When I was twelve or so and in my first year of Secondary School, I discovered rugby—or rather, the sport discovered me. A chubby, plump fellow with more energy than talent—I was second to few in the breakneck stampede to the dining hall—I had been tried out and successively thrown off the school’s junior soccer team, the class athletics team, and the dormitory basketball team. Perhaps in what should have been a final straw, even the baseball and woodball captains—theirs’ both then only debuting sports in the school—informed me politely that they’d rather field incomplete teams than risk an ‘‘Achilles’ heel’’ in the formation. ‘ A chain is only as strong as its weakest link!’ the woodball fellow sagely pronounced, fixing me with a gaze more penetrating than a contemptuous laser-beam. This of course notwithstanding that his sport— if I may condescend enough to call it one—was not far removed from a medieval pantomime reenacted in the present-day for little else than the en...
Sojourner · Scribe · Aesthete