Doug PollardRugger buggers lead the way
August 29th 2009 11:28
“Manchester United News” is now following me on Twitter. From which I assume that there’s at least one poofter on the cheer squad. That’s nice to know, isn’t it?
It doesn’t surprise me. Soccer has always struck me as rather a camp sport: you’re not allowed to use your hands (unless you’re the goalie, and even then he wears gloves) or touch the opposing players, and if you end up on the ground it’s probably because you flung yourself there to have a tanty.
From George Best to David Beckham, soccer’s always looked fairly gay, a home of prima donnas, vain metrosexuals, and pussy-whipped mammas boys with as much interest in fashion and haircuts as in kicking a ball around. No wonder the Italians are soccer crazy.
But rugby union has always been the really gay sport, heavily in denial, hiding behind the ultra-macho image. The British see through this – for as long as I can remember rugby players have been popularly known as ‘rugger-buggers’.
It begins at school, where sports teams are shielded by their status as heroes. At mine, the senior rugger teams bathed together after matches, got drunk together, and in some cases, had sex with one another, safe in the knowledge that none of them would – officially – remember a thing next day. As the pro teams say, “what happens on tour, stays on tour.”
Duncan – not his real name – was the perfect example: School Rugby Captain, Head Boy, Senior Prefect, Student Commander of the Combined Cadet Force, blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed, six feet tall and built like a Greek statue, constantly extolled by the Headmaster as the ideal of British Manhood we should all aspire to, the perfect symbol of the school.
With the Heads assistance he won a scholarship to travel the US, and almost immediately postcards addressed to the Headmaster started arriving. They lay on a table in the foyer until the school secretary arrived to take the post up to the office.
Now she was a very proper British lady who would never think of reading other people’s postcards, and so it never occurred to her that anyone else would, either. And of course the headmaster didn’t dare say anything that might draw her attention to them. So these brief tales of handsome boyfriends, wild parties, older men lavishing him with gifts in return for his services at extravagant private parties, lay there for anyone to read.
Postcards of the Empire State Building bearing US stamps were not a common sight in 1968, so of course, it wasn’t long before curious boys started reading them, and pretty soon we were waiting for the next instalment as eagerly as the headmaster must have been dreading them. But the best was yet to come.
When Duncan returned for the final assembly on his last day at school, he stepped onto the stage at morning assembly wearing his full military uniform – and blue eye-shadow. The headmaster – indeed, the whole school – pretended not to notice.
Rugby is less reticent about its homoerotic underpinnings nowadays. Last year I saw a documentary about an amateur team staggering from pub to pub getting shitfaced, stripping off, and giving the captain some lip service (because his was the biggest).
And now we even have a gay rugby union world cup, with a team in Sydney, and the beginnings of one in Melbourne.
Duncan would be proud. Now all we need are some gay AFL and league teams . . . .
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