State

eoch tide will try to gropplc ■« into •»* possession. while dn.mg the other fide о» о» from it. Note the Chorlotte bockt •« the bochground owoiting the result о» the serum It's Really A Gentleman's Game Sonic* words of o.xplanaf ion л lion I Iht* new form of niavlioni you're seeing from Room* lo П i I in in "Ion. thrashing. But worse than that would be losing those silver coins in a 100- yard stretch of grass and mud. From this strange beginning, which was presented by John T. Powell in his book. Inside Rugby, the game spread with the British Empire. Today, it is played over the entire world. Excellent teams come from such places as the Fiji Islands. New Zealand. South Af¬ rica and Argentina. Americans have adopted rugby on a lesser scale than the home-grown favorites such as baseball and football. But enough interest and savvy was applied to the game by a hard-tackling American squad to give the U.S. a 1924 Olympic- gold medal in rugby. Women. Too Interest in rugby in North Carolina appeared in 1965 when N.C. Slate University School of Design students Junius Andrews, a North Carolinian, and David Hayes, a Scotsman, de¬ cided to throw together some games on campus. From this tottering start, the N.C. State Rugby Football Club was born. Today, there are clubs in such cities as Charlotte. Wilmington and Greensboro. Fort Bragg has a club, as does Appalachian State University. Women are playing also. The Reedy Creek Rugby Club is Raleigh's wom¬ en's squad; Charlotte and Greensboro have women's clubs as well. All ACC schools have rugby clubs. Last October, the first ACC Rugby Tournament was held at N.C. State. All eight schools took part in the two- day tourney and when the dust had »«# DAVE C. HARPER On any given spring or fall weekend afternoon, some city parks and college athletic fields across North Carolina become battlefields beyond belief. And the battles are worth watching. On rectangular fields marked by football goal posts and covered with 3(1 kicking, running, tackling and screaming combatants, the game called rugby is underway. Much like American football, rugby is a hard-hitting game that requires teamwork, brute strength and speed to place an awkwardly shaped ball in an opponent's goal. In Great Britain, where the game originated, it is a na¬ tional pastime. In North Carolina, it is an e\ er-grow mg amateur sport, having teams on college campuses and in larger cities from Boone to Wil¬ mington. Rugby began at Britain's Rugby School in 1X23 when a student named White Closes Eton, in an effort to keep the bar¬ baric sport from its campus, required its foot-thc-ball players to wear w hite gloves and to hold their weekly allow¬ ance of silver in their hands during the games. Dirty gloves, which sup¬ posedly meant that the ball was han¬ dled. were probably rewarded with a Here, in о motch between Fort 81099 *» London, Ontario (Conodo) on the Woke Foret» University compus, the boll It being thrown in »rom the fidelities oTter it hot gone out o* bounds The tor- words ot both teomt line up in columns tide-by-side ond the boll it totted between them Players jump to top the boll to their bocht. Thu formotton it colled a line out. w. W. Wells was trying to toe a ball upfield in a game called "foot-the- ball" (a forerunner of today's soccer). When Well's efforts seemed to be going nowhere, he was probably over¬ come by a fit of frustration that prompted him to snatch the ball from the ground and to dash toward goal and glory. Although this flagrant violation of the game's no-hands rule might have been a breach of young gentlemanly behavior, the game, despite some seri¬ ous opposition, caught on. 14 THE STATE. October 1980