Rugby

22. Laidlaw, Somebody Stole My Game (5 Nov 2024)

by kurto

A jeremiad lamenting professionalism’s impacts on rugby circa 1995-2010, focusing on New Zealand’s game but also emphasizing on tensions borne of globalization (i.e., homogenization) and commercial management. Oscar Wilde’s mot that America went from barbarism to decadence with no intervening period of civilization is well cited. Professionalism polarizes public opinion because of its inherent conflict with amateur competition: the more top-end success, the greater the contrast. The observation might well extend to administrators. Universities brought the game to the English-speaking colonies, so their diminished role is emblematic of homogenized full-timers and likely to result in the game’s declining appeal to middle classes.

Laidlaw struggles, however, in identifying the one thing needful of reform, sometimes pointing to the European club-driven escalation of player salaries, which distances the game from amateurism (p. 27), and other times the judicial system, which indicates rugby’s doubts of its ability to govern itself (p. 44). In the end, revenue has become overly dependent on TV and other commercial interests, administrators have forgotten their loyalties to amateurs and the fan base, and the sport’s credibility tarnished by unrealistic aspirations.

Eventually the work resolves into short essays on such questions as the decrease of schoolboy playing numbers, whether arts deserve the same subsidization as sport, the role of 7s, why union hasn’t reconciled with league, and so on. The author is sometimes astute, as in foreseeing Ireland’s advance, and sometimes naïve, such as the impact of IRB ‘investment’, centralized planning sitting uneasily alongside distrust of professionalism.

Pro players should work in the off-season as development officers – but what rugby is on? This clever suggestion might easily resolve itself as officers in foreign countries. His understanding of America is shallow, such as in the assertion the pro game has hurt amateur basketball, baseball, or football.

10. Zavos, How to Watch a Game of Rugby (2005)

by kurto

Individuals bring unique perspectives to watching rugby games, and the action catalyzes the group experience. In what amounts to a sports cultural essay, Zavos aims to broaden the horizons of that experience through selected history and vignette, but too much of the book is only tangentially related to the thesis. That said, there’s much relevance to the American game, which does not view test matches as its ne plus ultra. Includes an interesting timeline.

4. Cafferty, Suitcase Number Seven (16 Feb 2006)

by kurto

A biography, initially presented as a faux autobiography, detailing the 1950s rugby career and subsequent bachelorhood and alcohol-ravaged life of Munster scrumhalf Tom Cleary. Cleary was 17 times an Ireland replacement but never earned a cap in the era before substitutes; the author presents this shortfall as symbolic of Cleary’s travails after rugby — never reaching his potential. The title refers to Cleary’s 1960 tour of South Africa and Rhodesia, which places him a teammate of Syd Miller and Tony O’Reilly. Though depicted with great sympathy, the details of Cleary’s mature years are less interesting for rugby readers. The appendix is rich with statistics and match reports from Munster, Ireland, and the SA tour.

9. Dine, French Rugby Football (6 June 2006)

by kurto

Not for beginners is this cultural history, which favors academic theory at the expense of recounting events. Thus there is no mention of the 1999 World Cup semifinal versus New Zealand, nor does the author address the question of why the XV de France is so unpredictable. He’s at his best exploring ‘le rugby du villages’, showing for example how a postwar construction boom in Lourdes helped produce the country’s dominant team from 1948-60. The book also does well in summarizing the transition to professionalism, but does not really delve into the persistence of violence, which is described as an amateur tradition that continues to function as an extension of provincial territoriality. In keeping with Annalisme and structuralism, Dine skips over worthies like Lourdes’ Jean Prat. Once exception is Jean-Pierre Rives — but ties to Albert Ferrasse are of primary interest. Dine evidently would have preferred that league surpassed union because of the latter’s Vichy ties, and that Ferrasse have been succeeded by someone other than Bernard Lapasset. As with Braudel, it is impossible not to profit from this work. But in taking this subject on his terms, rather than the contemporary context, his conclusions become idiosyncratic and politicized.

7. Fanning, From There to Here (4 May 2007)

by kurto

An accessible tale of Ireland’s transition from staunchly amateur mediocrity to fourth in the world. Beginning with the disastrous Australian tour of 1994, the book revisits milestones of the next dozen years, demonstrating their resonance in the mid-2000s. Typically, each chapter treats one story as it unfolds over the course of a given season: the 1999 World Cup debacle, Eddie O’Sullivan’s rise to head, Munster’s 2006 Heineken Cup championship. Players, coaches, administrators often reflect on events in their own voice, complemented by Fanning’s vernacular. He is sympathetic to their views yet level in his evaluation, a noteworthy achievement. For the

    Sunday Independent

columnist, the real antagonists are management and administrators who haven’t thought their plans through, or don’t realize what is required. Why, for example, did the Irish union consider excluding Connacht from the program while continuing to spend hundred of thousands of pounds to send its leadership (and their wives) to away Six Nations games? Of course, most of Ireland’s hurdles have been more complicated. Fanning moves briskly, and like many journalists he is the more certain with the passage of time. The final chapters lose something of the work’s overall verve. This is a principal difference between news writers and historians, sometimes more willing to draw conclusions of events which the journalist views as still in progress. Should Ireland make an unprecedented run to the 2007 World Cup semifinals, it may be seen as the definitive account.

