I recently started playing for an expat rugby team here in Korea. Rugby is not a popular sport in this country, so I was very lucky to find a club within a “reasonable” distance. I put that in quotes because some of my teammates make rather epic journeys to get to practice. I have a relatively simple commute consisting of a 20 minute cab ride followed by a 40 minute bus ride followed by another 10 minute cab ride. I have talked to people who have bus rides over 3 hours long. Practice is on Saturday afternoons, and to make sure I get there on time I have to leave my school by noon. Keep in mind that rugby players are fairly well known for their drinking (in the same way that male figure skaters are fairly well known for their fabulousness) so getting up any time before sundown on Saturday can often be an act of extreme physical exertion. I love rugby, but I simply would not even entertain the idea of making a nearly 4 hour commute so I could then get my head bashed around, no matter how fun that sounds.
Playing rugby anywhere in the world has its benefits, chief among them the sense of camaraderie and similarity to rugby everywhere else in the world. Some things about rugby teams are the same everywhere: teammates are very fond of tall players; cleats are called boots and your uniform is called your kit; everybody has a worst injury story; lunchtime conversations would cause nuns to go into spontaneous cardiac arrest from shock; oh, and drinking culture. Everybody knows that rugby players drink. For some people, that’s why they started playing rugby. It’s my opinion that risking great bodily harm just for some beer is probably the most inefficient way to go about getting drunk, but I’m not one to turn down somebody interested in the team. But even though the act of alcohol consumption is widely known the methods are not. The most important thing about rugby drinking is when both teams join up after a game for an event known universally as a “drinkup.” I’d put money down that even in France they call it “le drinkup.” This is where most rugby traditions take place. When a person scores for the first time they are made to “shoot the boot,” meaning that they have to drink beer out of the cleat of the largest, smelliest, dirtiest player on the team. While many people would find behavior such as this an indication of severe mental disorder, in the rugby world it is a great honor. While shooting the boot is a major piece of rugby culture, nothing compares to the drinking songs. The songs are without a doubt some of the most offensive things ever put to music. I believe that if The Vatican ever caught wind of the song “Jesus Can’t Play Rugby” half of Ireland would be instantly excommunicated. The songs are so offensive that they even make me uncomfortable. This is no small feat, as I’m fairly sure that my dinner conversations have deeply offended no less than half of my school, and most of the rest just have a different eating schedule. Despite how awful most of this sounds, the fact that all of it is a universal constant is incredibly comforting. It is nice to know that no matter where in the world you go, if you find a rugby team you can be offending people of all races and religions within an hour of the end of your first game.
One of the other nice things about playing with a sports team abroad is that it brings in people who are truly committed to playing the sport. This is not like a college intramural softball team. Many of my teammates are people from countries where little children who are barely able to stumble about are carted off to mercilessly wail on one another in a contest that even the most frilly of girls would never be able to call cute. Several of the people on my team have been playing rugby for over twice the time I have. There is at least one guy who has been playing longer than I have been alive. This brings me to one of the major downsides of playing with people who are this good. I fear for my life. A good portion of rugby is about knowing the game. It’s a sport in which intelligence, although severely underrepresented, is of major import. Being smart allows you to place yourself in positions which prevent you from getting demolished, and allow you to fairly easily pick off the morons who stand around with blank looks on their face. The problem with people from countries such as Australia and South Africa is that they don’t do stupid things. They are the ones who make you look stupid. All of a sudden, you’re the dumbest player on the field. And that’s not a good place to be.
Another downside to playing rugby here, or really anywhere, is that it begins to take its toll after a while. After 8 years of playing this game I have become an old man. I already had many of the qualities, including bad posture, grumpy temperament, and a tendency to make loud and inappropriate exclamations in the dining hall (in my case the difference being that this occurs at college rather than a nursing home). I’m one step away from sitting on my porch with a shotgun and yelling at kids to get off my lawn. Now with rugby, I also have the gift of a body that is prematurely falling apart. My knee clicks like the stopwatch at the beginning of 60 minutes (see, even my metaphors are for old people) and my back is in near constant pain. Just running for an hour or two puts me in pain for the next week. This is a particular problem when you have weekly practice. Recently though, I decided to try to get my back fixed. I had heard about a famous doctor that works on campus from my Korean friends, so I decided to go check him out.
One day after class I decided to go see Dr. Lyu. Dr. Lyu is easily the most famous and successful doctor in all of Korea. He is a very nice looking old man, who always wears old tweed jackets with a ruby rose-shaped pin on the lapel. The walls of the office are adorned with pictures of astronauts he helped prepare for space missions as well as old texts and models dealing with acupuncture. There is an area for the distribution of traditional herbs that strangely has a couple stuffed turtles lying on the floor. In addition, there are about a half dozen beds that people lie down on while they are being worked on. Upon first look these are clearly not normal beds, but some kind of special design. I noticed at first that there were two big electrical motors strapped to the bottom of each one, and that instead of the standard flat cushioned top each platform was made up of a series of cushioned rollers. The entire structure of the beds is made of steel tubes painted a seafoam green that is the color I imagine they paint bed frames in mental hospitals. Finally, the examination tables are trimmed with what looks like red floral pattern wallpaper and gold painted wood accents. At the end there are what appears to be some adjustment handles that are topped with what are obviously golf balls, once again painted that slightly uneasy green color. I took all this in as I was asked to lie down and point to where my back pain was located. With this, the doctor began inserting very fine needles into my back, the backs of my knees, and the backs of my ankles. In the coming weeks I would also get poked in the side of my elbow, the back of my hand between my thumb and pointer finger, the side of my hand near my pinky, and even on the ridge of my ear, not to mention some extra ones in my back. While all of the acupuncture would seem to many to be the weird aspect of my treatment, it wasn’t even close.
After my acupuncture, I was instructed to turn around and lie down on my back. With this, Dr. Lyu’s assistant strapped my feet into some foot holding devices that are much like leather shoes with the toes cut off. These shoes were then tied to the end of the machine while I was left in a state of utter bewilderment. Next, some straps were pulled over the other side of the machine and I was told to grab hold. At this point, the assistant flipped some switches and the machine began to tilt back, moving my head closer to the ground and my feet towards the ceiling. For a while I just looked at the patterns in drop ceiling tiles that are only interesting to somebody with ADD. When the tilting stopped I was told “It will start moving now” which was certainly a phrase I was not expecting. With that my feet were pulled up and the straps in my hands pulled down. The tension was quickly released but the next second the pulling began again. I quickly realized a few things. First was that the golf ball handle things were not levers but switches. Second was that only somebody pursuing an engineering degree would give a shit about the golf balls while they are being jerked around on some bizarre contraption without so much as an explanation of what was going on. Third, I thought that given the opportunity, the leaders of The Inquisition would have given an arm and a leg for a device like this (likely from one of their victims, but I imagine somebody who deals in extremities is not liable to be a particularly picky customer). This machine was clearly some sort of motorized torture rack device that had been slightly adjusted to alleviate back pain rather than elicit confessions of heresy and witchcraft. As the machine was tugging me back and forth Dr. Lyu came over and explained that this was a device of his own invention, with only 10 in the entire world. At that moment I was wondering why there was 1 of these things, much less 10 in existence. Soon, however, the thrashing stopped and the machine tilted back to horizontal. I got off and to my astonishment felt amazingly better. Clearly, the doctor knew what he was doing. Now, getting on the seafoam green and floral red patterned torture rack is part of my weekly routine. What a bizarre invention. Only in Korea.
