I can still hear the quick crunch of his vertebrae cracking. That's the meddling of hindsight, of course — he was too far away, out in the middle of the night-dark field, and there were too many people around me and around him: the fans heckling, the grunts and dull thud of 16 men crashing together in the scrum, then an ominous silence. People breathing hard, whispering, yelling for help.
But whatever I heard or didn't hear, whatever tricks memory has since played, I knew as soon as the scrum collapsed in on itself that something was wrong. It was clear in the collective intake of breath from the crowd, in the way the other players shifted their feet and paced in circles while they waited for the stretcher to arrive. I was in my ninth year of competitive rugby and I had seen plenty of men and women carried off the field, but in all those other instances the spinal boards had been only precautionary. Everyone knew, this time, that something was different.
By the next day, or the day after, the news was all over the rugby community in the small-town British university where I was a graduate student, and a member of a women's team. He'd been in the front row when the scrum caved in, and he'd been driven headfirst into the ground. His neck was broken, and apart from a twitching bicep, he was paralyzed from the shoulders down.
"He was so young," people said, defaulting to the past tense. "He was only 20 years old."
And then, the inevitable Band-Aid: "He was doing what he loved."
I thought about that phrase over and over again in the weeks after that night, and about its implication that paying a physical, or even fatal, price for the sports we love is worthwhile. At our next practice, the younger girls were deeply shaken — some contemplated quitting the team, calculating that it wasn't worth the risk. I reassured them that catastrophic spinal injuries were rare enough in men's rugby, and extraordinarily so in the women's game. But I wondered: How would I react, if my sport forced me to pay a price beyond the bruises, bone chips, blood and pulled muscles I'd already offered up?
If "doing what I loved" cost me the use of my legs and my arms, or the full use of my brain, would I say it was worth it? Could I measure the sport's rewards and stack them against the risks, and if I did, what would that balance sheet look like? What had the sport given me, and how much was I willing to pay in return? (...)
I'd always gravitated toward sports, though I'd never excelled at them. I'd been a mediocre little league softball player — my specialty was stealing bases, not a huge challenge in a league where very few girls could throw from home plate to second base with any accuracy — and a half-decent soccer player, relying on hustle and natural speed more than skill. I swam, and I ran track, and one summer I flirted with tennis. But none of those sports ever felt like they truly fit.
In junior high, I boasted to classmates that I would play rugby when I got to high school, despite knowing absolutely nothing about the sport. When I showed up at my first practice, I'd never even seen a rugby ball or watched a test on TV. All I knew is that it was a tough, violent game, and that, unlike football, girls were allowed to play it.
In 2006, researchers in the U.K. published a survey of 24 peer-reviewed studies examining people's motivations for playing sports. Echoing the Nike ad, the survey found that teenage girls increased their self-esteem and tapped into new social support networks when they joined a sports team. But those rewards came with a corresponding sacrifice. "While many girls wanted to be physically active," the researchers wrote, "a tension existed between wishing to appear feminine and attractive and the sweaty muscular image attached to active women ... A clear opposition can be seen between girls wanting to be physically active and at the same time feminine."
I remember seeing that tension play out on fields and hardwood gym floors throughout my school years: athletic girls catching themselves trying too hard to make a catch or swing a bat, visibly pulling themselves up short, then falling back on the safety of giggles and halfhearted efforts instead of striving for excellence, afraid of who might see. But I don't remember feeling all that torn about it, myself. I was awkward and inept when it came to "girl stuff" — slow to grasp the nuances of clothes, hair or makeup, flat-chested, and apparently incapable of anything resembling flirting. Rather than trying and failing to exist in that world, it seemed easier to me to embrace the tomboy cliché. When I joined the high school rugby team at age 15, it felt like I had completed a fumbling journey toward an identity that I could wrap myself in, and be shielded from the outside world.
