realize the press credential to a World Cup dream, Fran and I started up the website, DeepSouthRugby.net . We filled it with local rugby news, but it was way too little and way too late to get credentials. Carolyn and I went to France and I wrote about the tournament from the cottage we rented in the town of Leucate, but no credentials.  Most matches we watched on television in a bar in town or traveled to Montpelier to watch the USA team live. The US Eagles didn't win a match, but the World Cup experience did not disappoint. I had a ticket to a quarterfinal match in Cardiff, and then we were returning to New Orleans for the wedding of a former student, Catherine from Chapter One.

On our sixth wedding anniversary Carolyn and I went into Montpellier to celebrate and for the  USA v South Africa match. Carolyn had thought she would not want to go to the game, but after champagne brunch and feeling the spirit of the World Cup crowd, she changed her mind. It didn’t take long to find a ticket. A South African couple were advertising an extra ticket on the window of a cafe where they were drinking. We then sat down in Montpelier's central square, Place de la Comedie, where a giant screen had been set up for the France match against Georgia which was being played in Paris. We had time to watch it and then go to the stadium. When we sat down, there were a few people on the edges. The warm sunny late September afternoon and the brunch mimosas had Carolyn stretching out with her head pillowed on clothing layers in my lap. As the match approached the square filled up, and Carolyn snoozed on. The players lined up on the big screen above us for their national anthem. The crowd around us stood up. When they launched into a massive chorus of "La Marseillaise", the volume and passion lifted us to our feet and brought tears to our eyes. The French destroyed Georgia, and the crowd was intense and enthusiastic for every try. 

At the stadium the South African couple who sold us their extra ticket offered us antelope biltong and cheered even more than we did when the USA winger ran around South African legend, Bryan Habana. Ngwenya's much YouTubed try was possibly the sole moment to cheer for USA fans. There was another try in the second half, but South Africa was at least 5 tries ahead and threatening every time they touched the ball. And the golden boy of South African rugby and Carolyn's favorite, Percy Montgomery, was having a wonderful day. If it hadn't been our anniversary, I think she might have left me for him. When I ordered tickets in the summer before going to France, Carolyn had said she didn't think she would want to go to any matches. As she was driving us back to Leucate, she asked "Where is the next World Cup?"

"New Zealand," I replied.

"I've always wanted to go to New Zealand. When is the next World Cup?" She asked.

We still had the quarterfinal match in Cardiff, but we were already planning the New Zealand trip.

The quarterfinal ended with one of the great upsets in World Cup rugby. France beat New Zealand by a very narrow margin largely because of a bad call by the referee. The New Zealand players were dejected and eliminated from the tournament. With heads down they half-heartedly shook hands with the opposition and then quickly left the field. Earlier in the tournament I had traveled to St. Etienne to watch USA vs Samoa. It was a close match, but Samoa prevailed on a chilly rainy night . After the match both teams circled the field applauding and thanking fans. Both teams were out of the tournament. Samoa did their haka, national war dance, to all four sides of the stadium. Some of the players were giving their jerseys to fans. I understood the disappointment of the New Zealanders, but wondered wasn't it just part of the tradition to circle the field and give a thank-you to the fans when your tournament was over.

After the match I was in the Cardiff Rugby Club close to where I stood with Fran eight years before. I told the story about Samoa to Bob who was a good friend of Huw and Celia. Bob is an older Welsh prop forward type who has been around a bit. He coached the Welsh national women's side. I asked him about the tradition of thanking your fans. Bob had just been telling me about all the New Zealand fans who had been watching the game in the Cardiff Rugby Club. He said they were crying, sobbing their eyes out, when the match ended. Bob pointed out the guy next to him. 

Bob says, "Why don't you ask him. He's a Kiwi."

Bob taps the guy on the shoulder, offers to buy him a beer, and then says his American friend has a question for him.

So I tell him about the Samoa in St Etienne experience, and ask him about the tradition of thanking your fans after your last match. 

The guy just turns away. Bob laughs a little. He tells me, "He's Richie McCaw's dad."

Richie McCaw was the captain of the New Zealand team that had just lost and walked straight off the pitch.

