Generations and Other True Stories (19 page)

As the first sides take the field the rain stops, but the wind grows immediately strong and raw. The ball sails crazily through the air, splashes into puddles, thuds dully on the drowned grass. Scoring is almost impossible. The Harlequins lead only 7-0 at halftime, and Mr. Gale, their bulldog-built captain, delivers a spirited and profane pep talk in a British accent that he believes, after his years in Dallas, holds a tinge of Texas twang.

“Let's not go to sleep now, all right?” he says. “We've got at least thirty or forty more points to put on these buggers! We are preparing for bloody Vegas right here, right now! I don't know about you guys, but I'm having fun out there! I'm having damn good fun!”

The Harlequins go on to win, 43-13. After they've scraped the mud off their bodies, they reconvene at the Stepladr Pub on McKinney Avenue, the Reds' regular watering hole, where the home team, in accordance with ancient rugby custom, picks up the tab for the beer.

At 6:15 a.m. the Quins are gathering in an out-of-the-way corner of the huge Las Vegas Hilton lobby to tape their wrists, hands, fingers, ankles, ears. Their hair is tousled, their eyes bleary. They scratch, blink, yawn, trying to clean cobwebs and hangovers from their minds. Mr. Gale is haranguing them to hurry. At 7:00 a.m. they pile into two rental vans and head for Freedom Park on the outskirts of the city, where several soccer fields and softball outfields have been refashioned into rugby pitches.

The previous night, snow fell most everywhere in the West. Cajon Pass, on Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, has been closed by the weather, and in the casinos newly arrived gamblers are telling horror stories about their journeys. The surrounding mountains are covered with snow, but in Las Vegas it only has rained. Hard. All night. More rain has been forecast for this Saturday morning, too, but so far the sky is only overcast.

“I like this weather,” says Geoff Hawkes. “The first match I played in Texas, it was ninety-five degrees. I was used to playing in sixty-degree weather in England. I nearly died. I couldn't cope with it.”

The Harlequins' first side is to open the tournament at 8:00 a.m. against the San Fernando Valley Rugby Football Club in the first, or Aces, division. The second side will follow immediately with its game against Olde Gael, from North Oakland, California, in the second, or Kings, division. Each Harlequin side will play three games today. If they keep winning, it will take a total of nine victories for both to win their divisional trophies.

“Tournaments like this test your depth,” says Bob Latham. “You don't want to use all your best players in any one game. You've got to pace yourself throughout the day, so that all your best guys won't be too tired out and will be available for the final.”

As they warm up, the first-side players psyche themselves for the game. “Come on! We've got to bury these guys right off the bat!” someone says to nobody in particular. “We can't give them room to breathe, they can get fired up! We've got to stick it to them right away!”

And they do. The Harlequins demolish San Fernando Valley, 43-0, and Olde Gael, 40-3. After their games, the ruggers lounge about the grass, resting, mending wounds. “I have green blood running through my veins and black blood running through my arteries,” Norbert Mueller muses, lying supine, eyes closed.

Within forty-five minutes of their victory over Olde Gael, the second side is on the pitch again, this time playing a team of Marines from Camp Pendleton, whom they beat, 32-7. The first side demolishes the Camelback Rugby Football Club from Phoenix, 42-0.

Throughout the day, the Las Vegas paramedics are busy, moving from field to field, examining fallen ruggers, hauling some away in ambulances. But none has been a Harlequin. As the shadows grow long and disappear, as the sun sinks over the western mountains, as the field lights come on and the temperature begins to slide, both Quins sides are still playing their third matches of the day. The only spectators left are a few Harlettes and players from some of the clubs the Harlequins have beaten. At last, well into the night, the second side squeaks by Fort Collins, Colorado, 18-17, and the first side defeats the host Las Vegas team, 20-10.

