When it comes to matters of sincerity one can, whilst being entirely sincere, still somehow fail to paint a strictly “true” portrait of their character. I would argue that I may well have committed such a blunder. Prior to the publication of this article, the only articles published under my name in Arthur’s perennially sparse Sports section have been—of all things—about…*eugh* video games. 

In hindsight, I think this conspires to paint me as some sort of “gamer,” which, regardless of its veracity in this instance, is not really how I wish to be immortalized in this archive.

With that in mind, I have a confession to make:

I don’t hate sports.

Those acquainted with me primarily through my writing will have no doubt formed a certain perception of the verbose woman who writes predominantly about video games and critical theory, so you may be surprised to hear that I’m not the least sporty person ever born.

As a matter of fact, while I was and remain undeniably a dork, a nerd, and a loser, the fact of my obsession with various cultural artefacts and media franchises never precluded my participation in extracurricular sports.

I played amateur soccer—known always to my father as “football”—since before my brain had so much as begun recording memories.

I tried my hands at a few sports in Elementary school, realized I was actually good at swimming and stuck with that for several years. I equally adopted curling as just about the only team sport I tolerated.

While I’d never have described myself first and foremost as “athletic” at any point in my life, throughout high school I stood a lean 6’4”, could solo portage hundreds of pounds of backcountry gear several kilometres, and naturally possessed enough definition in my core and shoulder musculature as to attract female attention.

I’m not saying I was destined for the olympics, though I am saying that I was pretty much the fastest swimmer I ever knew, and even in transitioning I more closely resemble Nozomi “Sports Girlfriend” Kiyokawa than any other romantic narrative archetypal stock character in prototypical dating sim Tokimeki Memorial.

Take it on sincerity then, when I say today that out of every sport in which I’ve partaken or spectated, Rugby by far endures as my favourite.

Rugby is a difficult sport to explain for those unaccquainted with it. While the rules themselves are, in principle, very simple, the rather opaque terms such as “ruck,” “hooker,” “maul,” and “scrumhalf,” can prove baffling to the uninitiated. Generally speaking, when trying to explain the sport to someone expressing an earnest interest in it, one can expect to hear something along the lines of “it’s like [American] football, except nothing like [American] football.”

I have this theory, you see—borne of my coworker’s incessant baseball obsession—that most sports we have in North America are lesser imitations of better sports enjoyed the world over.

To amend this declaration, I will admit the only reason that many of these sports are played the world over is the ever-present spectre of British colonialism—which is itself problematic—though one might have equal cause to question the reason the most popular participation sport in Japan is baseball. 

To use said sport as example, baseball takes the simplicity of cricket’s principles of “hitting the ball with a bat and running,” and decides it would be much improved with a number of arbitrary places to stop during the running, as well as replacing its predecessor’s convoluted ruleset and endemic international corruption with a whole number of superfluous rules and financial scandals of its own.

While baseball is arguably “pared down” in comparison, owing to its games generally lasting three hours at most as opposed to the customary five days of test cricket, you’ll never know the excitement of a nine-hour World Cup final tied after 300 Overs and decided by a Super Over until you see it for yourself.

For as prominently as baseball figures in the North American psyche, 2.5 Billion people can’t be wrong about the actual best bat-and-ball game. I for one can tell you that I’d much rather watch a Telugu-language crime thriller about cricket betting than Moneyball.

Despite our Americanized idolizing of Ice Hockey, Basketball, and the type of “Football” you oxymoronically play with your hands, the sports which see the most global popularity don’t necessarily align with those we think of as synonymous with the major leagues here in US-proximal Canada.

“Football,” in the word’s American significance, is if anything merely the North American localization of rugby—a game about running with a ball, tackling people and scoring via transmission of a ball into an end zone. 

That points are scored by the means of “touchdown,” in which the ball does not in any way need to be touched down further solidifies its status as inferior imitation—the converse “football”—the beautiful game—(or “soccer,” if you’re so inclined) being by and away the most popular sport in the world according to multiple surveys on the matter.

