Adirondacks weekend renews friendships, rivalries

In our defense, we were left unsupervised.

I got together last month for a long weekend with some former teammates at the Can-Am Rugby Tournament in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

I arrived Thursday afternoon after stopping to visit family in Cortland the day before.

A day into our stay, I opened the refrigerator to see what there was to eat. There was a lot of beer, a little cheese and four yogurts. I had brought the yogurts, my token gesture toward a balanced diet.

When I went to the tournament two years ago — I missed the last one when I came down with COVID-19 — most of us were accompanied by wives and girlfriends. They coordinated shopping and food preparation, and several brought meals ready to eat.

Not this time.

In a domino effect of cancellations, the women dropped out — all but one wife, who would be arriving the second day. Until then, we were on our own.

I stopped at a supermarket in town to grab some stuff to eat. As I pushed my cart to the checkout, I realized it looked like an 8-year-old had written my shopping list. There were Doritos, pretzels, doughnuts, bagels, butter and some juices.

With Friday’s arrival of a guest who lacked a Y chromosome, there came hope. She brought a crumb cake, grapes and some other food. The chances of our survival had jumped to about 25%, so things were looking up.

We ate all of our meals at local restaurants and stayed in a rented house in the village of Saranac Lake. Half the matches were held at a local high school’s fields, while the rest were at fields in Lake George, about a half-hour drive away.

The tournament in recent years has become an alumni reunion for guys who played rugby for the Windhover Eagles club in Saratoga County in upstate New York. Windhover was my third and final club.

I played four years at St. Bonaventure University, then a few seasons for the Cortland State team when I moved to Cortland to take my first job after graduation. I quit playing for a couple of years but joined the Windhover club when I moved to Saratoga County for another job. I played a few more seasons for Windhover.

At Windhover, there were a lot of players who were alumni of Cortland State and Siena College. The guys from the two schools had a fierce rivalry from their college days, even as Windhover teammates. Scuffles broke out from time to time at practices.

When I joined Windhover, they had an equal number of players from Cortland and Siena.

To break the tie, they argued about how to count me. I never actually attended Cortland State. I played on the “B side,” the equivalent of a junior varsity squad, at a time when the Cortland team was on suspension by its college.

The Cortland players said I counted for them because we were teammates at Cortland. The Siena players said I counted for them because I was never a Cortland student, and St. Bonaventure and Siena are both Franciscan colleges.

The alumni for Cortland and Siena stayed in separate houses at the Can-Am Rugby Tournament. One night, we had a party together at the Siena house, and the next night we all got together at the Cortland house.

We reminisced about the old days playing for Windhover, and the rivalry between Cortland and Siena.

This was the first year that there were no former Cortland players in the tournament from our era, as the last of us had finally succumbed to injuries or age.

I last played rugby a couple of years ago at the tournament, very likely my final time lacing up cleats at the age of 61. But reunions at the Can-Am tournament continue my connection to the game I love and some of my old teammates.