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Play the balls, not the ball
Jul. 23rd, 2007 11:20 am“... 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”.—[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.nudejournal]
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.
Universal’s decision to throw everything behind touting tousle-haired validation-Gollum 