Boys gone wild!

When I got an invitation to watch the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens from my friends Bruce and Ching Purdue, I thought: Wha? I don’t even understand the game.

But their enthusiasm was contagious, not to mention that our 16-year-old daughters, Dominic and Isabel, rabid rugby fans that they are, were of a “Sevens or suffer” mind. So, Hong Kong Sevens it was. 

The Hong Kong Sevens is an annual international rugby tournament with 24 top teams from all over the world competing. The format had been altered this time to fit all the scheduled matches into a three-day weekend.  Instead of 15 players a side as regulation rugby games go, the Sevens use seven-a-side, hence the name.  Games have quick seven-minute halves, so there could be as many as 20 games per day following a knockout system. Where else can rugby fans witness an endless cavalcade of the world’s rugby greats as team after team takes to the field?  

At the close of March each year, there is an exodus of foreigners to the Hong Kong stadium, all costumed, made-up, ready to rugby and primed to party until kingdom come. I had heard that the party atmosphere at the Sevens matches was legendary, I just didn’t realize how legendary. 

Bright and early on the first day, I had a taste of things to come when we bumped into a couple of men — big, burly fellows, obviously rugby spectators, headed to the stadium as we were — dressed as the cheerleaders from the TV series Glee. They didn’t stop at just the outfits, they had wigs: pink, blonde and ginger, and yes, makeup too!

Pizza delivery?: Imaginative dress is expected among men who attend the rugby finals.

Think wrestler types squeezed into pleated micro miniskirts, with killer biceps straining against the armholes of their tops, massive tree trunks of hairy legs extending from beneath the hems of miniskirts, and bloated beer guts threatening to rip their waistbands apart. Oh, don’t forget the metallic pompoms that they shook in the air to get everybody into the Sevens mood. In my mind: Oooh! Boys gone wild! 

As we walked on, the crowds of eager fans spilling into the stadium seats still was no accurate indication of just how serious the party was going to be. What seemed like a Mardi Gras outside the gates paled in comparison to the full-blown fiesta of cheering, singing, dancing, costumed drinking people inside the stadium partying like it was their last night on earth, all for the love of rugby. 

It seemed almost like Halloween, only much grander in terms of scale. Those in costume were mostly big, grown men. All this for a game perceived to be barbaric by some, with its violent clashes of men using brute force in pushing, shoving and tackling matches. And that’s just in the stands. 

Finding our seats, we came across a contingent of Smurfs: folks who had covered their bodies in blue dye, wearing white diapers and elfin hats. There was a bevy of young men in nuns’ habits but with black fishnet stockings on — cabaret style — holding giant glasses of beer. I almost collided with a tall and thin fellow dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz except that his close-cropped hair didn’t grow in time for the games (he should have sprung for a wig).

Lining up at the food stand I bumped into a couple of teenage boys dressed in nothing but skimpy boxers and pizza boxes attached to their groin area. Around the corner from them was a posse of men built as wide as wrestlers, dressed in pink, frilly halter tops and pink, feathery cowboy hats. Just a few meters from them were a bunch of tipsy, middle-aged dudes sporting Snow White costumes.

I did catch some women dressed as tarts (or as themselves, as one of our friends remarked), showing lots of skin and cleavage; but they were outnumbered by the men — easily thousands of them — who had the spirit and daring to come whoring it on, dressed appropriately for the part to cheer, jeer, heckle, taunt, sing, dance drink and be merry, all in the spirit of the game. 

Really? Could it be the need to unload all that raging testosterone usually kept in check in the adult world, or could it be that their feminine side — that inner bitch forbidden to go head to head with their partners during domestic fights, needing to be unleashed for some stress relief? 

There I was, seated, careful to take in the audio-visual feast of men in racy drag, stomping on the stands, bouncing, yelling, toasting, shaking their bottoms, and obviously having the time of their lives. I figured: This is their rain dance for a bountiful harvest, the ceremonial dance around the fire before the hunt, but this time before their alter egos — the rugby players — charge out of the lockers to play out the primal war games of man, only this time in a controlled arena with civilized rules, but still as close to the wild as it can get.

Snow Weird: Both guys and gals get into character for the Hong Kong Sevens.

Bruce and Ching patiently explained to me the rules of the game. I was pleasantly surprised that what I thought was a barbaric free-for-all was, in fact, organized chaos — very organized. “It is said that rugby is a game of gentlemen; soccer, a gentleman’s game played by thugs,” Bruce said, referring to the full contact allowed in rugby and yet with definitive rules on what is and isn’t allowed, compared to soccer (or football) where, in theory, no contact is allowed but it does happen more often than not, away from the eyes of the referees — but not always — and with serious casualties. I paused to consider what he had said, and figured in a minute that the difference may lie in the psychological effect of the no-holds-barred contact plays in rugby. Rugby players are fully aware that the damage they inflict on each other can be lethal, so the restraint they impose on themselves is, literally, a matter of life and death; whereas, in football, a supposedly no-physical-contact sport, the furtive assaults — intentional elbow jabs, head butts, knee kicks, tripping — are a-plenty. Again, it could be the “forbidden fruit” syndrome at play.

Bruce added, “Notice the global representation in the tournament.” He was right; there were people from every corner of the world, except that it didn’t matter what color, race or creed one was. The only thing that counted was which team you were rooting for and in which manner you wanted to party.

By the middle of the first game, I was lifted — heart and soul — by the spirit of the sport. There was full-scale pushing and shoving: players locked head-to-head, shoulder against shoulder, bearing down on the other to throw him off his feet and then plant him down on the ground. There were full-on low tackles, where man as raging beast dives to grab someone’s feet on a sprint to the end zone with the ball, and with all that forward momentum, being dragged as one would be in old Western flicks, tied to a runaway carriage and hauled across the gravel.

Gasp and squirm is all one can do at moments like this, and there were plenty. As Bruce put it, “It’s a wonder nobody gets more hurt as they could otherwise be considering the intensity of the tackles.” Indeed, they do get hurt, but these six-plus-foot men weighing over 200 pounds each simply shake it off and battle on.

During the lulls between halves and games, blaring music was played in the stands to keep spirits high. Geriatric men with some spunk left in them got on their feet and boogied away like they were 20 again. But what caught my fancy was the loyal few who, against all odds, stayed in their seats meekly, guarding their wives’ purses perched on their laps, while the ladies ventured out to get food, drinks or worse, stood up right beside them to shimmy away to LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem. There they were — the few, the proud — glued to their seats in martyred obedience, content to bob their heads to the beat of the music.

Meanwhile the full-blown man hos of the day — the lot of them dressed in streetwalker regalia — forgot about their ordinary, day-to-day lives to indulge in some extraordinary partying.

“Funny,” one of our girl friends said. “You’d think there would be more women dressed as hos here. I mean, it’s their chance to let it all out.” One gentleman in our party teased: “It’s our chance to shine for a day. You girls get to be hos for a lifetime.”

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