Play the balls, not the ball

[webofevil]

“... when I’d been forced to play rugby, the best bits were when I was so shit that the teacher sent me off and made me run round the playing fields. Maybe kids aren’t that averse to exercise”.—[nudejournal]

When we were 15, two of us in my house at school refused to play rugby. He had become convinced of the ridiculous dangers involved in a compulsory heavy contact sport because of the injury his older cousin had sustained; a scrum had collapsed on him, leaving him incapable of leaning forward at an angle of more than about 110° for a sustained period without eventually blacking out—a condition that had rather interfered with his long-term plans to be a surgeon. What I lacked in rugby-damaged relatives I made up for in my finely-honed desire for self-preservation.

Early in the year, before the first inter-house match was even played, Alex and I decided that we would essentially be conscientious objectors. We would exercise, all right—we would run pretty much as far as anyone wanted us to—but we weren’t going to put ourselves in harm’s way on the rugby field for the sake of quaint notions of ésprit de corps, any more than we could be persuaded, for the good of the house, to jump in front of a bus.

(Later I became aware of the sheer irony of Alex’s desire to avoid bodily harm, given that by this point he was already a barely functioning alcoholic, sinking at least half a litre of vodka every morning except Thursdays and sometimes topping up during the day with a bracing mixture of ethanol and orange juice, and that this apparently led to him losing a kidney not too long after leaving school and the daft cunt finally drinking himself to death in his 20s.)

At first when we refused to go out on the field and went for a 90-minute run instead, it was viewed with annoyance by the rest of our year and some bemusement by the teacher in charge. We missed another game and were sent to see our housemaster, a man with a daunting reputation for embodying The Law and a subsidiary reputation for being passionate about rugby. He was more amused than cross, though, and allowed that our boycott could continue as long as we were prepared to go and explain our position to the senior school management. We agreed.

One more missed game and a meeting with a less amused member of the senior management team later, Alex and I found ourselves summoned—separately, along with our parents—to see the headmaster, who told us that when we came to the school we had accepted “the whole package” of the school, and that included rugby; if we rejected the game, we were rejecting the school in its entirety and we could, in essence, fuck off and not darken its gates again. Alex and I discovered afterwards that we had both surprised him by asking for time to decide.

In the end we stayed and played, although the bargain, as we understood it, was that we could thereafter be the most tremendous pains in the arse on the pitch since we were obviously there on massive sufferance. I never enjoyed any game of rugby as much as the first one after we capitulated. Both the hapless overweight Latin teacher who was refereeing and the opposing team took the whole game terribly seriously, but on the whole our lot weren’t nearly so driven and, the few earnest sporty types aside, weren’t too hard to persuade to join in with Alex’s and my in-game jeering, general mamping about and impromptu sit-in when we felt we hadn’t had a long enough halftime. Midway through the second half the ref blew his whistle. “I’ve had enough of this!” he shouted. “I want ten minutes of good, clean, quiet rugby!” This was too good. For ten minutes we, and as many of our team as were happy to play along, stage-whispered our way up and down the pitch. “To me!” “Mark him!” “Kick it!” I feel privileged to been part of possibly the only ever stage-whispering scrum.

At one point, mid-scrum, the other team—who, as I’ve mentioned, were always feverishly committed to the game to a worrying degree; they took to it like riot police—employed a classic rugby tactic: someone grabbed our hooker’s scrotum and yanked it like an emergency cord. He let out a piercing shriek of “OW, my NADS!” The ref assumed that this was me engaging in another “prank”, ran over to the scrum, where I played second row—and so routinely found myself wedged up against the buttocks of people I would already have paid good money to be on another continent from—and smacked me viciously on the leg, leaving a glowing handprint that took a day to subside. I emerged from the scrum as it dissolved in disarray and laughed at him. He had apparently been fearsome once, known when he was a housemaster for having beaten an entire dormitory of boys for making too much noise. Now, though, he was old, fat and given to dozing in his lessons—your powers are weak, old man, and all that—and we both knew, although he could bluster and hand out school punishments all he liked, that there wasn’t a thing he could do to me. It was a fine day.

After three years of losing and damaging temporary dental braces, I finally agreed at the age of 17 to have a train-track brace, and promptly discovered that I was then strictly not allowed to play any contact sports. If anyone had explained this to me five years earlier, my school life would have been a damn sight less cold, muddy and violent.

