The first time I went to Italy was in February 1986, and I didn't need to hire a mobile home for that one. There was a coach laid on for us. It was the school rugby tour of 1986. We even got matching rugby shirts and jumpers made, something I didn't have the benefit of again until 2010 and our Walney to Saltburn coast to coast ride.
We were based in Padua and we were supposed to play 3 games in a week. The middle one was cancelled because of bad weather so we just played the first and the third ones. When we turned up to play the first one, I thought that should have been cancelled aswell, half of the pitch was frozen solid. I moaned about this for a while, but Jim Collard just said to me 'If you don't want to play, we'll find someone who will'. So I shut up.
In the event it wasn't too bad because the pitch thawed out quite a bit during the game, and having thirty warm bodies piled up on bits of it helped with the thaw.
We lost the first game, and to be honest we were crap. We didn't lose by much, but we didn't play well. After the game, we got told by Mike Lamb and Jim that we were crap. And I should have just listened. But opening my mouth when I shouldn't has been a perennial problem for me. Richard Kilgarrif told me afterwards it was like watching the end of Rambo 1 (First Blood). It's okay, I didn't blow up an entire small town, but what I did do was give an emotional and incoherent speech about how we'd done our best blah blah blah. For the rest of the trip Richard used to do Sylvester Stallone impressions at me, 'I did it for my country' and all that in a slurred voice.
It didn't help to shake off the Stallone comparison that we went en masse to see Rocky IV in the cinema while we were over there. It had been dubbed into Italian and for some reason they'd chosen a Joe Pasquale soundalike for the part of Rocky. You didn't really need a translation to follow the story though. Basically Rocky lost at the beginning and then he went and did some training and lost a bit of weight, and then he won at the end. Simples!
It was a pretty cool trip, because on our days off when we weren't playing rugby, we got to go on trips. We went to Venice on a double decker train and we all bought water pistols and drank hot wine (vino callo) to keep warm in St Mark's Square, and bought takeaway pizza. Venice is the best city I've been to for fighting with water pistols, because there's water everywhere so you can always get a refill. Also, it's the quietest city I've ever been to, because there aren't any cars. I'm glad we were there in the winter though, because it can pong a bit in the summer apparently. We also went to Verona, and all I can remember about that is eating more pizza, and finding a scarf on the floor which I decided to keep.
Padua is the only place I've been to where it was cheaper to order a pint of wine, than a pint of beer. They had some fizzy red stuff at one of the bars. I had about 4 pints of that one night. It gave me a hell of a hangover. There was an ice cream parlour opposite our hotel and they had 30 flavours of ice cream. I'd only ever seen Neopolitan so this was amazing. I had about 40 tubs of the stuff while I was there.
As well as blowing my spending money on ice cream I spent a fortune playing an arcade game called King of Boxer. You had to beat about 10 boxers in a row and if you did, you had to face Violence Joe in the final, and get your head smashed in. But I hardly ever got through to fight Violence Joe. All the other fighters were easy, but there was one called Brown Pants and I just couldn't get past him. I must have spent about £30 trying.
We played the third and final game just before coming home, and this time we won 7-4. It was a low scoring affair, and Fraser Maclennan-Pike kicked the winning penalty. I expect the rest of the team were very relieved to have won, because it meant I didn't need to do any more incoherent babbling in the style of Rambo.
It's not every week you get to play rugby on an ice rink, impersonate Rambo, eat 30 flavours of ice cream, get beaten up by a guy called Brown Pants, run round Venice with water pistols and watch Rocky IV with subtitles. We won't see the like of those days again.
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