Looking for hits

The club is hopping. Multicolored lights illuminate the dance floor as deafening music, ranging from old-school Michael Jackson to the new-school Justin Timberlake, blares from the loudspeakers overhead.

It is a typical Thursday night at Tonic, a popular downtown Columbia nightclub. As the party progresses, Ryan Schulz walks through the club in his black “Bouncer” T-shirt, calmly waiting for someone, who has obviously had too many drinks, to make a scene.

It doesn’t take long.

In the middle of the dance floor, two guys who appear to be joking around suddenly get into a yelling match. A punch is thrown. But before the fight can escalate, Schulz is in the thick of the action, grabbing one of the guys and putting him in an inescapable headlock. Three other bouncers run to his assistance and toss the men out of the club.

“He knows how to put people in submission,” Jeff Rehder, a co-worker at Tonic, said of Schulz. “So when drunk people get into fights at the bars, he can really dominate the situation.”

Since September, Schulz, 21, has worked almost every night at Tonic. As a bouncer, he gets paid to control the crowd. Often that means using physical force.

“You got to be tough and loud and you can’t hesitate at all,” he said. “If a fight breaks out, you can’t be afraid to jump right in and break it up.”

Like a skydiver who gets his rush from free falling or a rock star who feeds off his screaming fans, Schulz lives to crush people with his physical prowess.

Being a bouncer, though, has its limitations.

Early in life he found that the best way to take out his aggressiveness was through athletics. Every sport he played, though, seemed to fall short of his expectations. He needed to find a sport that allowed him to inflict physical punishment on his opponents without any repercussions.

He decided to try rugby his senior year of high school.

Now he is starting on the Men’s Mizzou Rugby team, and the hits are finally hard enough.

Finding his sport

As he leads the stumbling man out of Tonic, Schulz’s grip on the guy’s wrist is so tight that the guy can’t move his arms. Schulz tells him not to come back. Like everyone else, he listens.

Schulz learned about the grip while wrestling for Marquette High School in his hometown of Chesterfield, Mo., just outside of St. Louis.

When he was in third grade, he began playing hockey and football. Later, he dabbled in jujitsu, learning different methods of self-defense and strategies to attack his opponents.

By the time he was starting on the Marquette high school varsity football team as junior, he had filled out enough to play both defensive end and offensive guard, playing every snap as if he had a personal vendetta.

“The feeling of hitting somebody as hard as you can, it just gives you such a rush,” he said.

Before his senior year, Schulz was looking for a way to stay in shape. His friend and teammate, Kyle Pusatery, suggested they play rugby for DeSmet, a Jesuit high school not far from where they lived.

At first, Schulz was indifferent to the idea. The he learned there would be ample opportunities to hit people.

“He seemed really gung-ho about it once I brought it up to him,” Pusatery said. “We got really pumped up and started working out about four days a week to try to get in shape.”

But it wasn’t until deep in the playoffs, when one of the team’s key starters was injured during a game, that Schulz got his chance to play.

Once he was in, he played by instinct, recklessly chasing ball carriers and punishing them with his brutal tackles. His performance helped the team move on to the national tournament.

That first game, Schulz remembers, would be a life-changing experience.

“When I hit the first guy I knew it. I was like, ‘Man, this is my sport,’” he said. “And after that I just got back up and hit the next guy and hit the next guy and over and over again. I knew that this is what I wanted to do.”

Hard-hitting decisions

When it came time to decide where to go for college, Schulz had a major decision to make. Should he go to Missouri, where most of his friends were going, or should he accept a football scholarship to play defensive end at Lindenwood University, an NAIA school close to home?

After talking it over with his family, he decided on the latter.

But once he arrived at Lindenwood for training camp, things didn’t feel right. Before he could even unpack his bags, he was exhausting himself at two-a-days and found himself wondering if football was still his passion.

The hits weren’t hard enough any more, he said. There were too many pads in the way. He couldn’t hear the bones crunching. He missed rugby.

Again, he had a decision to make.

“I asked myself, ‘Do I really want to do it? Is this my favorite thing to do?’” he said. “I decided I didn’t want to (play football) anymore. I’ve done it, I liked it, but it wasn’t my passion anymore. It was rugby.”

He decided to transfer to Missouri, a school where many of his rugby teammates from DeSmet were playing.

In his first year, Schulz worked his way onto the team and immediately made an impact. Before his coach, Ted Norwood, could recognize Schulz by his jersey number, he was able to point him out by the way he hit.

“He just came out and I really noticed him because he hit so hard in practice,” Norwood said. “He brought a lot of toughness and strength to the team.”

As a flanker, which is the rugby equivalent of a football linebacker, Schulz has capitalized on the more lenient rules of rugby, playing with the tenacity of an uncensored Ray Lewis.

In less than three semesters (rugby is a year-round sport), Schulz has blown an opposing player’s knee out, broken several noses, and developed a knack for sticking his cleats in the faces of players at the bottom of a pile.

“I try to pretty much bring the house,” he said. “I try to hit them as hard as I can so they know not to come back.”

The next step

With a double major in Business Finance and Biological Science, Schulz is almost certain to have lucrative opportunities once he leaves Columbia. An avid reader, he has been spending much of his free time learning about stocks and real estate.

But rather than study the Dow Jones, he has been focusing on improving his stock as a professional rugby player.

“Rugby’s my passion now,” he said. “That’s what I want to do in the future.”

Since the beginning of the semester, Schulz has been looking into study opportunities for next fall in Australia, where he hopes to join a club team, he said, because that is where most of the professional players are recruited.

His dad, Steve Schulz, has been helping too, making highlight videos of Ryan’s Missouri games to send to the coaches in Australia.

It is their hopes that by exposing Ryan to the Australian culture and getting his name out within the professional rugby circuits, he will one day be able to join a pro team there.

But until then, Schulz will continue to play for the Missouri club team, working to help his team reach the playoffs, and working to reach his ultimate goal.

“You just can’t stop,” he said. “I try to lift everyday, I try to run everyday, I try to eat the right stuff and keep my body in the best shape so I know I could actually have that chance to play professional rugby.”