There is Rugby Union: the fast, compelling,
TV-friendly combat sport in which sponsored gladiators
are sold on their ability to crash into each other at
top speed, and sometimes even to avoid each other and
score. And then there's rugger. Rugger was once the
serious version of rugby, more than a mere game, a
fierce contact-sport developed in Victorian public
schools to forge manly and unshakeable character. For a
hundred years boys played rugger and made themselves
into men. They also drank too much beer and took their
trousers down in public. The dark-side of rugger the
man-maker is the recidivist, the dreaded English
rugger-bugger. Setting out to examine this
contradiction, Richard Beard tries to reconcile
contrasting views of rugby and rugger with the diversity
of characters he meets, from Booker Prize winning
authors to former England hookers. He explores rugby's
rivalry with soccer, its influence on the first World
War, its surprising attraction for non-conformists, and
it's unlikely role in international organised crime. And
all the while he's trying to get himself a game.This is
Beard's quest into his rugby-playing past, where he's
lived the sport in many of its varied forms. By the end
of his wayward journey, he almost qualifies to judge
whether rugger has achieved what the Victorians always
intended, and made him a better man. |
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