HOPE VALLEY — Ask Kevin Cronan about rugby and he'll talk for hours. Ask him about Rhody rugby and he'll talk for days.
"I guess I talk a lot," Cronan laughingly said one afternoon last week as he spoke about his love of rugby; his former teammates on the University of Rhode Island Rugby Club back in the 1970s; the games they played; their victories; their defeats; their tight bonds; their "Keaney Blue" striped rugby jerseys; and the book he wrote two years ago using the pen name Connor Murphy.
"Rugby Tries and Knock Ons: Tales of a college rugby player in New England and the game that gave birth to American football" is a book, Cronan said, "that not only also traces the development of rugby in the United States, from the early days when no one was quite clear about the rules," but is full of colorful stories centered on the heyday of URI's rugby team.
Cronan, 64, said he wrote the book "to share my team's unique and fun story with others who enjoy sports in general and who root for the underdog."
The URI rugby team may have played without a coach, he said, without official uniforms and without transportation, "but we were pretty good."
Cronan and his scrappy squad managed to play regularly and defeat some of the best men’s teams in the country.
Among the highlights include winning the Harvard Business School's "Sevens Tournament" in Boston four straight years and the New York Sevens Tournament three years in a row.
The book not only covers "our competitive, underdog, fun team, but it includes a history of the game, an explanation of the rules and recollections of college life in the '70s ... both sporting and social."
"... The legal drinking age was 18 and kegs were tapped at the end of a match and beers were quaffed with the opposing team and fans," Dave Lavalee, who works in the university's media office, wrote in a "URI Today" story about Cronan featured in the April 2018 edition. "Happy hour at the pub in the Memorial Union counted as rugby practice and also a time to sing a salty tune or two, the lyrics of which can be found on pages 40 through 49."
"He recalls the bubble, the inflatable facility where the track team practiced on a wooden, banked track, and which often blew over in bad storms and blizzards," Lavalee wrote. "The book is filled with photos from The Good 5 Cent Cigar, the student newspaper, and Renaissance, the yearbook, which show scenes that will be familiar to many alumni, including toga parties, the Rams Den balcony, Narragansett night spots and great rugby action shots."
Cronan said the book, which is available locally at Savoy Bookshop and Café, should "appeal to any rugger or rugby fan."
"There were a lot of characters," he said with a chuckle.
"Local authors are an important part of the fabric that makes up independent bookstores,” said Anastasia Soroko, event and marketing manager for Savoy Bookshop & Café and Bank Square Books. "We're delighted to have the opportunity to help promote local author's titles to a wider audience via our bookshelves."
Cronan, a 1977 URI graduate who joined the rugby club in 1975, said he remembers "more than a few URI ruggers from Westerly" ... ruggers with names like Ron Gwaltney, Donald 'Pete' Thorpe and Dave Ligouri."
"We actually played in the first U.S. Rugby National Sevens National finals ... against the great Denver Barbarians men's club in 1979 in Hartford, Connecticut," Cronan said as he listed the odds-defying accomplishments of his ragtag team.
They also made it to the semifinals of the New England Rugby Union Open.
"Luckily we won our last appearance in 1979," he said.
There were also the regular pre-COVID-19 rugby reunions, typically held at the home of fellow URI alumni Harry and Sue Seidler in Jamestown, where the idea for the book began.
The father of two adult children — Sean and Casey — Cronan has written three children's books, one about a little boy named Harry who's learning to cope with Alzheimer's in the family and another about bullying. But finding a publisher can be complicated process, he said.
It was at one of the rugby reunions that the idea for using his writing skills to capture the glory days of URI's rugby team was hatched. Cronan's former teammate Bob Read of Barrington, who retired recently from the information technology department at Amica Insurance, gave Cronan a hand.
"Bobby helped with some of the technical jargon," Cronan said, "the rules and match details, and (Read's wife) Gail had many of the photos used in the book.
"I look back very fondly on my rugby days," Read said in an email, "especially ... playing with a bunch of committed individuals who were very serious about their rugby.
"Sure, we had our fun ... we were in college," he added, "but once the cleats and rugby shirt were put on it was all business."
Read said during the URI reunions in Jamestown, rugby stories "naturally broke out."
Each time the stories came up, he said, "we were better than the last time we had talked about it."
The stories eventually served as the catalyst for Cronan's book.
With help from his former teammates and Gail Read, who took sports photos for the URI newspaper, "The Good Five Cent Cigar," in the 1970s, Cronan was able to locate black and white photos, newspaper articles and other match memorabilia that helped him write and "paint a vivid picture of our team back in in those wild west, grassroots days."
Cronan also relied on Bobby Belluzzi, another URI alum who lives in Harthorne, N.Y., and was a captain and one of the officers of the URI Rugby Club.
"He still remembers everything about URI Rugby," Cronan said. "I picked his brain at the reunions before he knew I was writing the book. ... The book brought all that together in black and white — and some color — for a special bunch of guys."
Cronan started his career as a fourth grade teacher at St. Theresa's School in Providence (where he wore his Rhody Rugby Keaney Blue windbreaker most of the time and carried his books and lunch in an old Monroe dairy milk crate he used at URI) and went on to get certified in computer technology. He worked at a number of places, including Blue Cross and the Newport Career and Tech Center but eventually returned to his alma mater. After working with University Computing Services for 12 years, he retired, giving him time to write the book.
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