How to Watch a Game of Rugby by Spiro Zavos

Author:Spiro Zavos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781877551031
Publisher: Awa Press
Published: 2012-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

‘Boys from the working-class backgrounds see no point in learning anything when there is a chance that football will toss them 50,000 pounds a week. Rugby, by contrast, is part of an education. The boys that play it are more likely to grow up confident, well-behaved, popular and trusted.’

William Langley, Sunday Telegraph (UK)

Ultimate team

LIKE THE CATHOLIC concept of the community of saints, there is a community of players and watchers of rugby – the rugby tribe. ‘Saint All Black pray for us,’ M. K. Joseph wrote in his satirical masterpiece, A Secular Litany. All those men and women who played and watched rugby so many years ago, those players and watchers now, and those who will play and watch in the future, are part of the rugby tribe.

Some members include Pope John Paul II, who played rugby in Poland as a young man, and Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand’s Nobel Prize winner for splitting the atom, who was an enthusiastic player at Nelson College.

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, the guerrilla who put chic into terrorism, was a centre who should, perhaps, have played on the extreme left wing. He took up rugby when studying medicine in Buenos Aires in the 1950s and was so infatuated he started his own rugby magazine, Tackle. On the other end of the political spectrum, Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, claimed that rugby was his favourite sport. The sport was popular in Germany between the wars, with the national side defeating France occasionally. This success may have inspired Oswald Mosley to call rugby ‘a really fascist game’. Perhaps this slur on the rugby ethic is what attracted Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to play the game. Another well-known despot, Idi Amin, was in the reserves of the East Africa XV which lost 39–12 to the 1955 Lions. Journalist Allan Hogan recalls interviewing Amin when he was dictator of Uganda. Hogan was met at the airport by Amin’s adviser Bob Astles, a short, portly Englishman, who was sporting the black tie with silver fern of the New Zealand Rugby Union.

At least three presidents of the United States have had a connection with rugby. Woodrow Wilson, when a college president, tried to turn American colleges to the code, rather than its rival soccer. ‘Rugby has a great advantage over the association game,’ Wilson orated, ‘and all the croakers in our midst must be silenced!’ Current office-holder George W. Bush played fullback at Yale. And, although JFK never took to the field, his brother Teddy played in the centres as a student.

Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar in 1967, the same year as All Black halfback Chris Laidlaw, was an ungainly but enthusiastic second-rower on the playing fields of Oxford. When, as President Clinton, he arrived in New Zealand a quarter of a century later, the first thing he said to Prime Minister Jim Bolger was, ‘How’s my friend Chris Laidlaw?’ Bolger, a former rugby hooker (as was another National Party prime minister, Sir Keith Holyoake), was not amused: Laidlaw was a Labour MP and Bolger was leader of the National Party.

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