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Rugby, played with the elegance of old-time Dogpile

If you’ve been channel surfing lately, or flipping through the newspaper, no doubt you’ve noticed a veritable photographic plethora of largely unfamiliar extra-large humanoids running around on a field apparently trying to disassemble each other.

If you’ve been channel surfing lately, or flipping through the newspaper, no doubt you’ve noticed a veritable photographic plethora of largely unfamiliar extra-large humanoids running around on a field apparently trying to disassemble each other.

They also appear to be chasing, kicking and carrying what looks to be a swollen white football, although this seems to be mainly of secondary concern in favour of crashing headlong into each other at full speed.

What you may have stumbled on is a fun little game officially called Rugby Union, which most people just call “legalized assault and battery.” Also just rugby.

There is a reason rugby has drop kicked so ubiquitously into the media spotlight these days. It’s because the MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) and the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) and the FMI (Fight Injure and Maim League) are running out of tough guys who haven’t already had their brains knocked out.

The other reason, of course, is it’s time for the RWC (Rugby World Cup), another acronymed event that only takes place every four years. And this year, New Zealand (with special permission from the Lord of the Rings) is hosting the seventh quadrennial rugby thrashfest, and the media, realizing that there is advertising money to be made by covering any event where large men smash and mutilate each other, has been all over rugby coverage-wise.

I must admit I am a rugby fan and I try to catch a match whenever possible. It’s always great fun to watch something you don’t fully understand, especially when it involves tackling and additional incomprehensible mayhem called “scrums.”

In fact, we used to play a form of rugby at Central School in junior high at recess — completed unsanctioned by any adult, of course.

None of us had even heard of rugby, and we didn’t have a ball or any actual rules per se, so it wasn’t really like rugby at all, except for the tackling part and the violent mayhem part.

In fact, we called it Dogpile and it consisted entirely of two teams of constantly varying numbers hanging around until somebody yelled “DOGPILE!” and the two nearest opponents would tackle each other to the ground, whereupon all the other team members (and often several innocent bystanders) would randomly jump onto the two on the ground, piling on enthusiastically until there was a huge yelling, thrashing mound of Grade 7 dogpilers right in the middle of the playground.

We would eventually disengage from the pile, dusting off the dirt and tending to wounds until somebody screamed “Dogpile!” again.

My personal goal in a dogpile, always being the smallest shrimp out there, was to be the last one to pile on — sometimes having to perform a mighty Olympic-sized leap just to land somewhere near the top of the mass of piled-up humanity.

On a good day, we could get in a solid half-dozen major league dogpiles in one recess, with fairly minimal personal injury except the odd chipped tooth and the occasional sprained or bruised appendage.

So after the unofficial Central School Dogpile League (CSDL), rugby doesn’t seem so weird after all, and is in fact quite a skilled and exciting sport to watch.

We do certainly have rugby right here in our own civilized city, but it seems to be at the same profile and popularity as, say, cricket — another international sport that nobody understands.

So for those of you who watch and wonder what is going on when a couple of dozen goliaths take to the field in T-shirts and shorts and slam into each other in various creative ways for an hour or two, here, according to an article I read by several famous rugby players who may or may not have had one too many knocks to the head, are the basics of the game of rugby:

There are 15 players on each team, many of whom are lying injured at various parts of the field during the game. Play is not stopped when a player is injured with something minor like a broken femur or a subdural hematoma. In these cases, a medic runs out and tends to the injured behemoth with a medical kit consisting entirely of a bag of ice.

After the fracture, hemorrhage or internal injury has been sufficiently iced up for around a minute and a half, the player then staggers back into the fray where he immediately tackles the nearest moving object.

While in most other sports the object is to try to score, in rugby, each team utilizes its player positions to score a try.

This happens when a sasquatch-sized wildman (usually wearing a large ZZ Top style brown or black beard) lumbers across the goal line with the white swollen football and collapses face down, often at the bottom of a dogpile. This is worth five points. I think.

In rugby, a typical play might look like this: The scrum-half rolls the ball into the feet of the a mass of rugby forwards who are all locked in a scrum as the hooker heels the ball to the fly-half, who tosses the ball back to the openside flanker, who runs like crazy towards a wall of defending loosehead and tighthead props, and gets flattened by a number eight, who shoves the ball to his own left wing fullback who gets tacked by an inside or outside centre from either team, who pounces on the ball and immediately kicks it randomly down the field.

This goes on for an hour or two of exciting tackling and scrumming, and other stuff called lineouts and breakdowns, until the team that has the most players still able to walk heads to the nearest pub.

So there you have it: the “gentleman’s game” — rugby. The World Cup is on for another several weeks or months, so there’s plenty of time to get to know and enjoy this noble sport.

It is fascinating and fun to watch but just between you and me, rugby just doesn’t have the unbridled excitement and action of a good game of Dogpile.

Harley Hay is a local freelance writer, award-winning author, filmmaker and musician. His column appears on Saturdays in the Advocate. His books can be found at Chapters, Coles and Sunworks in Red Deer.