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"Definitions
for Definers, not the Defined" A study of the mind-set of the two rugby codes. For the two codes of rugby 1995 not 1989 marked, it is said, the end of history. The hundred years war between amateurism and professionalism was brought to a close, or so it is argued, by a new generation of players and administrators, men who came from the world of the past and entered the world of the future, an experimental landscape on the other side of some essential line drawn across human experience. Those who had survived that experience and come to maturity because of it, were the bearers of a special kind of wisdom that an older generation did not possess. It is they and their followers who were now in the business of shaping the identity of Rugby Union and, if necessary, renouncing the past. 1 Perhaps for this reason Jonathan Davies, who was described as a `defector' when he moved from Llanelli to Widnes, is now referred to as the `magical son' or saviour of Welsh rugby. Or that University students who, in the seventies and eighties, were regularly warned of their expulsion from Rugby Union for playing games of amateur Rugby League are now regarded as the unfortunate victims of an old regime which has since been dismantled. In their place the professionals of Wigan RLFC are invited to enter a team in the Middlesex sevens and the respective managers of Wigan and Bath contemplate the possibility of playing a game against each other. 2 There is plenty of evidence to indicate a thawing of relations between the two codes. In the 1995 season, professional Rugby League clubs played on Rugby Union grounds (London Broncos at The Stoop, for example) while in 1996, Orrell RUFC are scheduled to offer a number of their home games against prestige opposition at Wigan's Central Park. As the trajectories of rugby move ever closer, Union coaches like Brian Ashton and Les Cusworth proclaim the quality of Rugby League skills, while ex-internationals like J.P.R. Williams and Phil Bennett regularly comment in the Welsh press on the superior attractions of Rugby League and its growing popularity as a spectator sport. Their arguments are endorsed by a growing band of players, including Peter Williams, director of coaching at Orrell RUFC Reflecting on his time as a professional with Salford, Williams says how Rugby League made him `a better rugby player' and that anyone who returns to Union after spending time in League will find it much easier to play in `the Five Nations side'. 3 The idea that Union must leave its `prejudice' behind in an era of professionalism, as Williams argues, may well be inevitable. But in spite of the assumption that we frequently hear from people in positions of influence, including Maurice Lindsay, incidentally, of the Rugby Football League, that the codes will merge in the next decade, the outcome is by no means clear and the course of history impossible to predict with any kind of certainty. Although there is some suggestion that the old confrontational attitudes of Union administrators have been put to rest - one thinks, for example, of the impossible hostility of Dennis Evans, Secretary of the Welsh Rugby Football Union, to the playing of an amateur Rugby League competition at the Swansea Uplands Rugby Club in August 1991 4 - evidence that meaningful change has occurred can only be said to exist when the court historians of Rugby Union decide to investigate the prejudice that was de riguer in their game and the problems that experienced players like Peter Williams encountered once they switched codes. A change of consciousness can only occur, in other words, through an act of bearing witness to the past, some public testimony to the sins of the fathers and an investigation of the wilfull discrimination that many of the game's distinguished administrators actively encouraged as a matter of course. Union apologists at the current moment, however, are remarkably similar to the nouveau Communists in Poland and Russia; they extoll the virtues of the market place and the need for new disciplines, but refuse to acknowledge the division and prejudice in which their history is firmly rooted. The need for an owning up to history has yet to occur in Union historiography, a language of atonement for the tactics that were employed to belittle the achievements of those who took the League shilling, as well as an apology for the denial of opportunity for those who have wanted to play the game without fear of intimidation. In the first of the post cold war Rugby magazines, First XV, edited by Stuart Barnes, the impression conveyed by the editor is of a war between the codes that has come to an end, but one that has ended without any guilt. We sense some daring historical change in which the enemy is acknowledged but not its suffering, in which the threats