I went to the rugby game expecting an all out brawl with a referee. In middle school, an assistant teacher who used to play said that had a party after each game they to say, “sorry for sticking my thumb in your eye.”
“Here, no,” Alexis (Raquel’s boyfriend) told me. Here, they don’t have those parties; no one is sorry.
In fact, despite the fact that apparently two players began to throttle each other when I looked away, rugby is a surprisingly graceful sport. Sure, half the game is grown men throwing themselves on top of each other in smothering pig piles, and it’s all done without pads, but at some moments the fluidity of handoffs makes you forget this. At throw-ins, when a player jumped for the ball, a teammate would grab him around the waist and boost him up, an act I always associate with ballet.
As for the scrum, that seems to be have been invented with the sole goal of breaking arms. The teammates line up in a crowd, facing off against the other team, hook their arms around each others backs, and shove. The ball is dropped in the gap between the two teams. The goal of the scrum turns out to be about swiveling the other team out of the way so a player at the back of the mob can pick it up.
The venue also surprised me. I dreamed of a huge stadium of screaming fans, but instead it was more like an afternoon soccer game. The game took place in a complex of fields; teen girls played hand-ball and field hockey while the game went on, with a restaurant and a playground sitting between us and them. Bleachers were set up around the field, and the die-hard fans could pay for a particular section of bleachers. Throughout the game I kept seeing a small stream of glittering confetti drifting out of the hardcore bleachers. It turns out the fans there were tearing up their programs and tossing their scraps onto the field at no particular moment and not in union with any other fans.
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