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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781877551710 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Awa Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2005 |
| Series: | The Ginger series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 120 |
| File size: | 417 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How to Watch a Game of Rugby
By Spiro Zavos
Awa Press
Copyright © 2004 Spiro ZavosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-877551-71-0
CHAPTER 1
'Rugby is a wonderful concoction of ballet, opera and bloody murder.'
Actor Richard Burton
Wonderful concoction
On a blustery Saturday afternoon (it was Wellington, after all) in 1970, I trudged up to Athletic Park to watch the final All Blacks' trial to select a team to go to South Africa. With me was my partner and later my wife, Judy. The day before, I had met Chris Laidlaw in the Grand Hotel. There, in the main bar, with the cigarette smoke curling into the thick, beer-stinking air, with the good old boys in their cardigans and blazers leaning on the wet woodwork gossiping about who was going to be selected and who was out, he told me that he was determined to win back his All Black place from Sid Going.
Laidlaw had been at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and Going was now the incumbent New Zealand halfback. They didn't get on well together, Laidlaw told me. Going, a wary Mormon, with a brilliant running game, was angry that the worldly Laidlaw, who was the best passing halfback of his or any other era, seemed to be returning to New Zealand like a prodigal son to reclaim his lost inheritance. The man-on-man battle between these two adversaries was one of the games-within-the-game I was interested in watching.
I was also intrigued about the eventual selection of the All Blacks. The coach, Ivan Vodanovich, was a good friend of mine. Ivan had come to Wellington from the King Country, bulked up, developed his scrumming skills and played for the All Blacks in the front row against Australia in 1955. After his playing career was over he had, as so many All Blacks had done over the decades, put his energies into administration and coaching.
I used to ear-bash him with theories about backline play (the fly half shouldn't start running forward until the halfback had actually passed the ball) and how a team should be prepared in the week of a big match. My theory here was that training should be tapered off, especially on the Thursday and Friday, so that players were full of energy, like a charged-up battery, on Saturday.
Ivan disagreed. The year before, he had trained the All Blacks relentlessly on the Friday before the test. It was so hot he had taken his jersey off and the sweat had poured down his massive chest as he yelled and needled the All Blacks into doing their drills with more and more pace and energy. The next day the All Blacks played a brilliant first half against Wales and then faded in the second as I had predicted, to win comfortably but not overwhelmingly, as they could have.
Missing from the trial squads was another friend of mine, Ken Gray. A thoughtful man, with brooding, sunken eye sockets and a sophisticated social conscience, Ken had walked down Manners Street one night before Christmas, when the streets were glistening with rain, and told me he was retiring because his detestation of the apartheid regime in South Africa was so intense he could not bring himself to set foot in the country, not even as a rugby player. He wanted to retire rather than make a statement about his unavailability on moral grounds. 'I don't want to embarrass Chris and Pinetree [Colin Meads] and Brian Lochore,' he told me.
Ken was the rock of the All Black pack of the late 1960s (one of the best teams New Zealand has ever put on to a field). Another of the intriguing questions that had to be answered during the trial was whether there was another player who could adequately replace him.
There were other questions, too. Who would be the bolter in the squad? Teams selected for major tours in this era often included players whose names elicited gasps when they were read out. Grant Batty, perhaps? Batty had been a brilliant schoolboy player. Earlier that year I had sat with the famous rugby broadcaster Winston McCarthy at Athletic Park and watched his debut as a senior. 'This boy,' McCarthy told me, in a voice that, in Tony O'Reilly's words, rasped like two mating pieces of sandpaper, 'is the most exciting New Zealand back since Bert Cooke.' As Cooke, a 1920s' All Black, is regarded as the greatest inside back New Zealand rugby has produced, the compliment was extravagant.
Ivan Vodanovich had told me that if Batty played through the trial, he would be selected. In fact, he limped off the field towards the end and had to be replaced.
There was some interesting off-field action to look forward to as well. A radical activist I had known at university had told the newspapers he was going to douse himself with petrol and set fire to himself on the halfway mark before the main trial as a protest against apartheid and the tour to South Africa.
The trial match, therefore, had many points of interest for the keen observer like me to watch out for. And as there is with every game of rugby, whether it is played on a suburban park with a handful of spectators, or at one of the great rugby stadiums with huge crowds, there was, as well, the theatre of the game and its tribal imperatives. Australian supporters screaming out, 'Tackle, Wallabies, tackle!' or New Zealand supporters singing out, 'Black, black, black!' (or, to un-Kiwi ears, 'Blek, blek, blek!') are sounds of a healthy society with its priorities right. It is much better to make tackles than to make war.