I don’t really see why, in all honesty, the sport is piss-boring to watch. The Premier League is just about the only top level professional sport from which you can walk away after ninety-odd minutes having seen a nil-nil draw. 

While I may not understand why people watch football, however (besides being a great excuse for emotionally-stunted middle-aged men to express emotion through the means of excessive drinking, obscene chants, and calling the opposing goalkeeper a poofter), I do wholeheartedly understand the appeal of playing it. 

Football is one of the few sports that requires no equipment besides your body and a ball. While one can find ways to blow absurd sums of money on cleats, gloves, socks, shin pads, uniforms and the like, schoolchildren since time immemorial have made do with rucksacks as makeshift goal posts and whatever deflated, misshapen ball is nearest to hand. 

Circling back to the actual subject of this article, this unprecedented degree of accessibility is exactly the same thing which cements rugby’s enduring appeal—with the added caveat that unlike its foot-focused sibling, it proves not only tolerable, but thoroughly enjoyable to watch.

While rugby players generally wear the incredibly heterosexual ensemble of short shorts, high socks and remarkably tight-fitting jerseys, you need nothing more than something even vaguely resembling a ball to have a bit of a toss about with your mates.

I’ll say this about rugby—its uniforms aren’t nearly half as ugly as most professional sports’. While I’ve no delusions that the Welsh Rugby Union cap I rocked for the better part of my ninth to my twelfth or so years on this Earth was the height of fashion, I will say as someone with a professed distaste for her own university’s apparel that Trent’s rugby shirts are by and away the most tasteful piece of clothing the Follet bookstore has ever concocted. 

From a young age my father instilled in me a love of rugby. This may well have been by virtue of it being the only thing I was allowed to watch on television outside of mine and my brother’s one allotted hour every evening, though the sentiment here prevails in service of storytelling. 

Any time a game aired on SportsNet, my father was sure to wake up early to PVR it—usually cursing as he did so that I had used up the bulk of the PVR space with several seasons of BBC’s Sherlock—and we spent the weekend afternoons with bated breath watching stocky, sweaty grown men run facefirst into each other at full speed for around an hour and a half.

So it is that I have enjoyed rugby from afar for most of my life. Seeing as I am the daughter of a Welsh expatriate and the bulk of my family reside in the south of Wales, it seems sort of a innevitability that I would become enamoured with it.

In Fire Emblem terms, it is my Birthright, if you will.

Wales, being a country of just over three million people historically overshadowed by their immediate neighbour and not permitted to compete under their own flag at the olympics, have a curious history with sport.

Seeing as the land of my fathers is part of an Island nation which possesses such an unfathomably inbred gene pool as to allow me to feasibly presume lineage to at least one 12th-century prince named Llewellyn, Wales has never been—as one might well imagine—all that good at many sports.

With a notoriously temperate and overcast climate, and “mountains” which really constitute more just large hills, just about every winter sport was off the cards as a national passtime. While recent years have seen a number of noteworthy Welsh athletes such as Tour de France-winning Geraint Thomas, very few international sporting authorities distinguish between Wales and the rest of the UK, and the distinction within Great Britain is largely to watch Welsh football teams get ploughed by England in every level of the FA. 

Rugby, however, is a different story.

Wales dominates rugby like few other countries its size can claim to preside over any sport. The country has tied England, a country with nearly twenty times its population, for number of Six Nations championships, and boast a greater number of Grand Slams than them to this date. 

It’s not just Wales, however, small island nations the world over enjoy the ball sport of joyfully beating the shit out of each other! Ireland is of course a powerhouse in international competition, though rugby is equally the official sport of Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and Madagascar. Many, many Pacific nations enjoy this violent passtime—Japan have quickly become a powerhouse in the international scene, upsetting favourites Ireland and Scotland at the 2019 World Cup, and the New Zealand “All Blacks” are indisputably the best team to ever compete in organized rugby.

