The 1971–72 Season
A club still teaching itself the game — and paying for the privilege out of its own pockets.
In May 1972 the Columbia Missourian sent reporter and photographer Richard Shulman out to a Missouri rugby match, and the picture he brought back is the clearest surviving look at what the club was in these years. The spectators, he wrote, were the players themselves and a few friends. The field was not quite level. Some of the uniforms did not match. Six years after its founding, Mizzou Rugby was still very much a group of students who had decided to build something themselves.
Gordon Doak served as both coach and captain, and he told the Missourian that virtually none of the club's members had played rugby before coming to Missouri. They had to be taught, first of all, not to play it like football. “The object of the game is to pass the ball just before you get tackled, not to try to run over someone,” he said. The club had been organized in the fall of 1966 to give students an alternative to the established varsity sports and to the enormous amounts of time those sports demanded — and by 1972 that alternative had an appeal Doak was happy to explain. Graduate students, faculty and staff who could not play varsity sports could play rugby. So could anyone else. “One thing we tell everyone when they come out: We guarantee that they will play.”
It was not free. The Missourian noted that until the Missouri Students Association had recently begun providing limited funding, the club had been supported entirely by its own members. Players still paid a $10 membership fee and had to provide their own transportation and lodging for away games. “In a club sport you're paying for it yourself,” Doak said. “You're playing because you want to play.”
Shulman's photographs caught the club at home against the University of Missouri at Rolla — Ed Sweeney and Jim Dierker stretching for the ball at a lineout, a Rolla man about to be brought down with former Missouri footballer John “Jet” Henley closing in to help, the two packs binding for a scrum, and, afterwards, Phil Jones and a teammate at the ever-present beer keg. That last frame was the one Doak most wanted understood. Sportsmanship, he said, mattered particularly in rugby. “There's more to it than just playing rugby. It's called the gentlemen's game. The tradition is that you go out and play as hard as you can on the field, then after the game you go out with the opponent and drink beer.”
Source: “The Gentlemen's Game,” written and photographed by Richard Shulman, Columbia (Mo.) Missourian, Tuesday, May 9, 1972. Clipping preserved by Jim Dierker. No won-lost record for this season has reached us yet.