and reprisals experienced by many of those who played Rugby League for one hundred years were never much more than a bit of a joke, a ruse de guerre, a laugh among the lads, and something that certainly ought not to be allowed to spoil the party - or ruin the rapprochment of the 1990s. It is as if the Union scribes are trying to propitiate the new deities at the outset of their campaign, to win them over with pleas and promises and cajolery, to legitimise their professional enterprises and exculpate them as they embark upon their journey. Certainly, there is little desire to accept responsibility for what happened in the past. On the contrary, what lies behind the geniality of the joking is the old belief that the exclusive guilt for the act of conflict should be imputed to ones foes; that ultimate responsibility still lies with those who seceeded from the Union in the 1890s and those who dared to infringe on its moral purposes. A good example of this kind of thinking is illustrated by the reaction of a number of Union writers to David Hinchcliff's 1994 Sports Discrimination Bill. This Bill attempted to remove in Parliament the laws enshrined in Rugby Union which prevented former Rugby League players from joining or returning to the union game. It was designed, as Martin Sadler puts it, `to eradicate...the violation of human rights that Rugby Union administrators appear to enjoy inflicting upon innocent sportsmen who are merely exercising their freedom of choice'. It was an `uncontroversial measure among fair minded people', and had `all-party support in the House of Commons'. But witness the reaction of the Rugby Union press. Stephen Jones in The Sunday Times was contemptuous of the bill and derided it, claiming it was unnecessary, given the Rugby Union's recognition that the amateur principle was no longer sacrosanct. The subheading that Jones uses clearly anticipates the political message he wishes to impart: `letting league miscreants back into union'. Jones willingly endorses the official union position of 1994 that playing Rugby League, like eating people, is fundamentally wrong. The recent announcement of a superleague in English Rugby League could not hide the fact that the code is shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic, that the game, largely impoverished, does not have sufficient following or commercial muscle to survive intact and that the undercard of the game could be left to rot. A free gangway in union eyes, would allow league a transfusion of glamour and marketability without the development costs. 5 Stephen Jones, brave soul that he is, provides this analysis of Rugby League in the serene knowledge that he won't be challenged - either by his editor or by his colleagues on The Sunday Times. As a so-called vehicle for the disinterested coverage of sport The Sunday Times gives no genuine coverage to Rugby League, despite the game still being the second most popular spectator sport in the country. As Martin Sadler has said: `There is no Rugby League writer for that newspaper who can put right the gross distortions that a writer like Jones inflicts upon a gullible readership'. In the quality press, especially on Sundays, acres of space are devoted to Rugby Union, much of it testimony to our undying love affair with the mediocre and banal, to the celebration of players of extremely modest footballing ability, in contests which lollop along and provide the spectator with little more than interminable displays of line out jumping and aeriel ping pong. In many of the quality Sundays Orrell is bigger than Wigan, Wakefield Rugby Union club has always been bigger than Wakefield Trinity and Sale is bigger than St. Helens. In this respect Rugby League still, as it has done for generations, faces `the deeply ingrained prejudices of those people who control access to national newspaper columns'. 6 In September 1994 Chris Rea wrote a piece for the Independent on Sunday in which he provides us with a picture of Sir Tasker Watkins, President of the Welsh Rugby Union and old time apologist for Wavell Wakefield's `spirit of rugger'. Rea notes that Watkins' impeccable use of English, his dignified demeanour and his unfailing courtesy might raise a snigger or two from the cerebrally challenged and socially ungilded. But the possessor of an outstanding intellect is also, as the holder of the Victoria Cross, a man of extraordinary valour. In contrast to these `old, and nowadays often derided, values' stand `the detractors... from rugby league' who, when faced with a man like Tasker Watkins, are `consumed...by envy'. The reason is simple. Rugby Union is still run by men of intelligence and moral principle. [It] has almost everything that Rugby League covets: a genuinely global following, mass media coverage and money. Without even trying, it basks in the success which the professional