In the National Rugby team of history there are a saint, two Popes, five presidents (USA, France and South Africa), three premiers (UK and Japan), two astronauts, a revolutionary, five Nobel prizes, five Oscars (and 21 nominations), a Palme d’Or, a Golden Lion, a Grammy, and a secret agent who, no, didn’t write 007 on his shirt.
2023 or 200 years of rugby, the only sport named after a city: Rugby, Midlands, England. The “football played in the style of rugby college” was born in 1823: in reality a wonderful legend to summarize in a gesture and in a nebulous character the long modeling of a game then landed all over the world from the ships of the British Empire.
Pupil and future clergyman William Webb Ellis reportedly “broke the rules and ran forward holding the ball in his hands” on the school lawn two centuries ago. The success, already in the middle of the century (see the novel Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes of 1857), was sensational thanks to the intuition of the principal of the Rugby college, Thomas Arnold, who preached “Play and be a man” to the children of nobles and wealthy: a “muscular Christianity” to grow in the service of society with discipline, sense of responsibility and team strategies. The first team game to be codified and become mandatory in schools to form the backbone of imperial power also dealing with the lacerating consequences of the first industrial revolution. The gentlemen brought up with this spirit could only reject professionalism with horror, which arrived only in 1995, thus allowing many rugby players to make goals in other sectors of life as well. And only since 1987 has the world cup been held, named after William Webb Ellis, which will have its tenth edition in France in September.
Here then are the 15 starters, the 12 reserves (as many as have already experimented with some villainy) and the staff of technicians and managers. And finally a further group of players summoned to the stands. Some characters will certainly have remained out and someone else will be out of role: in the comments section at the bottom of the article you can have your say, opinions that will be reported in the updates of the text.
The 15 starters
Left prop is Javier Bardem, an Oscar-winning actor, who made it to the Spanish national youth teams in that tough front-line role. Even two appearances in the US senior national team for NASA astronaut and hooker Anne McClain. Yes, a single woman in the match sheet does not seem to adequately represent the impetuous growth of women’s rugby, but in fact women have only played rugby regularly since the early 1980s, not even two generations: the next national team in history, in a few years, will see many more players on the field.
Right prop (evangelical cornerstone of the scrum, source and architrave of the game) is Saint Karol Wojtyla, Pope who played rugby in his seminary years
In the second line two lungagnoni: the Venetian hydrologist engineer Andrea Rinaldo, the only Italian holder, who on August 27 will receive the Stockholm Water Prize, the Nobel for Water, 4 times in blue, also challenging the All Blacks and author of the illuminating essay “Del rugby. Towards an ecology of the oval ball”, and the French president Jacques Chirac, player of the Brive. In the third row is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who lost the use of an eye playing for Kirkaldy college in Scotland. Then US President Bill Clinton, on the field several times while studying at Oxford.
Devastating number eight, the Welsh actor Richard Burton, after the youth national teams would have reached the senior one if he hadn’t become an actor with 7 Oscar nominations. He once took his wife Liz Taylor to cheer for Wales at Cardiff’s Arms Park.
Now the control room entrusted to the unpredictable inspiration and courage of the scrum-half Ernesto “Che” Guevara, star of San Isidro (he played above all three-quarters) and founder of Tackle magazine (tackling), supported by the strategist Tony Blair, dazzling three-quarters for Fettes College (also set for the Harry Potter saga) and for the University of Oxford.
At the “centers” the writers John Ronald Ruel Tolkien and Salman Rushdie: the Lord of the Rings was proud of the shirt of King Edward’s School and Exeter College, Oxford, while the author of the Satanic Verses even played in college Rugby, as Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) had done before him, destined today to the bench.
Cinema and music for the back row: actors Jacques Tati, Oscar for Mon Oncle, who performed the first gags for friends at the Paris Racing Club, and Russell Crowe, Oscar for Gladiator, New Zealander transplanted to Australia, all-round rugby player (at 15, 13 and 7), owner of a rugby league team in Sydney. On the set of the film Master and commander he organized a rugby sevens tournament. Finally, the extreme Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, tumultuous owner at high school in Cambridge: he liked the rules of rugby, but he couldn’t stand those of school. The Grammy award, however, withdrew it.
Available
Joe Biden, the current US president is a great-uncle of Irish international Rob Kaerney and has invited the All Blacks to the White House.