Comments

[chiller.livejournal.com]

Reading this has just made me post about lacrosse. We're demonstrating Six Degrees of nudejournal, at this point.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Happy days.

My own resistance extended only as far as walking off the field when it started to rain, the obvious and sensible course of action. You can imagine the mutual incomprehension between me and my PE teacher, who looked at me as if I'd renounced not just my nation but my language.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

Ah yes. I went to a rugby school too. There's something *slightly* sadistic about getting kids like I - at the time like an undernourished Jarvis - to play against members of the school's First XV. Yeouch.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I was fortunate enough to go to a school with playing fields about 15 miles away; the result being that if one missed the bus, one missed games. I judged the odd detention to be a price well worth paying to spend the afternoon in the library reading Scientific American.

[(Anonymous)]

Judging by your responses, it would seem that rugby playing enthusiasts do not make up a great amount of your demographic.

Alternately, you could argue that those who disliked sport at school are fulfilling a certain stereotype by discussing via computer.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

These two thoughts had occurred to me, and I am comfortable with both.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

Also, I’d rather be stuck in a lift with, for example, someone who could come up with “looked at me as if I’d renounced not just my nation but my language” than someone who got strangely excited about the chance to stamp on a stranger’s—or indeed an acquaintance’s—testicles on a cold February afternoon, or would be prepared to lose an ear if it meant scoring a single try.

[(Anonymous)]

I wouldn't like us to believe that rugby players are all thugs.

Indeed, at the time that you were trotting about in short trousers for the house cup, there was no professional rugby union in this country. All players were amateurs, and the England side contained lawyers, stockbrokers, surgeons and policemen, to name but a few, and not all of them are thugs.

Also, I am not sure that being stuck in a lift would revert us all to our school age behaviours. At least, I hope not.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

> lawyers, stockbrokers, surgeons and policemen, to name but a few, and not all of them are thugs

But all of them with the kind of profound issues that led them to need to regularly let off steam with varying degrees of violence. I find that less comforting than you seem to, however long my trousers.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't feel that the playing of rugby necessarily equates to violence. It is a full contact sport, but played within the rules it is the same as any sport.

Violence can be found in any sport, whether a contact sport or not, and is representative of the person, not the sport.

I also don't believe that the occupation of a person gives rise to their desire to play any particular sport to let off steam. Some people are happy with a glass of wine, or a game of chess. Again, this goes to the type of person, not the occupation.

You played rugby at school where the laws of the playground ultimately held sway. If you had played any other sport then the violence would have existed all the same, because you were playing with other children.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

> I also don’t believe that the occupation of a person gives rise to their desire to play any particular sport to let off steam

Neither do I. I was suggesting, with no supporting evidence, that their desire to play rugby highlighted their personal issues, rather than that their occupations drove them into its muddy arms. More to the point, though, this is all in danger of becoming very dull; my beef was with compulsory contact sports at school, not with people who mystify me by enjoying them as adults. Look, I’m keen to establish a consensus: let’s just agree that everyone who plays rugby is as bad as Hitler, and we can put this behind us and move on.

[(Anonymous)]

I disagree. I think that those who refuse to participate in sports at school become sociopaths who long for a clock tower from which to gun down well rounded members of society.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

Anyone whose dreams of mass murder are stymied by the lack of a single clocktower does not deserve the mantle of “sociopath”.

[(Anonymous)]

I was quite good at rugby at school even though I disliked it. I resented giving up my Saturdays to play matches. After three years of violence in cold weather I tore the cartilage in my right knee and had to have it removed. Twenty years on I went to see a consultant who told me I was lucky I hadn't needed a knee replacement already and that I shall be needing one in about ten years - about thirty years before people typically have that sort of thing done.

So your concerns about self-preservation were well-founded. The boy who eventually became school captain once gratuitously stamped on another boy's neck and on another occasion kicked a boy (who was lying on the ground about to get up) in the stomach. Rugby does not seem to bring out the best in people.

If consenting adults want to do the rugby thing, fine. But requiring children to put themselves in harm's way is wrong. The only character building it did for me was to make me bitter and resentful at being permanently injured at a tender age.

Nihilist

[(Anonymous)]

It's this sort of namby pamby approach to child rearing that has led to us all having to listen to music from mobile phones whilst on the bus.

A kick in the stomach would sort them out, but no, that apparently counts as assault.