MARCH MADNESS IS NOT THE EXCLUSIVE DOMAIN of college hoops, as any fan or player of the sport of rugby football will be glad to tell you -- (and a special shout out to any mother or wife of a rugby player who gets stuck with ther soggy chore of washing and/or burning the game day jerseys after a March madness mud wrestling match like the ones Saturday afternoon between Brandywine Rugby Club and the visiting Baltimore-Chesapeake RFC at Brandywine's pitch in a former pasteur in the vast and beautiful horse and cattle country of that part of southern Chester County that is closer to Wilmington than West Chester.

When March is acting lionish with high winds, horizontal torrential rains and olympic pool- sized puddles the sport of rugby achieves a sort of sacred messiness caused by wet hands, sodden boots, floodtide turf, and muddy balls (yeah, including the ones they play the game with). A wet sloppy field is the great common denominator of rugby, where every speedy back in the three quarters line is transformed into a lumbering second row forward with bad hands. To imagine what it's like to cleanly catch a wet muddy rugby ball that has been passed or kicked in your general direction is like shooting a clean game of billiards while chalking your cue with axel grease.

Rugby players love playing in the mud because injuries are rare when the ground is as soft and spongy as a water-logged sofa left out overnight at a frat party kegger. Mud is a true democratic athletic condition. The fast get slower, the slow get slower still, and everyone drops the ball constantly. It would be comical if it weren't so unavoidable.

This photo is from the B side match which was played in great part during a sudden white squall of wind and 50 MPH bullet-like rain drops that arrived as suddenly as a twister and hung around for 20 minutes. As heavy as the rains were where you were yesterday, imagine trying to pass, kick, tackle , ruck and maul in rain and wind so fierce it blinded you as some other blind many was hurling his body at you. Look at some of the players facing the wind coming from the left in the photo above. And to think they actually pretended that they could see what was going on.

The young turkheads from Brandywine won both the A and B side matches, 22-15 and 20-5 respectively, remaining undefeated on the young season that started with a championship tournament performance in Fort Lauderdale last month where Brandywine defeated some major rugby clubs in the United State and Canada, including the Georgiaforeign-student rich rugby factory Life College and the Toronto Scots in the final.

March Madness on a rugby pitch. . . It's never pretty, but it sure is beautiful.