I wrote about every match I attended or watched on tv and posted them on DeepSoutRugby.net. I would type on a laptop and save articles on a stick. Wireless internet was not available. I'd go to the Internet cafe in Leucate to post using a French keyboard. I figured if I didn't take it seriously there was no chance of credentials ever.

The next four years of our life were planned. We looked for an overseas job that would last three years and then we took a year off for Rugby World Cup 2011 in New Zealand. During the three years between the two World Cups I posted regularly to DeepSouthRugby.net  mostly trying to preserve some of the history of what had happened and was happening in rugby in Louisiana, Misisipi, Alabama, and Florida panhandle. The first press credential I was granted, and possibly the only up until New Zealand, was to the high school national championships in Pittsburgh in 2007. I had helped Robert Markel a little with Jesuit that year in New Orleans, and they made it to the national championship. I went to watch the team and on a whim requested credentials. There weren’t many journalist there,

For three years in Honduras Carolyn and I  planned the New Zealand trip. I got in the lottery for World Cup  tickets as soon as possible, getting up at 2 a.m. Honduran time to be stuck in a computer hold line. I didn't get any tickets. The next lottery date comes and goes and I get a couple tickets to USA vs Russia. I was applying for tickets for 10-12 matches. Online I can see loads of tickets through StubHub-like sites and tour packages, so I start investigating how this can be. I'm pretty sure I didn't get to the bottom of anything, but what I was hearing was that tour companies tie-up blocks of tickets. They will sell them on through other sources for a good margin.  After a certain date they release them back to the official source or work with scalpers.

About this time I'm sending in my request for press credentials. My request is denied. Our website was and is not that popular. I wrote an article about the little bit I found out about the ticket lottery system and put it on the website. I emailed a copy to a college rugby pal, John Howe. John had, and possibly still has, a rugby podcast in the Washington, DC, area.

In college he was known for showing up five minutes before kick-off barefoot with a cigarette in his lips, his boots in one hand, and a beer in the other. He was an intense player with good skills, some experience, and a passion for the sport. He would go on to play in England and coach several teams. When I was "lecturing" at Goldsmiths we reconnected at a Tulane Old Boys rugby reunion. John was going with a group of players he coached on a trip to Paris for a Six Nations match between France and Scotland.  He said he had a place to stay. We lived not far from Waterloo Station in London which made it easy to catch a ride on the Eurostar to Paris. I went for one very long day.

I arrived Saturday morning. We went to the women's Six Nations match in a suburb of Paris that afternoon. (A reader, Louis, suggested I put a drink readers should enjoy while reading sections of the memoir. This section should have a nice Bordeaux. ) While at the women’s match, I asked John if he had tickets for the men's match the following day. 

He said, "I know a rugby bar where we can get tickets."

He had flown from the USA, and he didn't have a ticket. When I decided to go, I had tried to get tickets. It was showing sold out. I was only staying one night in Paris because I couldn't get a ticket to the men's match and a little bit because I had to work on Monday. After the women's match we took the metro to the Latin Quarter. The smell of garlic and all kinds of people crowded into narrow streets and more garlic swirled around our wine energized minds. We dined on unbelievably delicious pomme frites and a perfect croque monsieur and then seemed to stumble upon a small darkish bar on a quiet side street. John walks in, says hello, and that he is a friend of Jean Claude or Christian or somebody like that. The bartender smiles. They talk for a couple minutes. John returns with tickets . We end up at the end of the night heading to where he has "arranged"  to stay which is the hotel room of somebody else on tour. Along with ten other guests of John’s friends we crash on the floor. The next morning I slept well on the train ride home. John and I kept in touch by email over the next decade meeting up at rugby events on occasion.

He read my article questioning how World Cup tickets could end up in a tour package before the lottery on his podcast and got the director of some part of 2011 Rugby World Cup media operations on the phone to answer questions about it.

The next day I got an email from the person who sent me the denial of my credential application. She wrote, "You know you can appeal?"

I replied, "No, how do I appeal?"

She replied," Send us an email saying you would like to appeal."

So I replied, "I would like to appeal."

She replied, "Your appeal has been granted."

I had press credentials to a Rugby World Cup.

