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IS RUGBY A SPORT?
By C.J. SULLIVAN & DAVE HOLLANDER
(From the New
York Press, 11/29/2006)
SULLIVAN: I
was recently on Randall's Island investigating a story on a serial mugger when
I came upon a disturbing sight. A group of lumpy middle-aged men in striped
shirts looked like they were sexually assaulting a little man on the bottom of
a pile of humanity.
When the
dust cleared I realized that the men were playing the quaint and ancient game
of rugby. Rugby is a sport that evolution passed by—see football—but it is kept
alive, at least in America, by college students and old frat boys who still want
to play a sport that makes them feel like some kind of rough and tumble men.
Watching them play this silly sport is sort of like seeing a flock of dodo
birds do their flightless fowl thing.
Now outside
America, rugby is huge, as is Australian football, but I'll be damned if I can
tell the difference between the two, other than the fact that the Aussies wear
those embarrassing short shorts while they bounce around the pitch.
In September
2007 there will be a Rugby World Cup, which the International Rugby Board
claims that more than 3 billion people will watch. I don't buy that number, but
if rugby is big in the world, I still don't care. That number is inflated.
Rugby is even more boring than soccer and NASCAR and that is saying something.
HOLLANDER:
Three billion? That must take into account the world's prison population. Maybe
the sport enjoyed a huge boost in popularity last week after NY Press put out
its "Rugby Special"—no doubt an historic first in the annals of New York
City print media.
In interests
of full disclosure, I must admit I've never played rugby. Having watched it,
however, I'll stick with the bliss of my ignorance. I won't soon forget the
summer of 2000 I spent on a semi-secluded beach in the Gulf of Thailand as the
lone American amongst packs of Aussies and Brits who tried to explain to me the
difference between rugby and Australian Rules football. Thank God there was
plenty of weed to dull their droning. Seizing the high ground, I assured one
new friend from New Zealand that such a patently racist team name as the
"All Blacks" would not go over well in the States. He kindly
explained that the name had nothing to do with the racial composition of its
players. Oh, I see.
Look, I
could connect to their passion for it. I could relate to their rivalries. But,
as you say, the sport itself comes off like the under-evolved ancestor of
American football. The contest appears to deemphasize any demonstrations of the
athletic skill at its higher levels. Speed and dexterity seem nonexistent.
Rugby has only the rudiments of sport. By today's standards, it is relatively
unimaginative and almost Cro-Magnon in its objectives. It's as if a sub-human
species lacking opposable thumbs created a game about moving a ball forward.
So, yes,
it's a sport—just not one I can get that into.
SULLIVAN:
Well, I have trouble with any contest that has the No. 1 ranked team in the
world of rugby as New Zealand. Nothing against the Kiwis, but they have all of
4 million people living in the country. New York City has double the people
that live on those South Pacific islands so either they are really good
athletes or rugby is—at best—a fringe sport that few play; therefore a small
country can rule the rugby roost.
Now speaking
of fringe sports, I would rather watch the rousing Irish game of hurling.
Hurling is like an insane combination of football and baseball. In the spring,
make your way up to Gaelic Park in the Bronx and watch wild Irishmen swing
clubs and hit balls as they tackle and maim each other. It is like some ancient
game of roller ball.
Rugby, by
comparison, just looks so fey, especially when the men butt up and get into a
scrum. There is just too much ass contact for extended periods for me to watch
a game for very long. I never played the game, but I've watched it enough to
know of what I speak. I have also seen Brokeback Mountain. They looked
pretty similar to me.
HOLLANDER:
Before you make many of us hurl, I will shunt aside your backwoods homophobia
and redirect us to the issue at hand. There's plenty to make us uncomfortable
about rugby—that it's long been the province of prep school types, that it's
simply a pretext to get drunk and hit somebody, etc. What makes me squirm is
the word "scrum." It sounds like a contraction for the word
"scrotum." Or it's shorthand for combining two words,
"scrotum" and "scum." Whatever it is, there's an
onomatopoeic quality to "scrum" that feels dirty. I Googled
"scrum" and, lo and behold, there's a scrum.com, offering
comprehensive news, scores, standings and everything else that's rugby. I felt
sick, like I had scrum all over me.
But I'll
give credit where credit is due. Nando Parrado played rugby. Who is Nando Parrado?
He was part of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed deep in the Andes
Mountains October 1972. In order to survive without food and water for 72 days
in the lifeless glacier, Parrado and his teammates ate the flesh of their dead
friends. Facing his own imminent death, Parrado and another teammate left the
plane wreckage clothed merely in layered sweatshirts and trekked on foot for 10
days all the way to find help in Chile. In the process they scaled a 15,000
foot peak that not even the most experienced mountain climbers equipped with
all the best gear would attempt to conquer, especially not at that time of
year. Parrado did it with sneakers and his bare hands. He survived. And he led
a rescue expedition back to the crash site to save his teammates.
In his
recent memoir of survival, Miracle in the Andes (Crown), Parrado explained that
"rugby was more than a game, it was a sport raised to the level of moral
discipline." He believed that "no other sport taught so devoutly the
importance of striving, suffering and sacrificing in pursuit of a common
goal."
"Most
all of all," said Parrado, "the game demanded that teammates develop
an unshakeable sense of trust." Where would Nando Parrado be today without
rugby?