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Missing out Rugby grabs at American's attention
Posted: Wednesday November 03, 1999 03:30 PM
I don't know anything about rugby. About a million years ago I lived next door to a mammoth, 500-pound stockbroker and he invited me one day to come down and join the local rugby club, who said it was, "a lot of fun." I told him that the only rugby I had seen involved guys as big as him throwing guys as small as me as high as possible into the air, and that I said, "doesn't look like much fun to me." I think I'm ready to take another look at the game. I've been catching bits and pieces of the ongoing World Cup on television from the British Isles, enchanted by the noise and passion and tumult, but lost in my own ignorance. What the heck are these guys doing, pushing each other around in that scrum, everybody grunting until the ball is popped out like a watermelon seed? What's a good play? What's bad? I see the athleticism of the runners and the kickers, but don't understand a whole lot. I'm like a spinster aunt at her first baseball game. Isn't France on the verge of doing something no country ever has done, an amazing athletic parlay, soccer World Cup and rugby World Cup, one after another, if it can win Sunday's final against Australia? Isn't New Zealand in mourning, its fabled All Blacks on the sidelines? Didn't Tonga, of all places, have a pretty good team? Tonga? I probably should have paid attention to that fat-boy stockbroker, after all. I think that I, like most Americans, am missing out on a lot of fun. Sports Illustrated senior writer Leigh Montville appears regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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