Unlikely things to have happened on a rugby pitch

I used to play rugby at school.  They didn't give me the ball much, because I didn't have any ball handling skills.  I mostly just used to knock people over and dive around on the floor getting the ball back, and when I did I'd give it to someone else to do something with it.

I probably played about 100 games of rugby when I was at school.  I can't remember them all now, but there are things I do remember.  Some of the games were 30 years ago, so it's not surprising the memories are a bit vague.  But there are 3 main factors at work in the games I do remember.

I remember the games we won against teams we usually lost to, I remember the games which we won in the last minute and I remember the amazing goal kicking of Graham Tyler.

For example, we used to regularly lose to Ampleforth College and Welbeck College.  In the six years we played them we only beat them once each.  When I was in the lower sixth I used to play for the school's 2nd XV.  We weren't good enough to be in the first team, and because we weren't as important as them we didn't have to take it as seriously.  

All the different age school teams used to play the same school on the same day, about half of them at home and half away, so you never got to watch the teams play that you weren't in.

I can't remember why they were there, but for some reason when we played Ampleforth that year, the first team weren't playing and they came to watch us.  So we had basically about 20 people cheering us on.  It's amazing how much noise 20 people can make, it's the closest I've ever been to playing in front of a crowd.  It must be incredible to play in front of a whole stadium, although if you're England these days, that doesn't seem to help.

Anyway, spurred on by the crowd, we actually beat Ampleforth.  I think the score was 15-9 but I could have misremembered that.  What I do remember is that we were winning 9-8 at half time.  I promised I'd buy Rhys Hughes a pint if he scored a try and he did right at the end of the first half, and that was when I really started to believe we might win.  The result was in the balance almost to the end of the match, and then we gave the ball to Mick the Miller.  That wasn't his real name.  He was really called Jon Hargreaves.  He was absolutely tiny, so I don't think he was any good at tackling, but he was called Mick the Miller after a greyhound.  I can still remember near the end of the match watching him from a long way away as he ran away from the Ampleforth defence and over the try line.  No-one could get near him.  Ampleforth teams were always massive and because it was a boarding school they used to cheat by being able to practise a lot more often than we could in a day school.  And we used to lose to them every year, until that one.  Years of frustration, and of not being good enough disappeared in that instant.  

For some reason, it's not fashionable these days to let children lose.  I don't know why.  Losing fosters determination and a will to win, and once in a while, when you win against the odds, it more than makes up for all the defeats.

Another game I remember was playing away at Giggleswick.  Not only was the pitch on the side of a massive hill, but there was a force 10 gale blowing down it.  It was pretty irrelevant who was the better team, because whoever was playing downhill was going to score all the points.  It was pretty clear that whoever had the advantage of the slope in the first half was going to need to build up a massive lead and then defend it in the second half against the wind.

At the break we were only winning 10-0 which we knew wasn't going to be enough.  And sure enough Giggleswick clawed back our advantage and with about a minute to go we were losing 12-10.  And then after spending the whole half under our own posts, we managed to defy the wind and the hill and the other team and get up to the other end of the pitch and Bill Barker managed to stand up for long enough to fall over their try line in the corner with the ball, and we were back in the lead.

And then Graham Tyler kicked the conversion from the touchline, using the wind to banana it over the posts and we'd won 16-12.  And there's no better feeling in sport.  

Well, I say it was Graham.  Memory can play tricks on you, that kick could have been taken by Andrew Axon, Graham was probably playing for the first team then.  I assumed it was Graham because it was the kind of thing he would have done.  I'll have to ask him.  But there's a good reason, why I would remember it was him, even if it wasn't.

I didn't always get selected for the school rugby team, mostly because I wasn't good enough.  Quite often I was a non-playing reserve.  In those days it wasn't the girly game it is today.  You could only put subs on if someone was injured, you couldn't take people off because they were tired.  That was kind of the point of being fit, that you could keep going at the end.

There was one game I didn't play in, against John Smeaton which we won 21-16.  There were 3 tries each and the difference between the teams was that Graham kicked all our kicks whereas they missed theirs.  One particular conversion was from right on the touchline, and it was from the wrong side for a right footed kicker (if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry, it's a rugby thing).  The thing I remember is not just that it went over, but the body language of the whole team, who cheered and jumped up in the air as it went over.  I wouldn't have seen it if I'd been on the pitch, but I could see them all from where I was stood.

Why do I remember that kick?  Well, to put it into perspective, this is schoolboy rugby I'm talking about.  These were not professionals.  We used to practice once a week during double games on a Tuesday afternoon and we had a quick runaround one lunchtime a week as well, which was necessarily short because we also had to fit in getting a school dinner in that hour.  And Graham was always practising.  He used to practice kicking, after we'd all packed in (maybe he took packed lunches, I'm not sure).  Sometimes I used to watch him practisiing his kicks out of the window, and the thing was, they nearly always went through the middle of the posts.  