With all these emotions and thoughts roiling around in my subconscious, my heart was beating fiercely as the two trial teams, the Probables in black jerseys and the Possibles in white jerseys, trotted onto the clumpy, windswept grass of Athletic Park. At that moment, Judy bent down and pulled the latest issue of Time magazine from her bag. She steadfastly read her way through it while the players were vying for the prize of their lives and the spectators were going through emotional ups and downs with the fluctuating fortunes of their favourite players.
A month or so later, on the night of our wedding, a group of male friends joined me in the bedroom of our hotel to listen to (you don't have to be at the ground to 'watch' a rugby match) the radio broadcast of the second test between the Springboks and the All Blacks from South Africa. Chris Laidlaw had won back his halfback position, and played shrewdly and effectively to guide the tourists to a vital victory. We (the men) were ecstatic. Judy, though, was not amused.
This essay, then, is dedicated to all the Judys (men and women) who believe it is a waste of life's precious minutes to watch 'muddied oafs' throw themselves at each other in a rugby match. But it is also dedicated to all the rugby tragics like myself, the true believers, who know that 'one crowded hour of glorious life' is best spent at a match – any rugby match – either vicariously or physically, even on your wedding night.
CHAPTER 2'We see an object in the paint with which a surface is marked, rather than simply seeing the marks. One may see a spaniel in a painting by Landseer, for example, but one may also see a gleam of loyalty in the spaniel's eye: or discern heroism, optimism or nostalgia.'
Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects
An object in the paint
ALL THESE subplots around Chris Laidlaw, Sid Going, Ken Gray, Ivan Vodanovich, Grant Batty, Bernie the activist and Judy, which all came together during the 1970 All Black trial, bring us to Richard Wollheim, a leading authority on the history of painting. For Wollheim's theory of how to look at a painting can be used as a general theory of how to watch a rugby match.
Wollheim argued that the good watcher must try to achieve a 'seeing in' of the objects in a picture. The good watcher, he said, sees more than the marks on the surface of the painting. He or she sees into the painting. Wollheim used the example of the good watcher who sees the 'gleam of loyalty in the spaniel's eye' in a painting by Landseer. The more knowledge the good watcher brings to the seeing-in process, the sharper and truer it becomes. The good watcher recreates the painting with the various narratives they bring to the viewing.
A rugby match, according to this seeing-in theory, is never an objective reality. No one spectator sees the same match in the same way as any of the other spectators. The good watcher brings his or her personality and knowledge and passion to the game; the 'seeing-in' experience is therefore different from person to person.
The good watcher, in the arts world vernacular, 'subverts' the match. It becomes what the good watcher wants to see.
For my future wife Judy, for instance, that final trial was a doorway, opening into a world she might have to experience. But she did not have to stride through it this time. For the All Black selectors, the trial was a chance to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of various players in positions (the prop forwards) they were having difficulty in filling. For me, there were the stories involving Chris Laidlaw, Sid Going and Ken Gray's likely successor, as well as the pre-game antiapartheid protester. All of these personalised the trial for me.
The insights of Saul Alinsky in his book Rules For Radicals are useful, too, in establishing what the personal narratives are in this context. Alinsky argued that events (like rugby matches, presumably) become experience only after they have been reflected on. For most people, life is a series of happenings that go through their system 'undigested'. The happenings are not internalised, in other words. Happenings become experience (or what I call narratives) when they are digested. The digested happenings, which have been turned into part of a person's existence, or experience, can then be related to general patterns and synthesised.
The good watcher of rugby, following Alinsky's paradigm, opens himself or herself up to a plethora of narratives by knowing as much as possible about rugby, its history, its laws, its culture, its tribalism, its literature, its beauty, its ugliness, its customs, the players and the thinkers, what happened in past games and what might happen in the future.
They know, or should know, what the advantages or disadvantages are playing with the wind, whether it is best to have the captain in the forwards, whether one of the centres should be a tackler and the other a runner, how tall the loosehead prop should be, and so on – in short, the zen of rugby, which embraces the thousands of bits of information needed to understand rugby practice and culture.
The good watcher, too, will always try to be at the game. Certainly you can 'watch' rugby on television, or imagine the game through a radio commentary, but these methods are one step removed, like viewing a print of a painting, rather than the painting itself.
If you are not at the game, you miss the big-picture view. The television screen gives close-ups of individual contests but it can show only one event at a time – a scrum, say, or a maul, or a big tackle.
This, moreover, is the view the television commentator gets. Commentators must talk only about what appears on the television monitor in front of them. They are at the ground, but they see only what a person at home in front of their television set sees. And the screen can't show you where all the players are, nor all the contests and events that occur at any one time during a match.