game craves but which, despite its attempts at self-promotion, it has never achieved. Those, says Rea, who protest at the ban imposed on the ex Wigan R.L. player Ray Mordt from coaching Rugby Union in South Africa, are guilty of cant and humbug. `Let us be clear about one thing', he continues. The issue for all decent god-fearing Rugby Union folk is `not about Ray Mordt' or `amateurism or that preposterous waste of time and public money, the Sports (Discrimination) Bill. It is about survival'. Should Rugby Union open its doors `and invite the poor relations to join the feast? Of course not'. The barriers should remain firmly in place. The `fight' between League and Union `is a fight to the death between the codes' and Rugby Union should not `extend the hand of friendship' to a game which, as Vernon Pugh correctly describes it, is `essentially parasitic'. 7 In a subsequent article, of April 23, 1995, Rea re-stated his belief that the Rugby Union should defend itself by all possible means from the arguments advanced by the National Heritage Committee. Rugby Union must not provide `unrestricted access' to League players, he says, because League seeks `to lure Union players away from the game'. This gives Union `a right and a duty to protect itself' by preventing freedom of choice. The sporting apartheid of Rugby Union is, therefore, a necessary virtue, especially when League is riddled with `mercenaries' and `the sell-out' to Murdoch. The National Heritage Committee is `a national joke', he says. `The only worry is that Rugby Union will be daft enough to take them seriously'. 8 In the national press the Cold War warriors of Rugby Union still persist with their hawkish attitudes and an unreconstructed language of bigotry. In the new world order the language of a Chris Rea or a Michael Herd - who, in the London Evening Standard, recently described Rugby League `as a game for ape-like creatures watched by gloomy men in cloth caps',9 - still tends to lead an independent existence beyond rapprochment and is much more appealing and politically reassuring in the minds of traditionalists than soft-centred chit chat about marriage or merger. The opinions of a solid constituency of bigots has always excercised an easy appeal for the snob element in Rugby Union. Nourished by prejudice and misinformation the code struggles to abandon its dependency on those who trade in the hackneyed brutalism of a Michael Herd or a Charles Jennings.10 Here is a brief extract from an article written by David Irvine which appeared in The Guardian on 17 February 1993. It concerns the decision by Nigel Heslop of Orrell Rugby Union club to accept the offer made to him by Oldham's Peter Tunks of a match by match `incentive' contract in Rugby League. Orrell, hemmed in all sides by some of the top professional clubs, have been bled for years - although, with most of their losses being at colts level, no one outside the club has taken much notice. More recently, however, defections have had a direct bearing on the first team. They [The Rugby League scouts] are never far away, and [Orrell] know lots of [their] lads are being constantly talked to. 11 The problem of health, moral and physical, is once again in evidence; note the metaphors of bleeding (loss of fluid) and defection (loss of spirit or belief). All forms of illness, it seems, which derive from the playing of Rugby League, are induced by the presence of parasitical or viral agents which cause a loss of bodily function and a breakdown in defence mechanisms. There is also the loss of emotional function to consider, for if players like Heslop are seduced by `money', then the `lads' in the `colts' team are flattered by the attention they receive from the scout. Although they may not want it, these `lads' are `under pressure to switch codes'. The scout is relentless. He encourages the youth of Orrell to betray their allegiance to the cause and to abandon their belief in a game which has selflessly taught them all it knows. The scout is a wraith-like figure, a shadow-presence who exerts a menacing and unhealthy influence on the young and innocent. Wherever he goes he spreads a sinister aura of disloyalty. The idea of Rugby League as virus or contagion and Rugby Union as shelter or nest is also conveyed by the Sports Editor of the Western Mail, John Kennedy, in a 1990 article he wrote on the scouting activities of Rugby League clubs in the Welsh valleys. Kennedy warns us of a `new and frightening trend', a series of `raids' which, he claims, are now being made by `The Rugby League predators'. These aliens `have chosen to target the cream of our schoolboy talent', the traditional academies of sporting excellence like Christ College and Llandovery. Kennedy's article consists of a series of lurid tales which tell the reader what it's like to live as a scout in the Rugby League underworld; how, in