nice try

try

/trī/

1. an effort to accomplish something; an attempt.

2. (rugby) an act of touching the ball down behind the opposing goal line, scoring points and entitling the scoring side to a goal kick.

As a child, a diva-in-the-making, I was drafted into every sport, all to no avail. Between soccer, basketball, tennis, and baseball (t-ball), I seemed to have no passion for sports—the pride and joy of every other little boy I knew. So, I spent the first 18 years of my life sportless, coping by scoffing at men who sought validation from sports and excelled in them. Perhaps though, there lay a dormant thrum, a hidden pang, a whispered thrill that rushed through me, longing to shed my queerness and join what I believed to be manhood. I wanted to be a part of this collective, this space from which men derived their deepest, reddest rages, and the most exuberant, yellowest jovialities. 

Entering college, my dearest friend challenged me to “try something you aren’t good at” —a lesson I would impart on any first-year. From my point of view, I was already far enough out of my comfort zone in a foreign land (Rhode Island) with a foreign people (WASPs), all while navigating an archaic ecosystem (wealth-based sociality). Nevertheless, I hatched a plan: What was something technically novel, yet familiar, that would also be a great way to stay (become) slim in college and fend off the freshman 15? My dear old friend: organized sports, of course. But not just any sport—for what was more familiar to me than the school sport of my high school?

With the power of my one masculine trait (male arrogance), I decided to join rugby.

If you told me that you had no clue what exactly rugby is, I would begin by telling you that it is 1. perhaps (after wrestling), the most homoerotic sport a man can play and 2. a hybrid of soccer and football that came out less exotic than a fetishist might have wanted. What was soon in store for me, though, was a whole new field of difficulties far beyond the diet rugby we had played in gym class, which had no physical contact and omitted half of the rules. 

The collegiate immersion began just as queerly as it would be for the entire semester. I walked through the club fair, searched for the rugby table, and finally spotted it. My approach towards what would become my personal Tartarus triggered a metamorphosis: my shoulders broadened and squared, my posture straightened, my buttocks clenched. My strides were rigid and parallel as I approached the table and said, in an unconvincing voice with as much masculinity as I could muster, “Is this the rugby table?” lower in tone and volume than ever before. As the semester proceeded, I learned to stay silent unless I absolutely had to speak, caging the extroverted person I usually was. I thought this behavioral adaptation was part of the challenge, that the discomfort was part of the newness, and that it would subside.

It did not. Practice was on Monday and Wednesday evenings, after a long day of classes and before my favorite part of the day, dinner. I carried a sickness in my stomach as I swapped my shoes for new cleats (which I’ll never wear again) and popped in my mouthguard that guarded my real voice. Practice ended either with “team dinners” (perhaps the most uniting) or with me leaving early (by electric scooter), either way caked in dirt and mud. Lowest on the totem pole, I was a part of the “developmental group.”And develop we did, or at least the other men in my cohort did. We began with passing (never forward) and worked up to skills like scrums, trys, rucks, lineouts, mauls (all a foreign language). I didn’t quite take to it. My lagging improvement became discouraging, a pulsating pressure as my ineptitude rendered itself more visible. I only seemed to excel in contact or tackling (thank you freshman 15), which I guess is what one would expect a queer’s favorite part of the sport would be.

The intimacy of each position, entangled with or between the limbs of other men tightly gripping or interlocking one another, left a wellspring of entertainment and opportunity for jokes to arise. The insinuation of perverse pleasure or even a satirized mock persona of the pervert himself was taken up by the most jocular of the bunch to chase around their peers; I left each practice more reserved and more committed to my alter ego. Yet my meekness was of little armor, for the same men I would run drills with, lift and grope and wrestle down, would see me that same weekend in a full face of makeup, maybe in a crop top, surrounded by a flock of women for different reasons than they would be. Hiding from their view, I began to feel shame creep into my complexion, coloring my every move.

What was I so afraid of? At some point, I’d been there long enough, and the anticipated isolation I had concocted in my nightmares had never arrived; though, neither did the comradery, the fraternity that I believed made sports so alluring to men. In all fairness, I was only there a short time, yet in that blip a fully woven homosociality seemed established. I had begun to wave to a couple of people off the field, but for the most part I felt unintegrated; this was not a feeling I alone held, for the few men I had befriended expressed similar feelings of separation. The closest we ever stood as a collective was in caricature, huddled together at the end of every practice, fists raised, chanting the name of our school: a declaration of a unity I felt inauthentic and performed.

Part of my inspiration in joining a sports team in the first place had been my first-year roommate, who was both a D1 athlete and queer; I had thought of his success and talent alone as a dismantling of my previous decisiveness about where a gay man belonged. I came to realize that I had approached the experience, the trying of something new, with an age-old attitude, expecting rejection and welcoming it with a confirmation bias. 

My rugby journey ended the day of a tournament towards the end of first-year fall, and to my surprise, I had a lot of fun. For the perhaps 10 minutes total I spent playing, I found a thrill and an exhilaration in the game, an admittance I had been secretly fighting. Though I broke my finger in the second game, I played, in true male fashion, two more games, because I liked what I was a part of. Looking back, I believe I left the sport with lessons learned, perhaps not in how to catch balls better, but in the importance of facing novelty with neutrality, opposed to negativity. 

Though my brief stint in athletics continues to be a source of great hilarity to those who know me, it remains now, as much as it was then, something I hold with gravitas, for tackling the unknown, or trying the far-fetched, needn’t be self-disparaging. I may never again enter a male-dominated space if I can help it, but I will take with me the lesson that, though not everything is for me, the reason isn’t necessarily some innate disposition. For is it not equality, growth, progress, and representation, when we can have not only queer excellence, but queer mediocrity and inferiority too?