 Sorry, but boo. This was the Rugby World Cup that was going to extend rugby’s horizon. The game would show a surprising new face in unfamiliar surroundings to hundreds of thousands of potential start-up fans and players. Then the IRB decided to give RWC 2011 to New Zealand, and not Japan. This was a gift not just of the Cup, but of the cup too. Not even the flakey All Blacks could fail to win the Webb Ellis trophy with home advantage, though they tried their best, offering at the last a glimmer of hope to anyone who loves the game.
That hope was extinguished. The All Blacks held on for their win that had been ordained since the IRB decision in 2006. There were no surprises. The All Blacks win their first World Cup since 1987, thus bringing to an end the narrative spice that has made the first 24 years of the Rugby World Cup such a success: the All Blacks will be the best team and they will not win. Think how rugby would have closed in on itself if New Zealand had triumphed each time they assembled the best team in the tournament: 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007. Only New Zealanders have shed a tear over their team’s failure to kill the sport stone dead.
Now that they’ve managed to win again, albeit at home by one point to a limited French side, the rugby world should stop the toxic mixture of pity and cowering that has characterised the IRB relationship to the All Blacks. New Zealand rugby administrators have played a smart game ever since they politically outmanouevred the Japanese in the bidding for RWC 2011. In their black jackets and black ties they work both sides: as a small nation with limited revenue New Zealand needs special dispensations before the World Cup becomes too big for their limited infrastructure. They spin a story which says poor little New Zealand.
Conveniently, this obscures the fact that in rugby terms New Zealand is a superpower, and not averse to bullying those with less political rugby muscle. Witness their bleating in the middle of this World Cup that they might not have enough money to attend the next one. Here was the classic double-play – ‘poor us’ immediately followed by an implied threat. Do what we want or we won’t be coming.
Let’s hope that the All Black administration can now put aside its self-pity, and see that rugby has interests outside the land of the long white cloud. Their bullying, whining insistence (yes, both at the same time – not pretty) that this World Cup be held in New Zealand has set back the ambitions of the game by at least eight years. However great a success this tournament might have been inside New Zealand, from outside it has been a drag. The story ended exactly as predicted. Each time an intriguing narrative threatened to make the tournament interesting, it was snuffed out by conservative play or incomprehensible refereeing.
Well done New Zealand. We no longer pity you. I hope that means we can stop indulging the caprice of your unhelpful rugby politics.
 In 2003, I went to Japan as Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, a post that had evolved from the Professorship held in 1924 by the First World War poet Edmund Blunden. Blunden wrote the prose account of his wartime experiences, Undertones of War, in the shadow of the University’s grand Red Gate referring only to some trench-maps and his anxious unforgetting.
Blunden’s time in Tokyo was immensely productive, inspiring new poems, edited texts, critical commentaries. He also kept up with his beloved cricket (there is a separate chapter on Cricket in Barry Webb’s definitive biography). However, my own combination of interests meant that while teaching in his shadow I was presented with a literary scoop, or so I hope.
I had largely forgotten about this until now, but in one of my classes I had the pleasure of teaching Mr Iba, a mature student and former President of the Tokyo University Rugby Club. He had read Muddied Oafs, and enthusiastically introduced me to a spirited live version of the Tokyo University Rugby Club song. I was intrigued that it should be in English, and before long we were both researching its provenance.
We eventually discovered that the poem had been written in 1924 and presented to Mr Kayama, a rugby enthusiast who had written the first book about the sport’s development in Japan.
[A mini-extract, as kindly translated by Mr Iba:
1. We play Rugby to satisfy our Fighting Spirits sleeping in our blood.
2. But, We have to control it by our Gentlemanship.]
Blunden scholars will surely let me know if this lyric has surfaced in the past. If not, I hesitantly claim the rediscovery of a lost work by Edmund Blunden, two verses of poetry that remain a living force in twenty-first century Japan.
Up, Up!
I hear from winters long ago
Resounding to the frosty sky
The shouts of “Feet, feet, feet!” “Go low!”
The splendid roar that hailed the try.
I hear from winters yet to come
Those old glad cries from new throats hurled,
And feel, when you and I are dumb,
Still Rugby will refresh the world.
Friend, may this book of yours advance
This noble sport in old Japan
Till your disciples take on France,
England, New Zealand; when they can,
May we be there to swell the cheers
That loud and brilliant will proclaim
‘Japan’s first try!’ In after years,
Could your heart wish a happier fame?
I hope I can contribute to the happy posthumous fame of Mr Kayama, who was an apostle for rugby in the early days in Japan. The optimistic, global sentiment of the last line of Blunden’s first verse also seems fitting in a World Cup Year.
 The poem is still sung boisterously to round off Tokyo University Rugby Club functions, to the tune shown here (and Mr Iba intends to have it sung at his funeral). The music was composed by Mr Ryo Watanabe, in 1925, so the song (or Yell, as it is now known by the rugby club) was written soon after Blunden’s arrival. Perhaps he had a few hours to fill: later he would design his own cricket net, and set it up in the local park to await visits from anyone who had ever held a bat.