particular, the scout is condemned to wander the street in a dirty raincoat on the lookout for talent - the `lads' of Wales.12 The emotive language and the accusations contained in these articles are fairly common-place. That each journalist uses the same metaphor to illustrate the same offence says something about the uniformity of the Rugby Union mind. What is also curious is the way the nature of the offence changes as the `lads' grow older and turn into men. Once an adult turns to Rugby League he commits the unpardonable sin of selling his body to the highest bidder. Here the act of transfer is mercenary. As Wilf Wooler put it in The Sunday Telegraph in 1985: `The words "going north" carry emotive overtones in Wales. To switch to the professional code of Rugby League - as Cardiff's Terry Holmes did last week - is to defect: not only from amateur Rugby Union itself, but from your roots'.13 By choosing the verb `to defect' the commentator anticipates the subsequent discrimination which the act of switching one's allegiance provokes. By `going north' the player, as Nick Garnett puts it, `risks becoming an historical non person in the game [Rugby Union] that bred him. For the heinous crime of turning to another, if related, sport and receiving money doing so, the union heirarchy still takes a sour and bloody-minded view'.14 The verb `to defect' replaces the person with a moral condition. It makes him the victim of an experiment in disinvention. In the act of rejecting the freemasonry of Rugby Union the convert to Rugby League casts himself in the role of the ante bellum slave who escapes the `protection' of the southern family and takes the underground railroad. In so doing he becomes a kind of treacherous nigger, swapping his protection for a freedom of action he neither knows nor understands; he becomes a sporting pariah who willingly abandons the rights and privileges normally afforded to those who swear an allegiance to `the family'. `The sin of crossing cultures' is inexcusable. The player who does so can no longer expect to be rewarded through more acceptable forms of payment - car-park takings or the proverbial boot money. Union journalists are partisan to the point of paranoia whenever they spot a `defector' heading North. Those who get their retaliation in first resort to a strategy of apocalyptic prophecy with lurid tales of moral decline. In Swansea, where I live, the local Petulengro of the tealeaves goes by the name of Martin Pitchwell, `Wales' Most Outspoken Sports Writer'. In the weeks following the decision of Jonathan Davies to sign for Widnes, Pitchwell's readers were offered a sample of teacup tragedies and a heady brew of tales from the slop bucket. Pitchwell knew from his reading of the leaves what Widnes had in store for the luckless Davies. Staring into the murky recesses of an eleven o'clock cup of Tesco's Darjeeling Pitchwell announced that the `attraction of Rugby League' was difficult to fathom. `It seems so unsubtle - people running straight into other people for most of the time, then getting up, glaring, and back-heeling the ball to somebody else'. What the Indian weed revealed to Pitchwell is that `every so often you are penalised if you do that, so you have to kick the ball instead, so it's predictable even then'. Under the intense glare of such a profoundly analytical mind the dark mysteries of Rugby League were gradually exposed like some noxious, swampy, primeval substance. `The finer points' of Rugby League, `if there [are] any', pass him `by' because the game is predicated on the need for `sheer ruthlessness'. It is played with a neanderthal primitivism that artists and visionaries find it difficult to adjust to. Jonathan will be a target. `He will be hounded, pounded, goaded, insulted, bullied, scorned and, if the northern hard men have their way, humiliated in the next few weeks. He needs all the luck going'.15 In Rugby Union futurology what awaits `the defector' is a level of pain so severe that his moral, physical and emotional self will simply disintegrate. The player will go through an experience known only to the most traumatised of coke sufferers, speed freaks and skid-row junkies. What Davies did contradicted not only his own nature but every known rule of sporting logic. Not that we would consider applying the same argument to the experience of other sportsmen. When Paul Gascoigne decides he wants to up sticks for Italy we do not say that he is choosing to enter the crime capital of Europe or is risking his sanity in the company of the Mafia. When John Surtees leaves motorcycling for car racing he is not accused of wanting to risk life and limb in some needless spectacle on the streets of Monte Carlo. When an amateur boxer quits the ranks of the A.B.A. and signs up as a professional we do not tell him that he is bound to suffer the obligatory