In Italy, Benito Mussolini re-branded rugby as palla ovale, deciding it was an evolution of the classic Roman games feninda and harpastum. [...]]]> Old boys of the empire rugby nations are often charicatured as red-faced buffoons in blazers with wire badges, but elsewhere the game has a different feel, a stubborn history of social dissent and non-conformism.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini re-branded rugby as palla ovale, deciding it was an evolution of the classic Roman games feninda and harpastum. This new and frankly surprising Italian pedigree qualified the game to serve as a vehicle for fascist unity, and by 1927 rugby had its own propaganda committee. Palla ovale was going to revitalize Italian masculinity while teaching the subjugation of the individual to the needs of the group.

Rugby wouldn’t oblige. Despite the team framework, the game has always favoured individualism, from the moment in 1823 when William Webb Ellis first picked up the ball ‘with a fine disregard for the rules.’ Disobedience is at the source.

Mussolini found rugby inconveniently resistant to authority, the after-match irreverence as important to the players as the game itself. He dropped the sport in disgust, and for fascist purposes turned to volata, a malleable kind of handball.

These days, Italian rugby players are non-conformist simply because they’re not playing football. The same is true in the USA, where the football not being played is the gridiron game with pads and helmets. Rugby is the dissenting alternative, and many of today’s U.S. clubs were founded or revived at the time of student unrest in the 1960’s.

Rugby was part of a general campus awakening. Any big lads who fancied a ruck but also long hair and peace, man, rejected the authoritarian structures of American football. They wanted freedom, not drill-sergeant coaching routines, and because rugby was free of institutional funding it could be organized in a co-operative spirit by the players themselves.

It was in his rebellious student period that George W Bush played fullback for Yale. If the future president retained little from his exposure to the joys of non-conformism, then the same can’t be said for Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

There’s no doubting Che’s commitment. He loved rugby despite crippling asthma attacks and the disapproval of his father, and his team-mates gave him the affectionate nickname ‘Furious’. He founded and edited a rugby magazine called ‘Tackle’, and as a student world revolution came second to his passion for a game that rewards inspired leadership and a love of tumult.

Anyone with a fondness for this non-blazered tradition will be hoping that at the World Cup Argentina can continue to disrupt rugby’s established world order. Intelligent, aggressive, unapologetic, the Pumas are playing as if their compatriot Che was giving the pep-talk: “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

Different countries take the [...]]]> Men and women all over the world would like to be fearless, tough, stoical, and accepted into an amiably like-minded team that wants and needs to work together. It’s not just New Zealanders. This explains why the game of rugby is spreading, and the less established rugby nations growing stronger.

Different countries take the universal rugby values and shape them in different ways, and Japan is a good example. Watch closely the next time a Japanese player is replaced during a match. He will turn after crossing the white line and bow to the opposition, to his team-mates, to the pitch itself. This is a ritual familiar from martial arts – the rugby player is saluting his large open-air dojo.

In Japan, rugby shares history with judo and kendo as a vehicle for keeping alive the samurai ideals of bushido, the way of the warrior. When the game entered the country through the port cities of Yokohama and Kobe more than a hundred years ago, a modernising Japan was looking to graft ancient values onto activities that didn’t involve swords and necks.

The martial arts of the pre-Meiji era samurai were collectively known as bujitsu. The values that derived from these combat skills, and crossed over into the modern age, became budo. In that sense, bujitsu is to budo what jujitsu is to judo, the latter a codified and sanitised version of the former. At first glance it seems that rugby is more of a budo sport, especially as a striking feature of Japanese rugby is the lack of violence outside the rules. There is a reason for this: the game provides for plenty of violence within the rules.

Rugby’s unabashed mayhem makes the game more bujitsu than either kendo or judo, and socially it was preferable because a team sport allowed elite samurai values to be introduced quickly and efficiently to a wider population. This is how rugby found its way into the new national education system, so that there was already a high-school national championship by 1918.

Ever since, Japanese rugby has continued to encourage and instil the samurai virtues of seishin ryoku (spiritual strength). In rugby there will always be takers for ganburu (do your absolute best) isshokenmei (give everything), konjo (bottle) and gaman (endurance and perseverance).

Whereas Western sports-people grow fit on a dual philosophy of healthy body healthy mind, Japanese sports involve a third element, the spirit. The concept of seishin implies body, mind, and spirit, all three together the vital ingredients for success.

This is where the established nations can learn from those they usually disregard. The 6 Nations teams are physically honed and psychologically tuned, yet when these preparations fail they promise at least to play with ‘heart’. They haven’t fully understood what’s required. They don’t have the language.

Le scrum is not a [...]]]> Visitors to this year’s Rugby World Cup will notice, at least during daylight hours, that the natives are speaking a foreign language. This is the first tournament hosted by a non-English-speaking nation, and in its rugby vocabulary France insists that the game is more than muscles and bish-bosh, even at scrum-time.

Le scrum is not a word that rugbymen across the Channel decided to adopt. They could have done so, alongside le drop, but for the heart of the battle they revived instead la mêlée, a word last used in a competitive context in the 11th century. In the medieval period la mêlée was used to describe collisions of courtly knights in mock battles. Plus ça change. In rugby, too, elite specimens of French manhood display skill and courage while risking injury. They strive at a contest invested with ancient virtues such as honour, loyalty, perseverance, self-control and, once the lists are over, courtesy and hospitality.

English-speaking rugby arrives at a similar place by way of 19th-century muscular Christianity, but the vive la différence is in the detail. The troubadours who immortalised the original mêlées first emerged in Languedoc, one of France’s most passionate rugby regions. Among other chivalric ideals, these singing, drinking raconteurs also popularised notions of courtly love, and the French language allows modern rugby knights to compete for their own aloof and highly valued elle, the ball itself.

For “ball”, footballers in France kick about le ballon. La balle is more commonly chased by rugbymen, especially in the South, and the feminine noun more accurately suits a Gallic idea that the unpredictable, infuriating rugby ball, never bouncing in the expected direction, has to be female. She’s unreliable, desirable, valuable, dangerous. Elle, elle, elle, they say, and of course they’re talking with reverence about the ball.

It’s the shape of this ball that has led to another, newer term, L’Ovalie. This refers to an entire rugby-shaped world-view. L’Ovalie is life through oval-framed spectacles, with the game at the centre of a robust, good-humoured, staunch, well-fed, half-cut attitude of romanticised independence. L’Ovalie appeals to the oppositional instincts in the French soul that have always been well served by rugby – oval against round, villages against towns, the South West against Paris, and, in the international arena, Francophones against the global Anglophone conspiracy.

Rugby union needs the teams that don’t speak English. Without them, the sport can look like an old boys’ gathering of ageing Home Nations and bullying former colonies, all with a patronising disdain for anyone who can’t immediately find a rhyme for rugger.

Sadly for the French, their first match on home soil was against the other nonEnglish speaking country to have made serious international progress. Merde.