Looks Like I Have to Ride This Rugby Man

By Megan Reynolds | November 22, 2019 | 7:15pm

In Depth In Depth

Rugby, a sport that I understand to be spiritually similar to American football, confounds me. There are big men, some bearded, some not, who throw a ball around a field. There are rules, sure, but none of which make any sense. Reading a report on what happened at a rugby match is an activity my pea brain cannot handle, because frankly, I am tired and my shit is at capacity. However, when this viral tweet of rugby man Joe Marler mixing metaphors and talking about horses found its way to me, one thing became crystal clear: It’s time to ride this rugby man like a motherfucking Clydesdale.

The clip starts off as most sports post-game interviews do, with a cliche about getting back on the horse that tossed you off—a metaphor often invoked for losses in the sports world, when one big strong team isn’t big or strong enough to defeat the other. Most postgame interviews would end after the horse metaphor, but Marler, a big handsome bearded man with thighs like tree trunks and hands like baseball mitts, really went for it, stretching the metaphor much like I’d like to be stretched—to its absolute breaking point.

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“And take that horse to the water, and you can ask that horse, you can say, ‘Hey, horsey, do you want to have a drink or do you want to swim.’ It’s up to that horse to then realize what he wants to do in his life. That horse, at the moment, wants to go out on Saturday, he wants to clippity-clop all the way to The Stoop and he wants to say hello to those fans.”

I admire a man with this sort of imagination. Seems like that kind of imagination might work out in the bedroom, especially in the scenario that I have envisioned, which is arguably too perverted to share with the general public and involves a rudimentary understanding of what a “scrum” is. Rugby players are physically similar to football players—big-bodied, dense, with thighs so large that my own large thighs would be unable to wrap around his with ease. Sleeping my way through an entire rugby team is a very specific kind of endurance challenge that my old bones could not quite handle, but tackling every surface of this one large rugby man, who could probably deadlift me with ease, is much more my speed. Maybe after, we could drive to the Home Depot and pick up some lumber for the bookshelves I so desperately want. I will sit in the cab of the truck like a faithful Labrador, face to the wind, the sweat of our rutting drying on my body in the breeze. Later, there will be tea. A nice life, if you can picture it. Cozy. Serene.

No disrespect to Marler’s wife Daisy, who seems lovely, but if she were to be so kind, I would love to borrow him for a second? Won’t take long. Promise.