Edmund Blunden, sports nut, I salute you.
 New French Stash I know I keep promising to post up the first pages of J’suis pas plus con, or rather, I promised once and I always keep my promises.
I have, however, been distracted by two issues. Computer malfunctions, which are boring. And stash.
As an ambitious rugby player, I used to have the same hunger for stash as everyone else. ’Stash’ was the stuff that came with selection to a team. Stash is the extras, the perks, the over-and-aboves, and in those days, before the ease of printing onto synthetic materials, stash was expensive and therefore reserved most often for representative teams. It was worth having.
Typical items would be tracksuits, training tops, match shorts, maybe even a team-branded bag. It was the players’ version of been there, done that. Or if you were picked on the bench, been there, haven’t done that, but got some stash so my time wasn’t completely wasted.
Stash in sport is now out of control. There is even a company called Stash, who provide exactly the kind of accessory gear I’m talking about it (as well as this magnificent design for a rugby shirt, as enabled by modern print technology) . Every team in the land, turning their backs on natural fibres, gets personalised stuff because … well, because they can.
What happens to all this gear? It gets used for its original purpose, just out of the packet for the important match. Then it doesn’t get used because you’re dropped from the team, or move regions and don’t want to make enemies. Then it’s worn once more for validation when you’re training juniors, as a reminder of who you once were (both to them and to yourself.)
After that the stash stays in the attic for sentimental reasons until time drains it of meaning. I have a collection of fading sportswear emblazoned with the names of forgotten sponsors, usually local accountants or providers of ‘building services’.
 Those were the days Well this week I was reminded that stash also exists for writers. I’m immensely pleased with the bookmarks and the posters made for the French edition of Dry Bones by In Octavo. Stash for the writer, like stash for the rugby player, is confirmation that the core activity (the writing/playing) doesn’t come anywhere near reflecting the amount of work that goes into even the smallest triumph. Stash is tangible evidence that the effort was intended to create a world that can grow, that is growing, that can generate clothing and stationery and (why not?) cigarette lighters.
My X 20 Zippo cigarette lighter, the brainchild of Harper Collins, remains the best bit of writer’s stash I’ve ever had.
 - The Real Thing
There’s an old rugby saying: if you’re good enough, you’re big enough. The actor Matt Damon would have to be very good indeed. In Clint Eastwood’s new film Invictus, Damon plays the role of 1995 Rugby World Cup winning captain Francois Pienaar. He is 5 inches shorter and 4 stones lighter – the All Blacks would snap him in half.
At 5’10” Matt Damon is also shorter than Nelson Mandela (6’1”), who in Eastwood’s film is played by Morgan Freeman (6’2”). Winning the World Cup as the shortest man in the room is the kind of exploit that Hollywood loves.
Invictus is based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, which describes Nelson Mandela’s use of rugby to seduce white South Africans to his vision of the Rainbow Nation. ‘Don’t address their brains,’ he said at the time, ‘address their hearts.’ And deep in the Afrikaaner heart is a love of Rugby Union.
For a potential Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster, the obscurity of rugby presents a problem. What, exactly, is this strange-looking game? The bemused film critic of the Tucson Weekly described the Invictus sports action as ‘a bunch of guys groaning a lot,’ while over at the Kansas City Star rugby ‘pretty much looks like a group mugging.’
Over here, though, everything will be different. We know what rugby is supposed to look like.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen Invictus and rugby doesn’t look like this. As with any sporting setback, it’s not fair to place all the blame on the captain. Matt Damon isn’t given much of a team. His stand-in Springboks look like college boys, though not necessarily students of acting, and their emotional range is limited even for rugby players. They sometimes cross their arms to express indignation.
These are pat-a-cake Springboks led by mini-Matt Damon and they will never win the Webb-Ellis Trophy. In that sense, the casting is perfect for the formula – Nelson can lick the boys into shape. If they follow his crazy reconciling ways, then one day, perhaps at a World Cup on home soil, they will ultimately prevail.
 The Anxiety of Influence Eastwood, too, is in the business of addressing hearts and not brains. Mandela is a complicated man in a troublesome country, but as with the rugby it’s easier to keep things simple. The Mandela bio-pic soon becomes a plot-standard sports movie: he’s black, he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, but can kindly ex-con Nelson Mandela inspire a bunch of undersized students to become Rugby Champions of the World?
Maybe he can, if these actor Boks show they know their rugby. I certainly hadn’t written them off in advance, especially as in America Invictus was rated PG 13, for ‘brutal sport action’.
Which is exactly what rugby should provide, when played properly. By ‘properly’, I mean as we’re used to seeing it on TV, most of the weeks of the year. To capture the full dynamism and grace of the game, and also the brutality, TV sticks to the basics. High-spec cameras follow the action.
In Invictus, because the players aren’t a patch on the real thing, the camera does exactly the opposite. It obscures the action. Eastwood keeps cutting away, and no single sporting sequence is allowed to develop.
