The cauliflower-eared and good-hearted show fans can be champions
Peter FitzSimons
September 3, 2011
WHAT is a Rugby World Cup anyway? A gathering of the 20 best rugby teams in the world? Yes, I suppose. But that is, dinkum, the least of it. Those 20 teams will be responsible for about 600 players hitting Kiwi shores. (OK, OK, in the professional era, you can add perhaps another 1200 coaches, assistant coaches, assistant-assistant coaches, statisticians, video analysts and sundry hangers-on, but anyway.)
The real gathering, what the whole thing is about, is the quadrennial Carnival of the Cauliflower Ears. This carnivals sees broadly ugly men and oft-beautiful women from across the globe - just under 100,000 of them - quietly leaving their places of residence to noisily gather in the country where the World Cup is held, so they can for once be truly among their own. Hence why this World Cup will likely be even more joyous than most, as it is being held in a country where the preponderance of ugly men and beautiful women is well up into Guinness Book of Records territory. But I digress …
The wonderful thing about this carnival is that it has a culture all its own, unique in the world of sport and best exemplified by a scene I saw in Marseille during the last World Cup in 2007. For on the weekend of the quarter-finals, after South Africa played Fiji and Australia played England, there by Marseille harbour were tens of thousands of rugby fans, carrying on into the wee hours - drinking, dancing, cavorting and hugging each other for no good reason - and all of it with no security! At least 50,000 people there, with not a gendarme in sight, for there was no need - they were rugby people. And right there, dear friends, we can discern certain rules of behaviour for the Caulis and Caulettes of the Carnival.
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Rugby people are only occasionally violent on the field, never off it. No matter how passionate the fan, how close the game, what atrocities were committed in the course of it, once it is over there and the fans gather for the troisieme mi-temps, the third half, there is no propensity of rugby fans to burn down stadiums, they just burn the candle at both ends. If their team loses they don't storm en masse into downtown and trash the joint, the worst they do is get trashed themselves. They don't embrace violence, they embrace each other.
Why is this so? At least one factor is this: in most countries rugby is the minority sport and while rugby people remain passionate about the pursuit, it is such a joy to be at the Carnival among others of like mind - and equally cauliflowered ears - that you feel you're among your own kind.
An example of this global fervour and flavour of the true rugby fan came just before a pool match of the 2003 World Cup when Scotland was about to play Japan in Townsville. In front of the stadium a young Japanese man was standing dressed in the garb of a samurai warrior, playing the bagpipes. On those bagpipes he was playing Waltzing Matilda.
Bingo! Our kind of guy.
And the other factor is this. Rugby is the most inclusive of all games. If you were at a basketball world cup and were on the lookout for fellow basketball players, you can bet nine out of 10 of them would be very tall. A gathering of shotput people would see most of them squat with broad shoulders. Archery people, I guess, tend to walk around with one eye closed and gymnasts could sit on a see-saw with a lettuce at the other end and hold their own.
But the joy of rugby is that it says: one in, all in! If you're fat and slow, you can be a prop. Skinny and fast and you hate human contact of all kinds you can be on the wing; so egotistical you think the best way to change a light bulb is to hold it up and let the whole world revolve around you, you're five-eighth. Tall and debonair with the heart of a lion, you're in the second row. Five years old, you're in the juniors, 80 years old and you're in the Golden Oldies with purple shorts. Good player, you're in the firsts, so-so player you're in the sixths, just so long as you play. Girl, boy, man, woman, young, old, gay, straight, Caucasian, Asian, Black, Hispanic, it doesn't matter - and all of that permeates the crowd that will be there at the Rugby World Cup.
So, yes, there will be the world's best teams playing in New Zealand, but they aren't the main game. It is the Carnival of the Cauliflower Ears that counts and that will go on, whatever happens to our own teams. Party, hearty.
pfitzsimons@smh.com.au
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-union/un...#ixzz1X245URLM
