I AM PREPARING MY OBITUARY. I The older I get the more I read about men whose lives are defined, to some, by their acts during wartime. My father's generation is dying off so fast I can't appreciate the heroes as they flash past. And there are so many of them . I like to think that rugby cured me of feeling like a weakling in front of my father. It wasn't easy. And I wasn't alone.

There was the rugby, of course. The hardness. The voluntary hurt. The friendships. Rugby was my Vietnam and I embraced it. I wanted, I needed, to feel tested. And I had everything to lose by playing rugby. There was nothing in it for me except what it made me feel about myself. Play rugby every week for ten or so years, two seasons a year, and you get to know something about madness. The good kind. The "I can't believe I cared that much about that back when I cared about that." And to realize I still care about all that. Still crazy after all this rugby.

My father never got it. I can speak of this now because I am a man, and in the maul of my life I have learned how to speak of hurt without it sounding pitying. I pitied my father. He was the biggest influence in my life . He was the huge. And he was completely out of his mind. There was alcohol involved. The more I understand my father the more it breaks my heart. All that stuff left unsaid because he never found the language of his own life.

I understand his rage, his rage against the dying of the light. I just wish he had found the words or gestures. My father used to talk about World War II when I was a kid. I remember everything he said except where he was, and he never talked about the stories we found eight years after he died in letters he wrote to his sister. He was in Okinawa in August 1945. The first letter he got through to his sister was dated Oct. 16, 1945.

He filled in the blanks as best he knew them. He had been part of the invasion of Okinawa, saw frightened Japanese-hostage Okinawains emerge from a cave, and since then had been placed on a ship off the coast of Japan awaiting the order to invade. Which is where he was the day America went mediaval on Hiroshima. In his letter my father never mentions the means. He described the atomic bomb as "the Japanese surrender proposal." Regarding his feelings about invading Japan my father wrote "but the Japanese surrender proposal put an end to that interesting assignment." And then, to prove he's human, he added, "Thank God." My father was 36 years old. I wouldn't be born for another four years.

This new knowledge of how close my father was dying in the awful battle that never happened because of the Atomic bomb was the first time I was forced to consider life without me in it. I quickly came to the conclusion, "That sucks!" Suddenly I felt more pride than pity toward my father.

Boo-fuckin'-hoo. Am I breakin' any hearts here? We all had it rough. Or if we didn't, we do now because we play rugby. Or try to. Or did. I'm all fucked up from playing rugby. Won't begin to name the places. But let me point out that the heart of ruck and roll is till beating. I regret nothing. Not the waste of time. Not the misplaced values. Not the sad inventory a rugby braveheart has to submit himself to when he confronts the reality of how much time he spent on rugby rather than on family. Or job. Or success. Did I mention I'm also a mummer?

Oh, to get back to that opening "obituary" remark, I want rugby mentioned in my obituary. I want the world to know in the last story of my life how how much I loved the game of rugby football. And I love the game. Then and now. The game is better than ever. Much better than back when I played. But back then I actually played it. I played rugby as hard as I could. And now I feel like a man, for having played it, with purpose, year after year.

To speak such feelings iin front of rugby players is to feel like a fruit in front of the ripest bunch of bad apples I ever met. Slap a pair of tits on me, I'm a woman. But ask yourself this: "Would I have ever met this asshole if it weren't for rugby?" I could name names, and maybe I will. But let me speak the great unspoken about rugby players: We Love Each Other Because.

There was a bumper sticker back when I first started to play in the late '60's. All it said was "Rugby Because"

To this day I have no idea what that means and yet that's my best explanation for how I feel. In my wisdom gathered from years of living in my own skin, I know I needed to play rugby. Besides being the coolest sport I ever heard of, my older brother played it. And my older brother Bill was the coolest guy in the history of the world. Short, but cool.

I didn't realize my big brother was short until he beat me up when I was 18. He'd be away at college or something and I had taken over his room on the third floor to get beyond smelling distance of my younger brother Doug, who slept next to me for the first 18 years of my life. I had my reasons. But Billy would hear none of them. Like the Tank Man in Tianamin Square I stood defiant in front of my older brother. He proceeded to kick the shit out of me.

I remember this because it was the last time he ever kicked the shit out of me and I remember each moment like a bad scrum. I blame myself. I could have done better. I ended up running like a scolded dog down the stairs, even though I was six inches taller, 50 pounds heavier and eight years younger. Of course, Bill was drunk. And I was still a boy. And so, once again, I slept next to my brother Doug.

Rugby became a symbol for me. It was different. It was manly. It was out of it's freakin' mind. Oh, the adventures. And I wanted that. I wanted that bad. And I found it with the Whitemarsh Rugby Club, a name that gives me chills as I write it, because it means nothing except everything. We were brothers once, and young. We became men in front of our own eyes. I would trust them with my life, my fortune and my sacred honor. Beyond that, I got no time for any of them.