| In the spring of 1962, a rugby club made up of University
of Wisconsin students played the first game of rugby in the
Midwest against a club from the University of Notre Dame. Wisconsin
lost that first match when fullback, Jim Bakken, missed two
penalty kicks from relatively close range. That trivial incident
is significant only because Bakken played a record 234 consecutive
NFL games, making a record 7 field goals in one game in 1967.
In the summer of 1962, Vic Hilarov put ads in local papers
asking for contact sports athletes to play rugby. Mike Frost,
a hooker from England who played rugby at Cambridge and the
Royal Air Force, was one of the expatriate recruits to answer
the call.
After a historic first season in the fall of 1962, Mike and
Vic wrote and traveled to campuses in Illinois, Michigan and
Indiana to help form rugby clubs at the Universities of Michigan,
Indiana, Illinois and Chicago as well as North Shore Chicago
and the City of Chicago Club (later to become the Chicago
Lions). These clubs along with Notre Dame, Palmer College
and Minnetonka RFC would form the core of Wisconsin's opponents
from 1962-1964.
The winter of '62/'63 was crucial to Wisconsin rugby because
a handful of foreign rugby players, a few contact athletes
and several football players from the 1963 UW Rose Bowl squad
started a rugby program and a tradition of winning rugby that
led Wisconsin to become one of the leading rugby clubs in
the nation.
Vic was the president of the Wisconsin RFC from 1962-64 and
shortly thereafter became the first President of the Midwest
RFU (February, 1964) and in 1975 the President of the USA-RFU.
In the fall of 1963 Wisconsin was 4 and 3, its' first winning
season. The team was led by player-coach British Lion Brian
Wightman, who later became Fiji's Minister of Sport.
In 1962-1963 Wisconsin's team was comprised of three UW football
players: Bill Suits, Joe Heckl and Charles Brooke; and a group
of foreign players that included Allan Strachan (Scotland),
Charles van Rensburg (South Africa), Guillaume de Montravel
(a French Count), Dave Sanderson (New Zealand) plus Wightman,
Frost and Doug Eveleigh (all England). American athletes included
Hilarov, Pete McNaughton (today a retired U.S. Army General),
Dave Serwer, Dave Gorton, Dick Wands, Keith McCamy, Gus Hodge,
Jim Borth, Monty Pfundheller, Dave Wright, Mike Trinko, Jerry
Behrens, Jeff Thomas, Ron Armbruster, Ed Walker and Jim Heeb.
In spring 1964 Wisconsin was undefeated and won its second
Midwest Rugby Tournament. That fall, 18 year old Skip Muzik
made his debut, in one match scored 4 tries and made Rugby
Magazine's first and only All-America team. The Wisconsin
RFC was also ranked as a top 10 team in Rugby's first ever
national poll.
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