Rugbygate

Back in college, I played club league volleyball.

Club league as in not varsity. We had some pretty good players, but nobody was under the illusion that we were an official, varsity team.

Our league had nothing to do with the NAIA, to which Eastern College's varsity teams belonged. And it had nothing to do with the NCAA teams that our rivals Temple and Villanova fielded in other sports.

Still, it was great fun. The league included club teams from Eastern, Cabrini, Haverford, Swarthmore, Villanova, Temple, Lehigh, Penn State (Delco) and Montgomery County College.

Montco was actually the league powerhouse due to the fearsome Shlosser. I don't know if I ever learned his first name, but the man could crush a volleyball. After getting six-packed by him in one game, I had the word "Mikasa" imprinted backwards on my chest. It was still legible the next day.

And but so anyway it turns out that club league sports are something I have in common with our president. George W. Bush played a season of club league rugby while at Yale.

I learned this (via Cursor) from Jerome Doolittle, who also reports that, according to presidential adviser Karen Hughes, the president likes to, well, embellish a bit when describing his college athletic career. He cites this from a book review of Hughes' Ten Minutes from Normal:

A strange anecdote about Vladimir Putin's interest in Bush's college days seems to be included so Hughes can mention Bush's underappreciated athleticism: "'President Putin knew you had played rugby, but he didn't have the context. I mean you just played for one semester in college, right?' I said, dismissing it.

"'I played for a year,' the president corrected me, 'and it was the varsity.'"

Doolittle offers this correction:

… The underappreciated athlete couldn't have played varsity rugby because there wasn't any varsity. Because rugby was a club sport.

Now, okay, this isn't that big a deal. I'm not even sure it's a little deal. But the fact is the guy played a bit of intercollegiate intramurals and he likes to tell people that it was more than that — that he played Ivy League varsity.

That's kind of smarmy and less than admirable, but whatever.

Still, consider the kind of treatment this story would be getting if it were John Kerry, rather than George W. Bush, who was caught lying about his athletic resume.

Mickey Kaus would latch onto the story for at least a week, interpreting it as a deeply meaningful and revealing metaphor — maybe even a "synecdoche." Mickey would begin referring to it through some semi-clever nickname — "Rugbygate" — and Slate would publish day after day of his explorations of all the deplorable things such a story might indicate about the senator's character. (All of which would be more substantial than the confused trivialities Kaus has recently been peddling on Microsoft's dime.)

But don't expect Kaus or the other Heathers to even notice George W. Bush's embarrassing exaggerations of his boozy semester on the rugby field. The standards they apply are not equal.

Oh, one more thing for the record. Eastern's club team faced off against Yale's volleyball club team in one tournament at 'Nova's Nevin Fieldhouse. We kicked their butts.