Carolyn and I rented a camper van for the first month of pool matches. I picked up the press pass in Rotorua where we watched the New Zealand Maori formally welcome the Samoan team. The welcome involved a half-naked and formidable member of the Maori running with a spear at the captain of the Samoan side who was standing dead still. The Maori warrior leapt in the air, landed right in front of the Samoan captain with the spear less than an inch from his throat. The Samoan team was then taken to meet the matriarch of the Maori and invited to enjoy the country.

The New Zealand trip and the 2011 World Cup deserve their own chapter. This chapter is about press credentials to world cups. The 2015 Rugby World Cup was going to be in England. Carolyn is English. Before we left for New Zealand we were planning to find teaching jobs overseas when we returned and then take a year off for the World Cup in England. It didn't quite work out that way.

We couldn't get jobs in places we wanted because there were age requirements on work visas. We were turning sixty. We decided to try retirement, again. We rented out the beach cottage where we were planning to retire and moved into a trailer in a 55+ community. Carolyn got a job at a gift shop on Ft. Myers Beach. I started trying to sell real estate. There was a freedom from a school schedule that allowed me to pursue press credentials to many other rugby events.  DeepSoutRugby.net was in the system. I covered the 2013 Rugby Sevens World Cup in Moscow and the 2014 Women's Rugby World Cup in Paris.

DeepSouthRugby.net's application for press and photographer credentials for the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England were automatically approved, no appeal was necessary. That trip deserves its own chapter. The one thing I regretted from the New Zealand trip was that I hadn't attended the opening ceremony. The spectacle for the 2015 Rugby World Cup was going to be in Twickenham, an 82,000 seat stadium, arguably the best known rugby stadium in the world. Fran was going to come for two weeks as photographer. I was going for opening ceremony through the final. I was a man on a mission, and I was taking my journalistic responsibilities seriously. If I didn't take it seriously, then who would? But by the end of the trip I didn't care if I ever saw another live rugby match. Age and the discomforts involved with crowds and chilly to cold wet stadiums made watching games from the comfort of my living room way too attractive.

During the 2015 World Cup I wrote my most popular story. Todd Clever had been cut from the US team months before the World Cup in a mysterious manner. He was a star of the team and very little was given as explanation for his removal. He had been the team captain. Todd was playing professionally in England for the Newcastle Falcons during the World Cup. I pestered him a bit to give me the story. I offered him a ticket to a quarterfinal match in Cardiff and a place to stay at Huw and Celia’s. A last minute conflict cancelled his trip. I arranged to meet him in Newcastle. Over a pint at the Newcastle train station followed by a curry he poured out the story he had been wanting to tell. I stayed up most of the night transcribing and organizing his account of a coach who seemed determined to take him down. He had not told the story before because he did not want to impact the US team at the World Cup. They were eliminated without winning a game. 

In 2018 I was part of the credentialed press at the 7s World Cup in San Francisco. In the summer of 2019 I watched the USA play Russia in Denver. I applied for credentials. Although I had an email granting me press credentials, I had to wait half an hour at security for some sort of confirmation before I got in. After the 2018 World Cup I wrote a scathing article about how the first woman coach of the US Women 7’s team had been treated by the administration of US Rugby. I wondered if that was having an impact. 

In 2019 the Men’s Rugby World Cup was going to be in Japan. I got myself in mental shape for one more tournament. The summer before the World Cup I applied for and got credentials to  an HSBC Women's Rugby Sevens Tournament in Japan. Although I hadn’t been writing that much since 2015, I figured getting press credentials to a rugby event in Japan just months before the World Cup would be enough to get me credentials to the big one.

But No! My request was denied.There is a lot more media coverage of rugby in the USA since the forming in 2017 of a professional league. 

I went to Japan for three weeks with tickets to two matches. Before one of the matches I ran into Gift Egbelu. Gift was part of the credentialed press covering the World Cup. Gift was an LSU graduate who I met a few years earlier at an Olympic qualifying rugby tournament in North Carolina. We introduced ourselves on the sidelines. When he heard my name and that I was part of DeepSouthRugby.net, he proceeded to tell me how we inspired him to get into rugby journalism.