I can see just enough to make out that Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky is having a bad day with the boot. He can’t punt a rugby ball, and his incompetence is so striking (in a Test Match, Brian!) that I want to see immediate replays of his flawed technique.
That’s my Pavlovian TV-spectator response to unusual sports phenomena, a category that includes all the rugby in this film. I want Eddie Butler to explain why the wingers don’t sprint and the Samoans are weak in defence. Is it the altitude? Have the All Blacks been poisoned? And why has Andrew Mehrtens appeared in a World Cup final wearing an Andrew Mehrtens wig?
Instead of this sense of involvement, I gradually realise I’m watching the one activity on earth that is as far from real life as it’s possible to get: the rugby looks like amateur dramatics.
And in Invictus there’s no escape, because the ‘95 Final is shown at length, almost thirty minutes of ersatz rugby action. The fearsome Jonah Lomu is replaced by a slightly chubby student. He is occasionally jumped on by other students, but before we can assess his contact skills the camera cuts to another unrelated set-up. There are scuffed kick-offs and elementary back-moves, all performed at rehearsal pace so as not to confuse Wisconsin.
Eastwood knows something is wrong. How could entire nations be in thrall to this? He therefore decides that the fervour of rugby is best expressed by sound-effects.
 Springbok Back Line In Invictus, the major injury risk to the players is earache. Every tackle boofs like a blunt object thumped into stuffed leather, and out comes the stuffing as grunts and oomphs. This is the aural equivalent of the Batman biff and boom.
Just when the rugby can’t get any worse, the match goes slow-mo. On television, slow-motion exists to repeat the interesting bits. In feature films, it means the emotional heft is so weighty that time stands still. Or feels like it does.
As the action slows, so does the sound. Ellis Park fills with whale-song, as the groans wallow deeply from one amateur tackle to the next. The Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky, who isn’t Stransky and who has forgotten his kicking boots, is calling for the ball in slow-audio, an unintelligible last word direct from a Hollywood battlefield, possibly Iwo Jima, and I expect him at any moment to receive (tragically) a solitary bullet between the eyes.
Instead he pops over a drop goal.
Clint gives rugby the fatal Hollywood treatment. In doing so, he undermines his film about Nelson Mandela, the nature of leadership, and the new South Africa.
In the best Hollywood sports films, usually about baseball or boxing, the protagonists are allowed to be grown men. Their lives depend upon their sport. The 1995 Springboks were also men, much closer to the flawed and grizzled heroes of Eastwood’s earlier work than they are to the college-boys of Invictus. They were playing for their old life and their new life, and also for themselves.
It does the truth of the story a disservice to insist, less than fifteen years after the event, that Mandela and the Boks can be simplified to serve the narrative conventions of this film. The rugby is central to this weakness. It becomes apparent long before the end that the epiphany of Invictus depends on the Springboks winning the Cup.
South Africa win. The film ends, and as choral arrangements squeeze the last sentimental tear from any dry eye, the credits roll against a montage of still photographs from the final. The real one.
There is a photograph of Nelson Mandela, the great man himself, at Ellis Park before kick-off. He is famously wearing the No.6 Springbok jersey, in green-and-gold, and he looks tiny against the blonde Afrikaaner bulk of Pienaar, the man he called ‘captain of rugby’. Anyone genuinely inspired by Nelson Mandela, and indeed by the game of rugby itself, will know that the triumph would have been as great if South Africa had lost.
 'mental about fighting' I was reminded about this because I was thinking about the translator Marie Rennard, who came up with the title Le Rugbyman Nomade. In French, ‘le rugbyman’ is a commonly used term for those lucky souls with a passion for the sport of rugby. However, it means more than that, just as ‘le cricketman’ would be someone with more than a casual interest in cricket. ‘Le rugbyman’ is a rugby nutter. He’s mental about rugby. This is because the ‘man’ in ‘le rugbyman’ comes from the wide-eyed man in maniac.
I’ve always liked this false-friend aspect of ‘Le Rugbyman’, as if everyone who plays rugby is indeed a superhero, with a big R in a shield across the front of his stripey jersey. Bird, Plane, Rugbyman – Dru could draw this in her sleep.
Knowing that the man comes from the maniac has wider consequences when the French meet our English-language superheroes. I mean the real ones.
Spiderman, pronounced Speederrhhman, is a confused newspaper reporter who is mental about spiders. Superman is a general, all-round, 24-hour basket-case – Supermaniac. He is the maniac above all others. Either that, or he just loves everything that’s super. He’s the original Hero of Super, a Superhero.
Batman gets a double misunderstanding, but barely suffers (he’s superhuman) in translation. Small French boys love Batman, but not because he has a friend called Robin or was bitten by a bat as a child. They’re immediate fans because here they have a superhero, just like them, who loves to ‘battre’. He’s Batman, a maniac about fighting, which about sums him up.
Language. What a Marvel.
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of The National Academy of Writing in London. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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