But even knowing that about him, it was still amazing that the kick against John Smeaton went over.  The pitch was so clarted up with 80s mud, and the ball was so wet that it would have been like kicking a pumpkin.

And that's why I remember it, and that's why I remember Mick the Miller's try, and Bill Barker's against Giggleswick.  Because it wasn't likely to have happened.  All the games we won, when we were supposed to, against teams we were better than, and all the kicks that went over from in front of the posts, I've forgotten. 

But I remember the unlikely things, because they happened against the odds, and I saw them, and I can remember how it felt when I did.  And for me that's the meaning of sport.

How I used to befriend strangers in the days before the internet

In the days before the internet, things required a bit more effort and creativity than they do now.

For example, if you had to do a comparison between New York and Calcutta for your homework, you had to get your ass down to the local library and thumb your way through the Encyclopedia Britannica to find stuff out.  This included using a few skills which are falling out of fashion these days, eg walking, reading and thinking.  I got 19 out of 20 for that homework by the way, so I must have been able to do all 3.

Meeting and getting to know strangers also needed a bit of creativity too, and a little known thing called 'Being able to have a conversation' used to come in useful.  A good forum for having conversations in my youth was the ferry from Dover to Zeebrugge.  I used to go to Germany quite a bit in the 80s and we mostly travelled on the Transline buses.  These took about 24 hours to get from Leeds to Northern Germany and they required a 4 hour ferry crossing aswell.  They were brilliant for talking to people, because they couldn't get away.

Although it seems unlikely now I actually made some friends this way.  And one of them I'm still in touch with, although it took Facebook for me to find her again after losing touch for a while.

She used to be called Ute Fehn and she was from Stuttgart.  We got talking on the back of a cross channel ferry.  It was in the early hours of the morning and it was dark so we couldn't see each other for the first 3 hours or so.  In fact it wasn't till 5 am that I found out she was dressed in yellow.  

Because I couldn't see her my first impressions of her were that she was funny and kind and had a nice voice.  Oh and also that she was German, although I'm not sure she is any more (I think she might be American now).

I've met other people in similar circumstances, but I can't go on about that now, because Ruth has invited Graeme round for coffee, and I didn't know, because I wasn't looking on Facebook, and even though she's in the same house, she failed to tell me...Ah, it wasn't like this in the olden days.  Actually I take that back, it was, friends turned up at your house unexpectedly all the time then, because it was easier to go to their houses than use the bloody massive phone with the dial on...

I almost had a step dad once

I almost had a step dad once.

He was almost my step-dad because my mum never married him.  At first he impressed me because he could do card tricks. 

The first time I met him was in February 1979.  I had passed the entrance exam to go to Leeds Grammar School on a free scholarship and he gave me a lift to the interview. 

At the interview, the school governors asked me a few questions to make sure I wasn’t an idiot.  Then they asked me if I had any questions.  Just one I said.  Is it true that if you’re thick but your parents are rich, you can buy your way into this school?  They seemed to find this amusing, but they assured me it wasn’t the case, and they gave me the scholarship.

For the statistically minded out there, I was allegedly the first person ever to get free school meals there, and the school had been going since 1552.

My almost step dad was chunky and hairy with an orange soft top BMW which was full of fag ends and Rod Stewart cassettes, oh and drawings, him being an architect.

Later he drove a Cortina but it didn’t have any brakes so sometimes he’d have to swerve onto a grass verge to avoid collisions.  Towards the end he bought an Opel Manta but the engine blew up and he had to get a new one.  My mum lent him the money and he bought her some flowers.

He’d never come to the table when dinner was called but he’d come late and then microwave it all to hell and cover it with pepper. 

He thought he was still a miler because he used to run at school and he thought he knew kung fu, although trying to kung fu kick my brother on the ice proved to be a mistake as he ended up groaning in a hedge.  My mum thought I’d killed him when I played him at squash because he dived on top of the racket and it smashed some of his ribs.  More often than not, luck was not on his side.

He wore dark glasses indoors and put things in piles when he was nervous.  We called him Roy Orbison.  He said it was so we wouldn’t know what he was thinking.  Before he got in from work we used to call it Happy Hour

He wore beige socks, he drank fizzy orange in the morning when he was drying out, and he descended into alcoholism.  He wanted to die, he just didn’t know it. He had bad luck but he thought the answer to every problem was in the bottom of a bottle.  There were only more problems there.

12 years ago I became a step dad myself, ie a real one since I got married to someone with children.  At the time I thought ‘All I have to do to be a better step dad than I had is to stay conscious beyond 5.30 pm, not cook fish, chips and frozen peas all together in the deep fat fryer when paralytic, not fall down drunk in the street and have to be carried home by the neighbours and not mess the bed’.  I was pretty confident I could do it.  With hindsight, I’m not sure I was a great success.  I didn’t make the same mistakes, just lots of different ones. 

We never really got on, my nearly step dad and me.  When I was young I treated him more often than not with contempt and ridicule, but when I think of him now I feel sad, because it’s not an easy job and he gave it a go.  And so did I.  And that’s how I know.