As the matches end, each team raises a cheer for its opponent, in accordance with rugby custom. Then, in keeping with Harlequins tradition, the men in black and green bellow their victory chant:

The first side must win only one more match now to win the championship trophy. The second side must win two. It opens the second day of the tournament in the semifinal match against Langley, British Columbia. It's a low-scoring affair. The Harlequins lead, 6-3, with only a few seconds to go, when Kevin Phillipson, their young forward from South Africa, goes to the ground for the ball and is buried under a pile of bodies. When the pile is removed, Mr. Phillipson is flat on his back, lying unconscious and frighteningly still.

The paramedics are unable to revive him. The ruggers watch them work for a few minutes, then move to another field to play the game's remaining seconds. The score doesn't change, and the Harlequins win. An ambulance hauls Mr. Phillipson away.

The second-side captain, Keith “Flussen” Engelbrecht, tries to phone Mr. Phillipson's parents, but is unable to reach them. Rumor has it that they're somewhere in Wisconsin, travelling in a Winnebago.

The other Harlequins are worried about their fallen teammate, but take his injury stoically. “You get a lot of bumps and bruises in this game, but this still is quite rare,” says Bill “Flounder” Bartok. “Yet, it does happen, you know.”

And they must prepare for their final game, in which they soon will face the Mavericks from Arlington, Texas. “Go figure,” says one of the Phoenix players, standing on the sideline. “These guys came halfway across the country to play in the finals against a team from across town.”

It turns out to be
the
game of the tournament. At the end of the first half, the Mavericks lead, 14-12. For the first time all weekend, a Harlequins side is behind. In the second half, the Mavericks increase their lead to 24-12, but the Harlequins “dig deep and pull out that something extra,” as Nelson Spencer has said. The game ends in a 27-27 tie. In the sudden-death tie-breaker, the Harlequins win, 32-27.

“A game like this takes about nine years off my life,” says Mr. Engelbrecht. “I'm getting too old for it. I said last year and the year before: ‘This is going to be my last year.' But you get so involved. You want to be part of the winning team. You want to help the tradition continue. So you come out every year, and you think: ‘If I wasn't playing rugby, what
would
I be doing?' ”

In the final game of the tournament, the Quins' first side is to play Belmont Shore, a club from the Bay Area of California, which has two huge visiting Australians in its lineup. “Look at that guy,” one of the Harlequins says. “Each of his legs is as big as a man.”

It doesn't matter. The Harlequins win, 22-0. In nine games, the Quins' two sides have outscored their opponents, 255-67.

I was born on a mountaintop, raised by a bear
…

As the photographer for a rugby magazine is trying to line up the victors for a team picture, Kevin Phillipson appears as if by magic, groggy and wearing a neck brace, but alive.

“I went in to get the ball,” he says. “Next thing I remember is looking up into the paramedic's sunglasses. They wanted to keep me in the hospital overnight and give me a bunch of tests, but I told them, “The hell with that. I have a plane to catch.”

Later, the Harlequins learn that one of the casinos had a line on the Belmont Shore game, favoring the Quins by three. On the plane back to Dallas, the flight attendants run out of beer.

The Harlequins' 1984 national championship trophy, their Western championship trophies, and a few others are on display in a glass case at the Mucky Duck, a bar on Welborn Street where the Quins hang out. Still others sit on shelves at the home of Des Kirkwood, their vice president for operations and sometime coach. But while the two huge Las Vegas trophies rest snugly in his Porsche, Bob Latham is driving out Garland Road to one of those rental storage companies.

He stops at the office for a key, then drives through the electronically controlled gate and around the maze of storage buildings. He stops, gets out of the car, and unlocks one of the bins.

It's piled with boxes filled with jerseys that have been presented to the Harlequins by visiting international stars, with framed antique rugby prints, and with trophies, dozens of them, lying in a jumble.

“We have more trophies in here than most clubs have won,” Mr. Latham says. “Our dream is to have our own clubhouse someday, where we can display all this.”

He lays the two big trophies on top of the pile. “So visitors can come and see, and immediately know who the Dallas Harlequins are.”

February 1993

I met Ben Davis only once. We sat in his living room and had a quiet talk about his religious faith, his homosexuality, and his loneliness. I thought he was a very brave man
.

