I knew nothing of rugby until Partner and I went to Ireland in 2007. We quickly discovered the little betting parlors that crowd every Irish streetcorner. Partner busied himself with dog racing, but I was fascinated by the Rugby World Cup betting sheet, which was the size of a tablecloth and allowed you to bet on everything, including number of teeth knocked out during a game. Without really knowing what I was doing, I put a bet down on the opening game of the series: the Namibian team would beat the Irish team. I also bet that the first goal in the game would be scored by the captain of the Irish team.
I lost my first bet and won my second. Net gain: forty euros on a two-euro bet.
I began to pay attention to rugby at that point, and I liked what I saw. First of all, rugby players are enormous. Second of all, they do not wear padded Halloween outfits like American football players; they wear thin cotton shorts and tight shirts, and they look terrific. Third, the rules of rugby are entertainingly incomprehensible. It’s like American football played as a mixed martial art; they just keep beating each other up until one team has lost too much blood to continue. In one game in the late 1990s, the Irish team won the game by picking up the guy with the ball and throwing him headfirst like a javelin into the scoring area. The Sunday Irish Times had a whole special section explaining how the game worked; I read it twice and was still baffled.
And rugby players are characters. There's Gareth Thomas, the only openly gay man in professional team sports in the entire world. There's Lawrence Dallaglio, the huge beautiful deadly English player who makes my heart quiver whenever I look at him. There's Sebastien Chabal, l'Homme des Cavernes, the Caveman. There's Zinedine Zidane, the French player who headbutted another player so hard that I could feel it three hundred miles away.
But, in the end, it's all about watching thirty buffalo-sized men huffing and snorting at each other, with murder in their big angry beautiful bloodshot eyes.
And that's entertainment.
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