April Alumnus of the Month: Mike Burrows

Mike Burrows is the April Alumnus of the Month. Mike helped form the club in 1959 along with the late Bert Sugar. Mike and Bert were second row partners in the first ever UMRFC match. Mike also spoke at the club’s 40th and 50th anniversaries about the early years. We are forever grateful to Mike’s work with the club and are happy that the early efforts took root. Here he recounts a bit of the early honors and fills us in on his life now.

When did you play?
I played (one match, the club’s first) in the spring of ’59, and then from ’60 to ’64.

Any special honors?
I was coach and captain for that first match in ’59; club president from the fall of ’61 until the summer of ’64.

Favorite memories?
That very first match. Not only did we get a full 15 onto the field against the University of Toronto, but, to our great joy, the motley bunch that we were actually won.

Getting through to the Toronto Sevens final in ’61 at our first appearance at the tournament. Toronto Scottish beat us in the final, but in a grand gesture recognizing our achievement, their players handed over their trophies to us —- seven engraved pewter tankards. I still have mine.

Our tour to the New York area in the spring of ’62. (This is the correct date; the guessed date in my account on the Olde Blue web site is not.) We played four matches —- New York RFC, Old Blue RFC (Columbia University Alumni), Manhattan RFC (I believe) and Princeton RFC. We didn’t get even a single win, but it gave the club a growth experience as well as a great time.

Competing at the first Midwest Rugby Festival in Lincoln Park on Chicago’s lake shore in the spring of ’64. The colorful team uniforms in the spring sunshine, the new green of the grass and the wind-ruffled waves on Lake Michigan together made a picture I’ll never forget. Teams from all over the Midwest showed up, confirming that rugby had finally become established there. Earlier, in ’60 and ’61 we had to rely on our Canadian neighbors for our competition.

And finally, at the club’s 40th anniversary in ’99, joining Bert Sugar in the second row again for a few minutes, replaying our role in that first game 40 years earlier.

What are you doing now?
I’m a semi-retired electrical engineer, working at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington MA. I continued playing rugby after I left Michigan, first with the Boston RFC, and then with a now disbanded team, the Sorcerers RFC. I stopped playing finally in about 1979, when I was 45. My sport is now tennis. I have a wife, five children, and two grandchildren.

Anything else you want us to know?
The club almost died in the spring of ’61. We couldn’t put together a team to travel to Canada to play a scheduled match. By the time I stepped down as club president in the summer of ’64, however, the membership had grown so much that in the fall, I was gratified to hear that to accommodate all who wanted to play, the club was split into a Maize division and a Blue division.