UW-Rugby in the media

MEDELLIN, Colombia (AP) -- Colombia's national underwater rugby team performed a striptease to raise money for a trip to the world championships, but the mayor barred The Full Monty.

Twelve of the 25 team members gyrated before 1,500 gleeful female fans-- many hanging from the rafters -- at a disco Thursday night in Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city. They raised about a third of the $32,000 the team needs to travel to Germany for the championships in May.

Moments before going on stage, the first-time strippers received a note from the mayor's office ordering them to refrain from their promise of total nudity. So the men stripped down to their swimming caps, goggles and white bikini briefs -- but not a stitch more. "We we're willing to do it, but unfortunately they didn't allow us," griped Adrian Schmid, 33, one of the dancers who went out dressed as construction workers. The strippers were worried they'd have a revolt on their hands, but the crowd didn't seem overly disappointed. "Nobody said anything. The women behaved very well," Schmid said.

In advertising the fund-raiser, the team promised "The Full Monty"-- a reference to the 1997 British movie by the same name, in which oddball male strippers take off all of their clothes in a performance in unemployment-stricken Sheffield, England. "We don't have the best bodies. But we're prepared to take it all off for just one night," said a poster featuring five naked players shown from neck to knee -- one of them covering his groin with a water rugby ball. In Thursday's show, the Colombian players performed to two of the stripping songs in the movie: Tom Jones' "You Can Leave Your Hat On," and Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff". The players trained for two months with a ballet teacher.

In underwater rugby, a game popular in Germany and Scandinavia, teams of six players try to score by stuffing a weighted rubber ball into baskets at the bottom of both ends of a pool. The players wear fins, snorkels and masks. Light contact is permitted, but it is forbidden to hold, kick, punch or pull an opponent's swimming trunks.

AP-NY-04-23-99 1723EDT