One of his predecessors, George W. Bush, played fullback in the Yale University team. He always played on the edge of regulation, but then yellow and red cards were very rare.
Among the names of the scrum also Gerard Depardieu, Palma and Golden Lion, player and manager of Bordeaux-Begles,
Also among the towers is Eamonn Walsh, former bishop of Dublin, in touch until the age of 42 in Ireland and also on the field in Rome during his studies.
Even for the South African Nobel Prize-winning writer, John Maxwell Coetzee, at the forefront of the fight against apartheid, rugby is the sport of his university years in Cape Town: his essay on the merits and limitations of the game is dazzling, which can be read in the collection “Dubbing the boss”.
Volcanologist, documentary maker and pioneer of the theory of “plate tectonics”, the Belgian-French Haroun Tazieff who played, also as Old, halfway around the world.
Then the actor Peter O’Toole (Oscar winner) Leeds rugby union player converted to 15 by his set and drinking colleague Richard Harris, the Irishman from Garryowen Rfc, Palme d’Or in Cannes for “I am a champion” (rugby league).
From Lewis Carroll we have already mentioned the past in Rugby, while James Joyce once left Trieste to go and see the All Blacks in Paris. And he put the Haka into Finnegans Wake.
Yoshiro Mori, one step away from the national team and then Japanese prime minister and president of the federation.
Hugo Pratt, Rimini-Venetian, second Italian on the match sheet: Corto Maltese’s father distinguished himself with the “Casi” in Argentina: rugby appears in the story “Tango”.
Lo staff
To help the coach Pope Francis, competent and avowed rugby enthusiast and supporter of hundreds of teams in Argentine prisons (Espartanos project), in the management of the national team, is the president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela (remember the film Invictus), Nobel Peace Prize winner, who also used the values of rugby to create the Rainbow nation, and the team manager Jurji Gagarin, the first man in space, who contributed to the birth of the oval federation in the Soviet Union and made rugby the official game of the aeronautical academy.
And then the press officer Albert Camus, Nobel Prize for Literature, who for years asked the Equipe in vain to write about rugby that he madly loved. In PR the Irishman George Bernard Shaw, Nobel Prize for Literature and Oscar for Pygmalion (a stellar encore who remained unique until 2016, well, now there are two, the other is Bob Dylan) author of withering aphorisms on rugby and always in the stands at Lansdowne Road.
Mental coach (ok, chaplain), the South African Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize winner, who supported Mandela in the fight against apartheid and in the construction of the new South Africa without revenge: when Joel Stransky hit the decisive drop for the victory of the Springboks (always see Invictus) of the 1995 World Cup, the archbishop said that “the ball had been carried so high between the posts by the angels”.
Finally, the English international referee Sir Ivor Roberts, former ambassador of the United Kingdom also in Rome. For the safety of the team, who better than Daniel Craig? If he hadn’t stopped too soon, 007, the gritty trocar of Hoylake Rfc, could also become the starter. As a supporter he has also toured with the Lions and has also visited the England national team in the dressing room at the Olimpico.
In the stands
Strange but true, so far not even a name of the All Blacks: possible? Here then is the scrum-half Chris Laidlawcapped 20 in 1960s, later New Zealand Labor Party leader and diplomat.
Architect, ambassador of Argentina and minister as well as infallible fly-half of the Pumas: Hugo Portain the national team until 1990.
All saints who play rugby? The exception that proves the rule has the size of When All Dada, the dictator of Uganda, who also played for Nile RFC and for British Army teams where he was an officer. He also said that he faced the Lions super selection with East Africa in 1955, but it is not proven.
Another NASA astronaut, on a mission to the ISS with Samantha Cristoforetti: she is the geologist Jessica Andrea Watkins, bronze medal at the rugby 7 World Cup.
Bettino Craxi, leader of the PSI and premier, second line in the youth years in Lombard teams
Giancarlo Dondi, second row, Parma and Fiamme Oro player (a Scudetto): president of the Fir from 1996 to 2012, the president who led Italy to the Six Nations.
Also candidates for the next national team in history are Prince William, godfather of the Welsh Union, his wife Kate Middleton, godmother of the English Union, and his brother Harry who before the last stormy years did not lose a match (even away in the southern hemisphere) of the English national team. The two brothers played college rugby.
So who do you think is missing?
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1970-01-01 00:00:00
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