As with any sport largely transmitted through gunboat diplomacy, there is of course a pervasize desire to usurp perennial Big Bads Angle-terra which makes the sport a rather accessible spectacle. As with her sisters in British Empire football and cricket, in rugby one can generally throw their support wholeheartedly behind any team that’s playing England. Beating England in rugby, to many countries, is just as much a colonial revenge as cricket is for India, Pakistan, and all. While the Canadian men’s team might be stunningly bad, even once we’re knocked out round one there’s still nothing quite like watching a team of jacked Maori men bulldoze a bunch of former Eton kids!

On the Friday of mine writing this piece I went to see the final weekend of the 2023 Pacific Four series—a tournament comprising the women’s teams of the U.S, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Sitting in the stands of Ottawa’s Lansdowne Place arena in the pelting hot sun, surrounded by family in town from British Columbia, and drinking pint after pint of pisspoor beer, I felt compelled to write this piece.

I digress—I’m not here to litigate the accusation that women’s rugby is a sport for lesbians. I presume many would have though that’s the angle my gay ass would well have taken. 

All organized sports are kind of gay. Frankly it’s a bit sexist that we largely reserve this presumption for women’s sports. While I’ll admit that any game in which players cut or braid their hair so as to prevent their opponents pulling it is not exactly “Serving Straight,” men’s sports are just as gay, if not more so considering they usually amount to a bunch of men handling balls.

Needless to say, I saw quite a few undercuts over the course of the game, and my cousin with whom I attended did lean over to whisper “she’s pretty” to me more than once.

Over the course of the tournament the Americans lost every match they played, New Zealand predictably demolished everyone, and Canada, in a pleasant surprise, commandingly trounced Australia in a game for which I was very drunk and very invested.

Rugby is really easy to love, even drunk, even knowing none of the rules. I say this because a couple sitting behind my father and I at the game were befuddled as to the intricacies of tries, conversions, and line-outs, but nonetheless seemed rapt, as rugby leaves no lull in its action.

Whether it's the palpable tension of a scrum, or a hooker making a stunning breakaway, the action flows with speed and surprising intricacy. In many ways, rugby played at the highest professional level more closely resembles dance than it does the pile-on most people imagine. Certainly in the games I had the pleasure of watching, whenever one woman was tackled instantly two or three of her teammates were there in the ruck—the result being a consistent and coordinated forward advance far more mesmerizing than the incessant stop-start of American football’s “downs.”

The slight differences between rugby and its American analogues make it infinitely more fascinating. Having to actually touch the ball to the end zone to score a try dials up the tension as teams battle over the last few metres before the endzone. To be in the stadium as a player scrambles to wrest the ball to the ground is one of the most electric sporting experiences in which one can take part.

Rugby is fundamentally intuitive. If something looks exciting, it is, and generally one can follow the direction of play from the position of the players alone. Seeing as a rugby ball is roughly the size of a human baby, it’s pretty easy to see it being tossed around on the pitch. Unlike soccer, baseball and the like, there’s no squinting necessary to try and make out what has happened.

There’s no hooligans like there are in football, and there’s no bemoaning the functionality of a pitch clock like in baseball. Unlike every other sport, rugby is generally collegial (save righteous games against England). I’ve never had a bad experience at any of the rugby games I’ve attended at any age or any professional level—be they high school, university, club games or international competitions. The overwhelming atmosphere is one of camaraderie and joy.

To me, rugby is like home.

It’s home in the sport, in the simplicity of it to watch and the ability to pick it up just about anywhere with anyone. It’s home in the people you share it with—over pints and popcorn, and pats on the back—whether you’re watching the game or not doesn’t strictly matter, you’ll still go apeshit whenever a player succeeds a conversion you’d have never expected to land. Most of all, rugby is home when listening to two dozen Welsh men belt Hen Lad fy Nhadau mere minutes before shoving the ball so far up England’s ass it’ll never see the light of day. 

I, for one, think that’s beautiful.

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