The Rugby Team Bed Push

1980 (15 YEARS OLD)3 months ago

1980 - 15 Years Old

Our rugby team needed to raise money for our new team jerseys. We needed 20, for the first 15 and the 5 substitutes. That meant 95 Pounds for 19 shirts plus whatever it would cost for a shirt that would fit our #8, Patrick Zydyrko.

Now in professional rugby, the #8 is a large muscular and very athletic chap; but working with the limited variety of size and abilities in the under 16s, our rugby coach, Mr. Longman, had decided that having the biggest, fattest bastard possible as #8 would help us in our scrum.

And Paddy Zydyrko fit the bill perfectly. He was twice the size of the next biggest player. I had been in a fight with him in the 6th-form toilets several years earlier. But that was in the past.

And he made our scrum almost unbeatable.

Across the pond, if they wanted to raise money for their school, they would hold a bake sale, with a cake walk, an auction, and maybe a kissing booth.

I’d been to such a fundraiser for our church on the American base. No kissing booth, of course, as Catholics aren’t allowed to kiss until they are married.

But they did have red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.

If we were being honest, a kissing booth with Cathy Hughes and Kieran would have really raked it in. We probably would have made enough money to have Yves St. Lauren hand sew them…

But, no, Longman came up with a better idea: a 23-mile sponsored bed push, from our school to Warwick Castle.

He said it would be a good-team building exercise.

We needed a girl to sit in the bed, and Longman ignored all of our suggestions for which girls and what sort of flimsy negligees they should wear.

Instead, he chose Maggie Flynn.

Maggie was the best girl athlete in our school. She was basically one of the lads. And she even helped push for a few miles, while Alan McCluskey sat in the bed, until he got out after becoming tired of the abuse from the rest of us.

Maggie wore a navy tracksuit.

So our convoy set off from our school early on a Saturday morning.

First, was Longman and one of us in his Morgan.

Next was 8 of us pushing the bed.

Followed by 6 of us on bikes.

And, finally, 3 of us pulling up the rear in the school mini bus, driven by Mr. Bromley, the janitor. Guarding our sandwiches.

We’d rotate every 3 miles or so.

There should have been 20 of us, but one lad was sick and Paddy Zydyrko would have collapsed before we’d got to the end of the street our school was on.

And as we pushed, we sang. Like an Alabaman prison work gang from the 1920s. It would have been great if we knew even one of the many infamous dirty rugby songs, but we didn’t. There was no youtube back then. And we were too young to hang out at the pub after the match, honing that essential aspect of being a true rugby player.

So we sang whatever we knew. Mostly songs we sort of knew from Top of the Pops.

Such as Do Rock Steady, the name I would later nick for the name of a blog. But our singing was absolute crap, so they all ended up sounding like rugby songs, anyway.

At one point, a chap in a Rolls Royce drove by in the opposite direction, waving a banknote out of the window. We missed the moment, and he disappeared down the road.

Sod that.

I made Richard Walsh get off the 10-speed he was riding, and I pedalled like a bastard to catch up with Lord Snot.

About 10-minutes later, I caught up with a line of traffic waiting on road works. There was the Roller standing out. It wasn’t hard to spot. It wasn’t London.

I knocked on the window, and the window purred down. Before he could say anything, I told him,

I’m with the bed push. You were waving some dosh.

Then, I added,

I just pedalled 3 miles – it better not be a quid.

He laughed, and gave me a tenner. Must be nice.

That’s probably what Zydyrko’s shirt would cost.

I arrived back to the gang, waving my spoils to cheers, a hero. As a reward, Longman even let me ride in his Morgan on the way home.

We stopped at a lay-by for tea and sandwiches, joking, and showing our legs to passing cars, whistling at girls, and singing “we are the lads.”

Typical rugby-player stuff.

We finally made it to Warwick Castle in the early evening, having only been rained on a couple of times.

I can’t remember the logistics of packing up and going home, as I was too busy focusing on the ride home in the Morgan.

Bond. James Bond.

But we had done it.

The following week we had our first match in our new jerseys. Despite the fact that they looked like they were designed by someone who was either colourblind or had previously worked at a circus (bright orange with a single black stripe), we walked onto the pitch feeling like ~~a million bucks~~ one hundred and five pounds.

Longman was right. We had become a team.

And we thrashed the other side.