fate of the punch drunk and brain damaged. Nor when Jeremy Guscott decides to become a male model do we say that he is about to rub shoulders with suspected Aids sufferers. When a bird decides to leave its nest or a wave chooses to separate itself from the anonymity of the ocean and crash upon the shore, or when a man wants a sex change or a film star an implant, we do not say that each has broken some inalienable law of God and abandoned their pre-ordained role in life. We accept the decision for what it is. Sometimes we may even marvel at it. Freedom of expression is a wonderful thing except in the corridors of the Rugby Union. Here it has long been considered a gross violation of natural law. One thinks of the response of Dr. Dannie Craven when Ray Mordt and Rob Louw left South Africa and signed for Wigan in 1985. According to Paul Martin writing from Pretoria, Craven 'issued a seemingly non-stop barrage of gloom and doom messages to potential "traitors". He said they "would lose their freedom of action and become ensnared into slavery - able to be bought and sold like cattle"'. According to Martin, Craven 'also claimed' the players would have no career structure to fall back on once discarded or injured and that they would become (or rather, he would insist that they become) ostracised by the game that made them great. `They will experience the strictest form of apartheid - between Rugby Union and Rugby League - which have been sworn enemies for a century'. Finally, Craven warned Louw and Mordt about injuries in Rugby League, 'adding that some players..."would be killed in the first few minutes"'. Dannie Craven was, as we all know, one of nature's gentlemen, a man who had no time for the language of apartheid, sporting or racial, a real home-on-the-range gent who spent his life in the forefront of the struggle for racial equality in South Africa and who committed himself to upholding the principles of natural justice, freedom of expression and civil rights for all. As Jack McNamara puts it: 'You'll remember that this grand sport once described Rugby League players as "reptiles".16 A lovely bloke! I puked when I read the sycophantic obits'. With some exceptions, like Clem Thomas,17 the vilification of Rugby League is a traditional strategy for the elder statesmen of Rugby Union. In 1977, Gordon Mackintosh, president of the Lancashire R.F.U., complimented Orrell on the club's success in recent years: `As President of Lancashire' he announced at the club's annual dinner, ` I am proud of Orrell. It is good to know that rugby in this part of the world is in very safe keeping. We live in a world of curious standards, which are sometimes cheap and sleazy, but you at Orrell have become the guardians of rugby'. Mr. Mackintosh's speech distinguishes between that which is Orrell - where `rugby is played' and standards are in `safe' hands - and that which is not Orrell, where `rugby is not played and the prevailing standards are, as he puts it, `cheap and sleazy'.18 Orrell, it seems, lies in the middle of an indigestible rugby sandwich, the nutritional value of which is ruined by the `cheap and sleazy' crust of professionalism. Either side of Orrell one finds a denial of wholesome and healthy `standards' and the absence of fruitful organic relationships, the kind of which Mr. Mackintosh finds in abundance at Orrell. Mr. Mackintosh directs us to an old idea in the moral folklore of Rugby Union: the idea that Rugby Union is a moral union against those `cheap and sleazy' values which threaten to overwhelm `those parts of the world' that play Rugby Union. The people of Orrell are the `guardians' of rugby and Edge Hall Road is a noble outpost where the sacred flame of Twickenham is cherished on a postage stamp of English soil. Either side of Orrell are the menacing industrial townships of Wigan and St. Helens, centres of heathenism, secularism and anti-ruralism. The officials of Rugby Union have regularly tended to portray Rugby League as a game designed to suit the aspirations of a brutalised proletariat. They have also sought to disappear those versions of history which cannot be demeaned through the use of propaganda. The art of vanishing history - or what Toni Morrison calls disremembering - is a familiar strategy in Rugby Union historiography. The moment the Rugby Union `defector' goes north, says Nick Garnett, he commits in the eyes of the Union hierarchy the sin `of turning to another, if related, sport' and earning his living dishonestly. `The spreading practice of payments in union leaves its hierarchy untouched, but the sin of crossing cultures is another thing'.19 John Ravitale recalls his life as a Rugby Union player in Fiji in the 1960s. He describes how, after his so-called `links' with Rugby League were publicised in the press, the Rugby Union tried to discredit him and ruin his relationship with