I loved the early morning practices, riding the city bus through the darkness and running laps around the school's hallways while we waited for the snow to melt off our field in spring. I played in the back line in my early seasons, the row of leaner, fleeter players who ran the ball after the burlier forwards had scrummed over it, and I loved learning set plays and then learning the secret code names to go with them. ("Jerry Springer!" We'd yell across the field. "Sally Jessy Raphael!") I was tentative in my first season, afraid of hitting people and afraid of being hit. But I soon learned that the fear itself, the anticipation of pain, was almost always worse than the reality. Soon I loved the sound of an opposing player's bones jangling together when I drove her into the ground, and I even learned to love the sickening, stomach-churning moments before an open field tackle, wondering if I would miss or make the hit.
I loved being yelled at by my last name. I loved the scrapes and lumps I racked up on shins, thighs, and shoulders, the line of yellowed fingerprint bruises running down my arms in my prom photo. I loved the belligerence of the T-shirts that were handed out at tournaments: "Give Blood, Play Rugby." "Suck It Up, Princess." "You Only Wish You Could Play Like a Girl."
Most of all, I loved my teammates. Though I'd started playing rugby in part because of my discomfort in Girl World, the team didn't just provide a refuge: It also drew me back out again. It was in the dressing room after practices and games that I learned to stop hiding in a bathroom stall to change, learned to be comfortable with and even proud of my body. Girls from the team dragged me to the mall, and to school dances, stuffing me into dresses and heels that gradually came to feel less foreign. When I graduated after four seasons of high school rugby, and prepared to head off for four more seasons in college, I felt transformed. I no longer called myself a tomboy, and rugby was no longer a crutch.
So much for the revenue side of the balance sheet. Rugby had, for a time, given me everything. But around the same time I'd begun to outgrow my need for it, I'd also begun to understand its potential cost. I racked up pulled muscles and strained ligaments, and chipped a bone in my ankle that still aches under pressure, more than 15 years later. I played with women sporting twin scars on their knees from ACL surgeries. I saw a man come off the pitch one afternoon with his ear torn half off. I helped concussed teammates stagger off the field, unable to remember their own names, and suffered one concussion myself — a minor one, but still an injury with the terrifying power to reach back in time and erase my memories from even before the hit. I had one friend, on my college's men's team, who swore he would quit after three concussions, but he only counted the big ones. Once, I saw him pick himself up after a collision and line up alongside the wrong team. And then, finally, I watched that young man break his neck under the floodlights on a cold night in northern England. I was haunted by the question of my own potential regrets.
In the end, I quit the sport not by choice, but because I became an itinerant freelance writer, lived out of a suitcase for a year and a half, and eventually moved to the Yukon Territory in northern Canada, where there was no rugby to play. The question lingered, though. Here, people paddled whitewater rapids and tumbled off mountain bikes and ventured into the mountainous backcountry on skis and snowmobiles. Every year, boaters drowned or died of exposure, skiers were buried in avalanches, and hikers and mountaineers were rescued, or not reached in time. I bought a can of bear spray, learned to ice climb, capsized a canoe in an icy rapid for the first time. I faced a new set of rewards and a new set of risks. I wondered about the price my friends and I would be willing to pay to "do what we love."
But whatever I heard or didn't hear, whatever tricks memory has since played, I knew as soon as the scrum collapsed in on itself that something was wrong. It was clear in the collective intake of breath from the crowd, in the way the other players shifted their feet and paced in circles while they waited for the stretcher to arrive. I was in my ninth year of competitive rugby and I had seen plenty of men and women carried off the field, but in all those other instances the spinal boards had been only precautionary. Everyone knew, this time, that something was different.
By the next day, or the day after, the news was all over the rugby community in the small-town British university where I was a graduate student, and a member of a women's team. He'd been in the front row when the scrum caved in, and he'd been driven headfirst into the ground. His neck was broken, and apart from a twitching bicep, he was paralyzed from the shoulders down."He was so young," people said, defaulting to the past tense. "He was only 20 years old."
And then, the inevitable Band-Aid: "He was doing what he loved."
I thought about that phrase over and over again in the weeks after that night, and about its implication that paying a physical, or even fatal, price for the sports we love is worthwhile. At our next practice, the younger girls were deeply shaken — some contemplated quitting the team, calculating that it wasn't worth the risk. I reassured them that catastrophic spinal injuries were rare enough in men's rugby, and extraordinarily so in the women's game. But I wondered: How would I react, if my sport forced me to pay a price beyond the bruises, bone chips, blood and pulled muscles I'd already offered up?
