The Rugby Chronicles 3: Brutal, but nice

Even if you have seen rugby on TV, watching it live for the first time is disconcerting. It looks chaotic and barbarous; it does not seem to make sense. If you have become friendly with the players your face is frozen into a grimace—they are getting clobbered.

But here’s the thing: they signed up to get clobbered. On some level, they want to get clobbered.

This is one of the reasons the sport of rugby may be a hard sell in the Philippines. It’s not that Pinoys don’t want to get hurt—we have full-contact basketball, and we have some terrific boxers. But Pinoys value paporma, papogi, looking good. Why would anyone want to get beaten up and not get paid for it?

More than any other team sport rugby requires that the players trust each other, not just to score a goal (which they call a “try,” as if “goal” would be boasting) but to survive. The cliche “matter of life and death” is in this case a hard fact.

Upon their return to the Philippines the Volcanoes visited the Bahay Bata Orphanage in Pampanga, where they train the kids to play rugby.

Think of the bone-crunching collisions in American football. Think of Jerry Maguire leaning over the unconscious Rod Tidwell, begging him to wake up. Now take away the helmet, the padding, the kevlar and the million-dollar player contracts. “Playing rugby is probably the closest thing to being in a foxhole,” says Jon Morales. “When you pass the ball to a teammate you know he could get killed.”

Or you could get pounced on by three very large guys, which is what happens to Andrew Wolff in the match against Sri Lanka. (The urge to kick Wolff in the face must be overpowering: “Take that, you...model.”) All part of the plan: run run run, tie up your defenders, pass the ball to your support players (and you can only pass backwards, never forwards), who find the open man, who scores the try. Rugby demands a spirit of self-sacrifice.

Or maybe I’m just romanticizing rugby because I could be sitting at home watching a wildlife documentary on National Geographic.

In their first match at the Borneo 7s the Philippine Volcanoes kept losing possession because the Japanese were constantly tackling them. So they make adjustments in the game against Sri Lanka: they hurl themselves at the ball-carrier. It works at first—at the half the Volcanoes are up, 12-5. Then they get sloppy and start turning over the ball, and the opposition keeps finding their big guy who is also very fast. Final score: 26-12 to Sri Lanka.

The atmosphere on the bus is funereal. Manager Phil Gittus puts it into perspective: “We could’ve beaten two Top 5 nations. This is progress.”

The defense was so fierce bodies flew outside the field.

The two losses put the Philippines in the bowl division. At rugby tournaments there are cup, plate, and bowl divisions so everyone goes home with a trophy. Rugby is a very rough sport that requires people to be nice. Tomorrow morning the Volcanoes will play a knockout match for the bowl final in the afternoon. Tonight they have to recover and rest. I say what any Pinoy would say under the circumstances: “Let’s go to the mall and eat.”

Intermission: “When you finish school and get your own place you think, ‘I’m going out every night!’ In the morning you go to the office, in the evening you go to the gym, then you train with your team, then you hit the clubs. You do this for two weeks, and at the end of those two weeks you are very, very tired. All you want to be by 10 pm is asleep.”

The knockout match in the morning is against Chinese Taipei. The Volcanoes quickly score a good try, and then a great try: Wolff is jumped by three defenders but before he hits the ground he passes to Noel Flowers, who evades two Taipei players to find Patrice Olivier, who runs 50 meters then passes to David Carman, who gets tackled just short of the try line but as he goes down, feeds Mark Chatting for the try.

But Chinese Taipei catches up, and in the final minutes the match is tied 12-all with Taipei in possession. That’s when Andrew Everingham takes down the ball-carrier and Flowers intercepts to find Coveney literally screaming down the middle. Coveney runs flat out, dives across the line as the final siren goes off, and makes the try on his face. The Philippines is in the bowl final against Kazakhstan. Too winded to get up, Coveney lifts an arm and high-fives the referee.

Dark skies, rumbling thunder, flashing lightning: RP faces Kazakhstan in the bowl final.

Minutes before the bowl final it starts to rain. The complete sound and fury package—crashing thunder, flashing lightning. They do not stop for rain in rugby; they might consider stopping if lightning hits the goalposts.

Kazakhstan is the second-ranked team in Asia, with the biggest guys in the tournament. The last match is so brutal your eyes feel bruised. Every meter has to be fought for, and the opponents assert their size advantage. They’re not fast and not particularly creative, but everywhere you turn there they are, seemingly rooted to the ground. Neither team will yield; at the end of the first half the score is 0-0.

From where I sit it looks more like wrestling than sevens. One can only speculate on what goes on under the pile of bodies squirming towards the try line. Just when it seems the game will end in a scoreless draw the referee blows the whistle. With 30 seconds left in the match, a penalty is awarded to Kazakhstan. They win, 7-0.

Back in the stands bruises are treated, icebags handed out, muddy laundry collected. I overhear the Ilonggo-Aussie Andrew Farrar describing the Kazakhs’ tactics. “Could you repeat that?” I ask him.

“What?”

“You were describing your opponents.”

“No I wasn’t,” he laughs. “They’re sweethearts. We love those guys.”

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Coverage of the Philippine Volcanoes at the Borneo 7s was made possible by Globe Telecom.