his own family. After thirty years Ravitale remains bitter. `I'll never forget that', he says. `Even my family didn't talk to me. The Union was very powerful'.20 Jim Brough had a similar experience. When he was in his seventies he donated his English Rugby Union jersey to Silloth Rugby Union club where he began his career. The club was immediately ordered to remove it by the Rugby Football Union because, later in his career, Brough had signed for Leeds Rugby League Club. The attempt to discredit the amateur status of eighteen and nineteen year old students was something I witnessed for almost fifteen years as a Rugby League coach and administrator in Wales. Before the free gangway between amateur Rugby League and Rugby Union came into being in the late 1980s (and even afterwards), students who played Rugby Union on Saturday and Rugby League on Sunday were regularly informed that their chances of climbing the Rugby Union tree would be seriously jeopardised if they continued to play student Rugby League. I can think of at least twenty students - international players in both codes - who enjoyed the opportunity that Rugby League offered them to enhance their skills, and who regularly received the whisper-in-the-ear treatment by their Rugby Union coach (many of them physical education lecturers whose job it was to encourage the idea of freedom of sport within education). The students would be told to `remember which side your bread is buttered on, son' or, `I might not be able to stop you from playing Rugby League but I can certainly stop you from playing Rugby Union. I won't pick you' - a comment that was made on several occasions in places like South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education, (now Cardiff Institute). Such brave advice, intimidation masking as paternalism, was common currency in Wales during the 1980s. Of course many of these coaches were simply taking their cue from the top, from the archpriests of discrimination in the Welsh Rugby Union. The need to witchhunt the young and put the frighteners on the students stemmed from a paranoid suspicion that many of these `lads' would be compelled against their wishes to switch to Rugby League in order to indulge in a satanic black mass. There was a regularly voiced horror story that went the rounds in the '80s that the students would be persuaded by myself, or Danny Sheehy in Aberavon, or Clive Griffiths in St. Helens, to throw in their lot with the devil himself and become `professionals'. As a matter of interest, on no occasion did this ever happen. Whether it did or it didn't is beside the point. The treatment the students received was unprofessional and cowardly. The people who perpetrated these acts were motivated by an attempt to protect Rugby Union, even at student level, at all costs. They were often celebrated and well known in their own field, yet they had no genuine interest in the skills and techniques the students were developing. Even in cup games or international matches I never once saw any of these so-called guardians of Rugby show real interest or lend their support in any way, so utterly narrow and embittered had they become in their worship of Rugby Union. The students in Wales whom I knew rose above this and conducted themselves with great dignity. They achieved an unprecedented level of success on the field and earned the title of European champions on several occasions. In spite of their problems the students refused to play the role of public victim. Sadly, because of this, their problems were discounted or quietly buried and often by those in positions of authority who should have known better. The attempt to discredit those who display an attachment to Rugby League has a timeless appeal for Rugby Union aficionados. In the early years of this century Ben Gronow played Rugby Union for Bridgend and Wales. In 1910 he signed for Huddersfield and played for the Rugby League Lions in Australia. When he retired he settled in Yorkshire and in the 1930s became the coach at Morley Rugby Union Club. In 1978 Morley held its centenary and in its brochure printed a picture of the 1936 Morley first team, including a head and shoulders shot of Gronow in the back row. Each person in the photograph is named with the exception of Gronow who is described as `unknown'. When asked why the Morley club had done this, Henry Holliday, chairman of the club, said that it was necessary to `forget' Gronow in order `to save embarrassment'. Holliday admitted he knew who Gronow was but didn't feel able to name him because `the rulebook says that a player of his calibre should not be a coach for a Rugby Union club like ours'. (Note the words `his calibre'.) The fact that Gronow had committed himself to Morley and given freely of his services as a coach in his later years meant nothing to the diehards. The men of Morley had not found