Category: The Dish

The Greatest Try Of All Time

I don’t why this blog has gotten all sporty all of a sudden. Especially over rugby – a game I was forced to play for years and hated. My dad, however, worships rugby (I was a terrible disappointment to him on that score). And so I developed an appreciation of it. A rugby-fan reader sends in this YouTube of the greatest try of all time. I haven’t watched enough rugby to say for sure, but it’s mighty impressive.

In Praise of Rugby

Bcrugby

It’s civilizational, according to this reader:

I played something like 200 rugby games over 17 years and probably a like number of games of touch football, and I can honestly say that nothing inspires the excitement of lining up at standoff and putting the ball in play. On the other hand, playing quarterback, even on the sandlot, is remarkably fun — sort of a chess game where the opposition pieces are jumping around and trying to knock you down. Actually, there is a lot in common with playing standoff in rugby and quarterbacking in football, except that you put your life on the line each time you touch the ball in rugby.

The most interesting part of the subject though is this: I have played with and against some remarkably smart and accomplished people on the rugby field; it would be hard to imagine a more intellectual bunch than those MIT teams (the future physics chair at U Chicago was a forward, and the team included numerous future PhD’s). The scar I have through my right eyebrow was put there by a Cal Tech professor. Also, the relationships we had with opposing teams at those profane postgame parties were also fun (the single exception in all my time being the B School, which failed the hospitality test utterly).

The most jarring discovery when it came to the game of rugby football was its gentlemen’s culture – the culture of hatred that is the essence of football rivalries was absent in rugby – the home team always held a beer party for the visitors, and we drank and sang barroom ballads well into the night. (There is probably a PhD in comparative linguistics somewhere for a study on the historical origins of songs like The Wild West Show or The Marrying Kind, and how the language is subtly misunderstood by Americans sometimes.) It was also interesting to become part of an international culture which seemed to take the concept of sportsmanship seriously. In New England or later southern California, it was possible to play with and against players from the British Isles, France, New Zealand, the U.S., and now more and more, Samoa and even Tonga.

I don’t think that video at the level of YouTube does justice to the sport, but it’s what we have for the moment. One thing the sport has left me with: I can’t get into the idea of golf. The ball just sits there.

(Photo of Boston College rugby team.)

Pro-War Media Bias?

That’s what some soldiers have been saying:

"To be honest, it’s going to be like this for a long time to come, no matter what we do," said Hardy, 25, of Atlanta. "I think some people in America don’t want to know about all this violence, about all the killings. The people back home are shielded from it; they get it sugar-coated."

Malkin Award Nominee

"If the surge is seen to fail, [Democrats] will be the ones who made it more difficult, demoralized the armed forces, kneecapped the commander, and telegraphed to the enemy that our will was cracking, and we would shortly be leaving. If a failure ensues, it is no longer his fault, in its entirety. Now it is his fault – and theirs," – Noemie Emery, Weekly Standard.