If you go into the studios where the television commentators do their broadcasts at the major rugby grounds, you will see a small screen placed below their eye level so they can see the field and the screen. What will surprise the onlooker who may be allowed to stand silently at the back of the box during the match broadcast is that the commentators and the men who provide the colour, the Gordon Brays and Murray Mexteds, look down to the screen, rather than across to the field. In other words they, too, see the match through the pictures selected by the producers.
One time when I was in a commentary box as an observer for a test, there were roars from the crowd which weren't reflected in the dull passage of play on the field. The commentator turned back to me and mouthed, 'What's happening out there?' The irony was exquisite. Here was a commentator seemingly describing test-match action to hundreds of thousands of watchers around the world, and he had to ask someone what was going on. I quickly wrote a note: 'A couple of players were having a scuffle well away from the play.'
The live 'seeing-in' experience is best because the good watcher can control what he or she wants to see at the game. With the advent of the big screen at the main stadiums, the watcher can also get the close-ups, while still being able to put the scrum or the maul or the line-out that is being highlighted into the context of what is happening around the field. By comparison, if you watch a match on television, you are dependent on the pictures the producer allows you to see. You see the director's game.
With the 'seeing-in' theory now under control, it's time to emulate Captain Cook and take a voyage around the world of rugby. Andre Maurois, the French writer, said that 'you get out of reading exactly what you put into it'. The same discipline applies for watching rugby.
CHAPTER 3'Rugby, of course, is the perfect game. All the necessary elements are there. It is exceptionally difficult to play well, and to make a move work extraordinary precision and control are needed in the most hostile of circumstances. But at the same time – at the moment that finesse has to be put into action – it demands a boxer's depth of resolution in the service of the skills of a watchmaker.'
British sports journalist Adam Nicholson
Skills of a watchmaker
I WAS FIRST introduced to rugby, the perfect game, at the age of five at the convent school, Star of the Sea, Seatoun, Wellington. I couldn't speak a word of English when I was deposited by my parents at the front gate of the school. Perhaps part of the attraction of rugby was my feeling that playing the New Zealand game would make me accepted as a dinkum Kiwi.
I watched my first test on 3 September 1949, when the All Blacks lost to the Wallabies 11–6 at Wellington's Athletic Park. This was perhaps the blackest day in New Zealand rugby history: on the same day the frontline All Black squad (without any Maori players, who had been prevented from going by the apartheid policies of the South African government) lost to the Springboks at Durban 9–3.
I saw the All Blacks win for the first time at Athletic Park a year later, against the British Lions. I sat on the western bank, a sharply sloping hill oozing mud. I was jammed in with thousands of other spectators, all of us huddling together trying to shelter from a biting wind and slanting showers of rain. Around the time for the test to start, I got an uncontrollable urge to urinate. But going to the toilet meant giving up my excellent position towards the top of the bank opposite the halfway mark of the field. This is the best place to watch rugby, and I had got it only by arriving at the ground in the early hours of the morning. There was nothing for it. I surreptitiously unbuttoned my trouser's fly and released a gentle, controlled flow of urine onto the gabardine overcoat of the unsuspecting Scots College boy sitting in front of me.
This test has remained in my memory. Some people mark the significant moments in their lives by a particular song. I mark the passages of my life with the memories of great rugby teams, players and matches I have watched. And from this treasure house of personal memories I have come to understand that there is a moral ethic in rugby that, if it is embraced by the dedicated watchers of the game, enhances the way they live their lives.
When I taught at St Patrick's College, Silverstream, I was told that 'a good rugby school is a good school'. This assertion that there is a moral dimension to rugby is not as banal as it seems. Rugby is a manly game. You play for your team. You take your knocks, give as hard as you receive, but you do not do anything underhand. You don't pass to someone in a worse position than yourself. You take the tackle yourself, if necessary. You play the ball, not the man.
The erratic bounce of the ball gives rugby an anarchical aspect. You never know precisely what will happen next. The round ball in soccer, for instance, has an inevitability about the way it rolls, thereby reducing the element of luck and unpredictability in the game. But no rugby movement is exactly the same because of the contrariness of the ball, which scuttles and wheels like a tiny terrier doing somersaults. This contrariness mirrors the contrariness of life. Rugby teaches you to accept life's bounce of the ball. The rugby watcher learns to take the bad and the unfair with the good and the fair. A rugby match intensifies the emotions in a 'crowded hour of glorious life'. It is a heightened reality. Winning is important. But accepting defeat graciously is also (or should be) the mark of a rugby supporter.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Watch a Game of Rugby by Spiro Zavos. Copyright © 2004 Spiro Zavos. Excerpted by permission of Awa Press.
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