A Jew stands in a muddy field. The air is cold, the rain blows horizontal from the north. He is not appropriately dressed, because they would not let him dress appropriately. Those are the rules. Just shorts, boots and a thin cotton jersey. Then out into the rain. Out! Out! Out!
The Jew is small. He is nine or ten years old. He does not see so well, either because such is the lot of his race or because he spends all his time reading. He isn’t sure which. The two are kind of entwined.
His teeth chatter. The tip of his nose burns. His hands are tucked inside the ends of his wet, cotton sleeves, thumbs inside the fingers, and he shivers. Beneath his feet are the remains of a smeary, painted white line. Far away, through the rain and the myopia, he can dimly make out the rumpus of 29 huge Gentiles fighting for their lives (and possibly, to be fair, a couple of larger-than-average Jews — one doesn’t want to overdo the pogrom element of what is just a normal games afternoon in the late 1970s at an English prep school in the rugger season). There are intermittent roars of joy and despair, the thump of boots and heads and leather, then the thud of one of the biggest boots and something goes airborne in the mist.
A head? No, a ball. And charging after it comes the pack of 29 monstrous goyim (and, yes, possibly the odd unusually hefty Semite), thundering towards him across the mud, screeching like Picts.
“Not to me,” mutters the little Jew under his breath. “Not to me. Please!”
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But as the ball arcs downwards on its parabola (the little Jew knows so much more about the trajectory of falling objects under gravity than he does about rugby), it’s clear that it’s coming right for him. The little Jew sets himself . . . and pouches the catch with ease in his red, frozen little hands.
“The English find their sporting apogee in a scrap between morons
Are you surprised? Don’t be. This little Jew is no malco (to use one of the least offensive terms available in that cruel decade). He may be small but he is quick, well-balanced and good with his hands and feet. That is why he is in the football team and the cricket team — games of actual skill and guile — and was even on the boxing team, enjoying the fair and level combat in his weight group, until the school banned boxing for being dangerous. But rugby, this is something else altogether.
With the ball safely in hand the little Jew sets off, running, his short legs pumping ten to the dozen and covering the ground with astonishing speed.
“Coren!” comes a yell from the touchline (the Jew, quite obviously, is me). “You’re running the wrong way!”
And there’s the madness of it. I’m four foot five or six and maybe four-and-a-half stone, I’ve caught this bloody ball. There’s a mob of much larger boys bearing down who want it off me. And you expect me to run TOWARDS THEM?
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Well I’m not. I’m bloody not.
So the little Jew runs and runs until eventually they catch him and bring him heavily to ground, and trample him, and tear his clothes and bloody his nose and make their metal stud marks on his back.
And who gets the bollocking for not entering into the spirit of the game?
The little Jew, of course.
That afternoon (and other afternoons like it) left me with a mortal distaste for rugby, which is a dumb game for giant, malcoordinated thickos. There’s no skill in it at all, no dexterity. It is a game whose only requirement, like basketball, is size. It’s just the biggest people available playing catch but with punching. Little wonder that the English, with their disregard for individual genius in sport and their veneration for hard work, bravery and blind allegiance, find their sporting apogee in a backwards-moving territorial scrap between enormous morons in which technical ability on the ball is all but incidental.
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But would I ban it? Which is effectively what the ban on tackling in school rugby — proposed this week by a bunch of goofy left-wing educationalists — would do, by reducing it to little more than a game of piggy-in-the-middle? Hell, no I wouldn’t. Because, you see, I’ve got this son.
And Samuel, my boy, is not a Jew. Nor is he little. Thanks to Viking genes on his mother’s side, Sam is in what they call the 90th percentile for height and the 95th for weight, and has been since birth. Which means that he will not only be extremely tall, but heavy for his height. He will also, thanks to his maternal grandmother, be Welsh.
At two and a half, my Sam is the height and weight of a healthy five-year-old, with legs like York hams and an arse on him like Victor Ubogu. And all he wants to do is tuck a ball under his arm (or a stuffed rabbit or a plastic tractor) and run at you, screaming, and hit you hard. In the balls. And laugh when you go down.
Sam will not play “chase”. If you shout “Here I come!” at my little golem, he shouts “okay!” and charges straight at you, head down.
But he is also a total malc. Can’t catch, can’t throw, can’t cross a room without bumping into (and breaking) a table. He will never have the skill for football or the guile for cricket or the grace for tennis. But it doesn’t matter because what my beautiful, big, clumsy, fearless, fiery Welsh son was put on earth for is rugby.
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Because of this, I have been gradually coming round to the “ugly game” (does everyone call it that or just me?). I watch the mini-rugby on Hampstead Heath on a Saturday and long to toss him in there. But I can’t until he’s six years old (although I’d worry for your six-year-old playing rugby with Samuel even now).
So I’d be furious if in the meantime these lefty do-gooders were allowed to destroy rugby. I hated the game myself, and the lumpen brutality it stood for, but I survived to create a monster. And I want to live to see him wreak my revenge for me, on the field, smashing heads and breaking bones. The first Coren in history whose instinct with a ball in his hand and a muddy field full of charging men in front of him, is to run the way an Englishman is supposed to run. Forwards.