A couple of weeks after this piece ran, he died of AIDS
.

Fundamental Differences

One fall day in 1948, Ben Davis' mother taught Sunday school in the morning, made lunch for her pastor and a visiting evangelist, went into labor while doing the dishes, and gave birth to her son that afternoon. “By the next Sunday I'd already been in several services,” Mr. Davis says.

One night when he was five, Ben was awakened by the voice of God calling him to be a Pentecostal preacher. “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel of salvation and temptation,” God told him.

“It scared me so badly I almost wet the bed,” Mr. Davis says now. But after discussing the incident with his mother, he abandoned his ambition to become an ambulance driver. “From that moment on, all I ever wanted to do was preach the Gospel,” he says.

When he was about seven, the Reverend Oral Roberts held a meeting in Dallas, and Ben's father asked the evangelist to pray for God to give Ben—a sickly lad—an appetite. And God did. “Overnight my appetite became ravenous,” Mr. Davis says, “and in no time I'd bloated up like a poisoned dog. I've been fat ever since.”

These and other stories are in
Strange Angel: The Gospel According to Benny Joe
, Mr. Davis' memoir of the Assemblies of God congregations in which he spent his childhood and adolescence, singing, shouting, speaking in tongues, preaching, and praying seven nights a week and all day Sunday in meetings where “the power of God was so strong the entire area was literally held by the ankles over hell.”

The book relates Mr. Davis' memories of Pentecostal Christianity in the pre-TV-evangelist days, when it was regarded as an across-the-tracks religion practiced only by the poor, and of his years spent studying for the ministry at Southwestern Assemblies of God College in Waxahachie, Texas. They are warm and often funny. “When you go to church seven nights a week,” Mr. Davis says, “a lot of funny things happen.” And any reader who grew up in the smaller congregations of any brimstone-preaching fundamentalist denomination will identify with many of them.

The real reason Mr. Davis wrote his book doesn't appear until page 172:

“I stood there, numb, staring at myself in the mirror, unable to move. Nothing would ever be the same again. What had gone wrong? I was fourth-generation Pentecostal. I was a licensed Assemblies of God minister, and I was to graduate from Southwestern in May. A lifetime of preparation, work, and dreams lay dead at my feet. How could it have happened? What would I do?”

He had come to realize that he was gay. And, because the Pentecostal churches consider homosexuality to be a sin, he says, he knew he would never be permitted to fulfill his lifelong dream. “I only knew two things for sure,” he would write. “I couldn't be a preacher, and there was absolutely nothing else I wanted to be.”

Mr. Davis says he still might have remained a member of his church if he had continued to hide his homosexuality, but his conscience wouldn't let him. “I decided I wouldn't be a hypocrite,” he says.

At that point, the humor in the story assumes a tinge of bitterness. Mr. Davis dropped out of school ten weeks before he was to graduate. He confided in his pastor, seeking comfort. The preacher told him he would roast in hell. When Mr. Davis told his best friend that he was gay, the friend spread the news to the rest of the congregation.

The church members froze him out of their lives, turning their heads away whenever they would meet him. His mother went to her pastor, seeking guidance, and the minister told her: “Well, Sister Davis, as the mother of a queer you're not fit to teach Sunday school. I'll have to take that class away from you.”

When Corona Publishing, a small house in San Antonio, brought out
Strange Angel
two years ago, Mr. Davis was amazed at the response it received. “People have called me from all over the country,” he says. “Members of fundamentalist churches who have had divorces, who have had affairs, who have had abortions—who are sinners, in other words. They tell me of the ways those churches crucified them, tarred and feathered them, threw them out of town. They all say, ‘I can identify with what you went through.' I've had calls from parents of gay children in fundamentalist churches. They say, ‘You speak fundamentalist language. We know that you know what you're talking about.' Mothers tell me they were embarrassed to ask their children certain questions about gay life, and some of those are answered in the book, and it has made it a little easier for them to cope. My favorite was a mother who called and said she had lost her only son to AIDS, and that reading my book was the first time she had smiled since his death. I really love that.”