What to Watch Locally This Weekend

Sadly I can't make it, but if you have free time on Saturday afternoon this is what you should do: go watch PAC Rugby play Washington Rugby. These are Washington's rugby big boys, the Brutes of the Four Quadrants, the Animals of the Anacostia, the Powerhouses of the Potomac, etc. This is Redskins-Cowboys, Yankees-Red Sox, Seneca Valley-Northwest, etc. These teams muddy each other's shoes, chew on each other's ear lobes, just plain don't like each other, etc.

"Just so you know, we are beating the snot out of our cross town Rival on sat," a WRFC player e-mailed me.

"We're the good guys, they're the dark side," WRFC Captain Kevin Gilligan said. "We've won more games than they can count, probably."

Gilligan said this is for local bragging rights. He said that WRFC has lost the previous two meetings in heartbreaking last-minute fashion. He said that they'll be underdogs, but that they expect to win.

PAC, which was formed with the express purpose of supplanting WRFC as the local powerhouse, scoffs at such talk. PAC scoffs at the rivalry. PAC scoffs a lot, in general.

"Over the last six or seven years they're not even really our competition any more," PAC Prez Stefan Hankin just told me. "Yes, Washington is a cross-town rival, but we really don't even consider them in our league any more....We're not sweating it too much."

Take that, WRFC. If that isn't locker room material, I don't know what is. Although the game will be played down at 15th and Independence, across from the Holocaust Museum, and there aren't really locker rooms, per se.

2 p.m. Saturday. Followed by refreshments at the Bottom Line. Tickets are free. They don't even exist. Several hundred people are expected to attend. Full details on Monday.