Under the granite towers of the United States Military Academy at West Point last weekend, I sat down to watch some Army rugby. The slightest hint of autumn was in the air, the vaguest twist of fallen leaf and rain. There was also something yet more potent: nostalgia.
The women’s team played first and they had me at hello – hello being, as it often is in rugby, a crunching hit, close to my spot on the sideline.
The hit was made by Emily Roskopf, an All American centre who plays for the Quinnipiac Bobcats. It was no football-style wipeout, no concussive helmet smash or arms-free kamikaze to the thorax. It was a shoulder-dipped, two-arms-wrapped, two-legs-driving tackle, a piece of technical perfection. With an audible and fleshy smack, an unfortunate Army ball-carrier just disappeared, so suddenly that her molecular outline stayed hanging in the air.
The flattened Army player reacted – by placing the ball behind her and protecting it with her body. A ruck formed over her, a maelstrom of boots and limbs, players from each side driving against each other to win the precious ball. West Point won it, and the game went on. There was no stoppage, as there would have been had I been watching the Army football team up at Michie Stadium. No one went to the sideline to rest. No one called a timeout or a replay. There was no posturing, no hollering, no high-fiving.
There was also no – or comparatively little – danger to the head of tackler or tackled. And while we’re at it, though rugby is most often compared to American football, the tackled player would never have even thought to try any soccer-style acting, writhing or howling.
This all happened because rugby – 15-a-side “union” in this case (as in the World Cup that kicks off in England on Friday), though the 13-a-side “league” variant of the game is entirely wonderful too – is the most honest game in the world. Unlike football, it’s not about the show. Unlike football, it’s not about the money. By its very essence – the working of an oval ball down a crowded field to be placed over the goal line for a five-point try – rugby is all about the team.
The Army men took the field next, and most of the tackling in their game was done by the poor old University of Buffalo, who took a proper thumping. But tackle they did, and fairly. It was admirable, it was hopeless, it was epic ... and it filled me with an intense yearning to stick in a mouthguard and play.
That yearning also centered on the scrummage – the restart in which each team’s eight forwards link arms and push against their eight opponents to win the ball placed between them. Back when I played – when the world was comparatively young – I was usually a second-row forward, toiling in the engine room of such group effort. There are also lineouts, in which second-row forwards leap to contest the ball in the air.
The sound of 30 pairs of cleats (in the UK we call them studs), clicking away through the mud, all but did me in – just once more, to tape up, psyche up – no pads, remember – and put my shoulder to the communal wheel.
I last did that a long time ago, back when I was a rugby reporter. In June 2003 the job, ill-paid but rather fun, took me to Ljubljana. Slovenia is not exactly a rugby power: its national team ranks 70th in the world, a mere 50 places behind plucky little Namibia, whose upcoming World Cup game against the mighty New Zealand All Blacks will be on the ugly side of hopeless. But rugby is in Slovenia to be reported on, played by the kind of amateur diehards who play it in Cote d’Ivoire (50), Guam (71) and American Samoa (102nd and last). American football – insular, mercenary, technocratic – will never be so gloriously global.
That day 12 years ago, I played No8 – the last man in the scrummage. Alongside me in the back row were two flankers, smaller and quicker, tacklers and fetchers of the ball, the princes of the pack. One was a Kiwi called Mike who flew in from Zagreb for a game. The other was the captain of Slovenia, whose name I can’t remember but who was definitely bloody good. The opposing team were a bunch of Welshmen, mostly players from semi-professional clubs who were enjoying an end-of-season tour. In the middle of a 72-hour bender, they still beat us by 50 to, well ... not very much.
My opposite number was Mike Powell, a vast boyo quarried from the side of some valley or other who played for the Ospreys, Swansea’s professional team. He could have killed me with his little finger, but he settled for busting my nose. I scored a try, placing the ball over the line with dubious downward pressure, and after the 80 minutes were up I dragged myself off, sneezing blood and suffering mild heatstroke. We ate, drank and learned some fascinatingly arcane Slovenian sexual slang. I still have my RK Ljubljana shirt, bloodstains included.
Through a haze of pain and beer, Slovenia seemed as good a place as any to say my last goodbye. My playing career had begun in Yorkshire when I was seven, and gone on through Durham University and Rosslyn Park, a swanky club in south-west London. By the time I was 25, rugby was really starting to hurt.
Now I am 37, a father of two with one working knee. I know I won’t play again. But that’s OK, because the World Cup is on – the only one that matters, anyway – and I can watch the games, and thrill to the tackles and tries, and sing.
Singing while watching a game is central to rugby’s glory. I’m English, so when I watch my team I sing Swing Low Sweet Chariot and Jerusalem. If I was Irish, I’d sing Molly Malone and The Wild Rover; if I was Scottish I’d sing Flower of Scotland and Wild Mountain Thyme. I am not and have never been Welsh, thank God, but I do know the rude words to Men of Harlech. And so I will sing them when England play Wales in London on 26 September, in the most lethal game in the World Cup’s group of death.
On that day, in some New York bar, I will congregate with like-minded souls. Rugby-loving Americans will be there, outnumbered as their team will be outmatched in England, but – like that team – fighting the good fight regardless. And I’ll love them for it as I love their team, the Eagles, and the glorious sport they play.
There is no way on an oval-shaped earth that football – corporate, heartless football – could make me and millions of others feel remotely so transported.