it within themselves to honour and accept Gronow as one of their own. They denied the player his right to be remembered as well as his right to a name. In the photograph, Gronow lost not only his position in the club but also his position in society. Since he had no name he had no business being in the photograph. The absence of position signified intrusion; it reduced the coach to the status of a simpleton, a hanger-on in what appeared to be (in the centenary brochure) an exclusive event.21 The disappearance of the `defector' is by no means an odd or freakish occurrence in Rugby Union circles. In the 1980s Nigel Starmer-Smith presented a feature on the sporting record of the Hesford family on `Rugby Special'. Bob was described as playing Rugby Union for England and keeping goal for Blackpool F.C., while his sister was seen playing hockey for England. Brother Steve at the time was an outstanding fullback for Warrington but he never got a mention. `I thought', says the journalist Jack McNamara, `that if this was a mistake it was a bad one and if it was deliberate it was shameful'.22 But how does one shame a Rugby Union commentator? For the Union guru the emptying of minds and washing of hands has been an act of faith for generations. As time is rewound on the spool of memory we enter the world of Pol Pot's Year Zero. Ben Gronow and Steve Hesford have never existed. They inhabit the realm of the living dead, condemned to dwell in some underworld of perpetual exclusion. They are the unnamed ghosts of rugby in Britain. Excluded from the proceedings of rugby history, they are quietly erased from the sporting record. The game of Rugby Union has been shaped by a racially conservative view of the world, one that is dominated by WASP values and cultural agoraphobia. Rugby League, on the other hand, a game often pilloried in Britain for its provincial values and its unwillingness to spread beyond a narrow, northern corridor, has wholeheartedly embraced the ideal of multiracialism throughout its history. The accusations of prodigality and delinquency have, nevertheless, left their mark on the character of Rugby League. For one hundred years Rugby League folk have been described by the Rugby Union as having somehow forfeited their moral character, as well as their right to be included in rugby conversations. Rugby League has grown weary of being sidelined, yet the parent has been relentless, persistently disowning the wayward child. Rugby League has been seen as the psychopathic offspring, the fugitive infant on the run from history, while the loss of a protecting and advising parent has never allowed it to be embraced or forgiven. The recognition it seeks, that place in the sun the Rugby Union denied it - the dream of becoming a national sport - has never occurred. Yet the story of Rugby League is not, as one might imagine, that of the white, working class seeking to create a world unto itself. It is a story of outward tendencies, an attempt to break the imprisoning insularities, an infatuation with the possibilities of race and cosmopolitanism, coupled with a desire to investigate the borderless states that athletes of talent, whatever their background, are capable of achieving. Rugby League in Britain has thrived on a mixture of migrant flows and native traditions. Within the boundaries of the industrial town it has sought to blend together, over the last sixty years, indigenous and immigrant cultures in new and experimental forms. Players of colour like Ces Thompson or Roy Francis or George Bennett are an integral part of the games history. Jason Robinson, Danny Wilson, Calvin Wilkes, Roy Powell, Ellery Hanley, St.John Ellis, Des Drummond, Phil Ford, Anthony Sullivan, Ikram Butt, Hussein M'Barki, Alan Hunte, Eddie Rombo, Francis Jarvis - these are just some of the more recent names who have made that experiment possible for the fans on the terrace. When the Rugby Union talk of defection they wilfully obscure the spirit of openness in Rugby League. They falsify those traditions that have allowed many of the games greatest figures - outsiders like Jim Sullivan and Billy Boston - to be loved and accepted as if they were born and bred in the north. Here is the inexplicable paradox of Rugby League. The game still finds itself unable to escape the imprisoning definitions of geography and class. It is riddled with parochial interests and anti-intellectualisms and dogged by feuds and tribal blood-letting. Yet, for all its faults, Rugby League remains admirably committed to a radical policy on race and colour, one that has taken it, in the 1990s, on a new adventure in the South African townships of Alexandria and Soweto. 1
Witness the decision by Harlequins RUFC, for the 1996 season, to sell
their name to a Japanese electronics company, NEC. Armstrong, 196, 1.
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