10. Krige, Right Place at the Wrong Time (27 June 2007)

by kurto

A capable but standard ghostwritten autobiography of Springbok hero Corne Krige. The account is most interesting for its narrative of South Africa’s infamous Kamp Staaldraad assembly prior to the 2003 World Cup. Krige, an Alan Solomons man, also acknowledges there were too many Japies at Northampton in 2004, which year sent the Saints spiraling toward relegation. Too little about SA schools rugby, but some interesting passages about prep school culture.

8. Carlin, Invictus (9 Dec 2009)

by kurto

Narrates Nelson Mandela’s 10-year odyssey from political prisoner to elected, popularly acclaimed leader of post-apartheid South Africa, an ambition spectacularly achieved by coopting the emblematic Springboks. South African rugby circa 1994 was more immovable object than irresistible force, so Mandela ingeniously converted the sport into a fulcrum for incorporating white society into the emerging sociopolitical order; the alternative was civil war. The monograph elaborates parts of Mandela’s

    Long Walk to Freedom

more than it retells the 1995 World Cup, while the movie focuses more on the world championship. It’s disappointing but not critical that the book (and movie) skips past controversial allegations of food poisoning and the birth pangs of professionalism, remarkably a contemporary phenomenon. The plot would have been strengthened by telling of Chester Williams’ belated inclusion. Also, while all stories must begin and end somewhere, the 1996 series loss to New Zealand and Afrikaner recidivism meant the road to the rainbow nation was not only one direction.

5. Ryan, Try for Gold (11 Nov 2011)

by kurto

The narrative of US Olympic rugby is well known, and this tale diligently rehearses 1920 and 1924 while breaking little new ground. The most interesting topic is not the relationship of protagonists ‘Babe’ Slater and Rudy Scholz, but the success of the crossover athletes. Sadly the author is sloppy in executing the 3d-person omniscient and so probably misses other such seminal moments in American history. Infuriating style but impossible not to come away enlightened and proud. A useful appendix.

9. Atkinson, Rugby-Playing Man (12 Jul 2012)

by kurto

Remember America’s ‘tavern league’ era, when ill-resourced, player-coached teams contested lightly organized leagues while celebrating the cultish, borderline behavior of 20- and 30-year-olds?
These days, most do not. The game is predominated by students, most of whom weren’t born at the time of its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s. So what do we really know of the stereotype?
Jay Atkinson’s

    Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man: Guts, Glory, and Blood in the World’s Greatest Game

, a well-crafted autobiography of a senior-grade player in Florida, Boston, and elsewhere, is a poignant, representative snapshot of the men who identified with rugby beyond all else.

    Rugby-Playing Man’s

dust jacket sensationalizes its contents, but the narrative is more nuanced. As the author begins, ‘There are the things we do for love, and the things we do for rugby, which are pretty much the same, at least in my case’.
To be sure, there are any number debauched adventures, some of which could still transpire today. It is one thing to revisit tales among teammates, however, and another to bring them to life – without pandering – for a new audience. This is a primary achievement of Atkinson’s effort.
Still more interesting are recollections of how Atkinson found his home at hooker, a controversial state championship match, or a tour of Wales. Anyone who played in the era will relate. Though the book is consciously neither historical or sociological, later generations and outsiders will glimpse the game as commonly experienced.
Disgust with the tavern-league era – homespun administrators as much as outre players – is one explanation for American rugby’s latter-day obsession with professionalizing. The union’s present constitution seals the board off from the grassroots: only well-heeled capitalists need apply. Most have no affinity for American rugby culture, always a weakness for any government.
Atkinson’s

    Rugby-Playing Man

surpasses its author’s narrative, portraying the good and bad of a bygone time. America’s modern era, which has fallen short of its self-declared goals, will do well to find an equally skillful telling.

See also http://www.gainline.us/gainline/2015/02/on-the-tavern-league-era.html

20. Richards, A Game for Hooligans (16 Dec 2016)

by kurto

Surveys elite-level rugby union from the 1860s to the 2007 World Cup. Most attuned to competitive outcomes, the author elaborates the impact of law changes, regional distinctions and trends, and even socioeconomic influences but declines to articulate a superordinate narrative. For example, while amateurism’s distortions figure in most in the work, the storyline seemingly forgets the old code as it portrays the new features of an overly professional game. This may be conscious decision: to present a more encompassing theory might have forced Richards into a history of World Rugby (nee International Board), which would be far more difficult to research, probably less interesting, and certainly exclusive of the majority. Although diligently touching base on emerging countries, there are omissions of the Pan American and Pacific Rim tournaments, plus the sign-off misses the growth of the Olympic version, seven-a-side. A very useful bibliography.