If "doing what I loved" cost me the use of my legs and my arms, or the full use of my brain, would I say it was worth it? Could I measure the sport's rewards and stack them against the risks, and if I did, what would that balance sheet look like? What had the sport given me, and how much was I willing to pay in return? (...)
I'd always gravitated toward sports, though I'd never excelled at them. I'd been a mediocre little league softball player — my specialty was stealing bases, not a huge challenge in a league where very few girls could throw from home plate to second base with any accuracy — and a half-decent soccer player, relying on hustle and natural speed more than skill. I swam, and I ran track, and one summer I flirted with tennis. But none of those sports ever felt like they truly fit.
In junior high, I boasted to classmates that I would play rugby when I got to high school, despite knowing absolutely nothing about the sport. When I showed up at my first practice, I'd never even seen a rugby ball or watched a test on TV. All I knew is that it was a tough, violent game, and that, unlike football, girls were allowed to play it.
In 2006, researchers in the U.K. published a survey of 24 peer-reviewed studies examining people's motivations for playing sports. Echoing the Nike ad, the survey found that teenage girls increased their self-esteem and tapped into new social support networks when they joined a sports team. But those rewards came with a corresponding sacrifice. "While many girls wanted to be physically active," the researchers wrote, "a tension existed between wishing to appear feminine and attractive and the sweaty muscular image attached to active women ... A clear opposition can be seen between girls wanting to be physically active and at the same time feminine."
I remember seeing that tension play out on fields and hardwood gym floors throughout my school years: athletic girls catching themselves trying too hard to make a catch or swing a bat, visibly pulling themselves up short, then falling back on the safety of giggles and halfhearted efforts instead of striving for excellence, afraid of who might see. But I don't remember feeling all that torn about it, myself. I was awkward and inept when it came to "girl stuff" — slow to grasp the nuances of clothes, hair or makeup, flat-chested, and apparently incapable of anything resembling flirting. Rather than trying and failing to exist in that world, it seemed easier to me to embrace the tomboy cliché. When I joined the high school rugby team at age 15, it felt like I had completed a fumbling journey toward an identity that I could wrap myself in, and be shielded from the outside world.
I loved the early morning practices, riding the city bus through the darkness and running laps around the school's hallways while we waited for the snow to melt off our field in spring. I played in the back line in my early seasons, the row of leaner, fleeter players who ran the ball after the burlier forwards had scrummed over it, and I loved learning set plays and then learning the secret code names to go with them. ("Jerry Springer!" We'd yell across the field. "Sally Jessy Raphael!") I was tentative in my first season, afraid of hitting people and afraid of being hit. But I soon learned that the fear itself, the anticipation of pain, was almost always worse than the reality. Soon I loved the sound of an opposing player's bones jangling together when I drove her into the ground, and I even learned to love the sickening, stomach-churning moments before an open field tackle, wondering if I would miss or make the hit.
I loved being yelled at by my last name. I loved the scrapes and lumps I racked up on shins, thighs, and shoulders, the line of yellowed fingerprint bruises running down my arms in my prom photo. I loved the belligerence of the T-shirts that were handed out at tournaments: "Give Blood, Play Rugby." "Suck It Up, Princess." "You Only Wish You Could Play Like a Girl."
Most of all, I loved my teammates. Though I'd started playing rugby in part because of my discomfort in Girl World, the team didn't just provide a refuge: It also drew me back out again. It was in the dressing room after practices and games that I learned to stop hiding in a bathroom stall to change, learned to be comfortable with and even proud of my body. Girls from the team dragged me to the mall, and to school dances, stuffing me into dresses and heels that gradually came to feel less foreign. When I graduated after four seasons of high school rugby, and prepared to head off for four more seasons in college, I felt transformed. I no longer called myself a tomboy, and rugby was no longer a crutch.
So much for the revenue side of the balance sheet. Rugby had, for a time, given me everything. But around the same time I'd begun to outgrow my need for it, I'd also begun to understand its potential cost. I racked up pulled muscles and strained ligaments, and chipped a bone in my ankle that still aches under pressure, more than 15 years later. I played with women sporting twin scars on their knees from ACL surgeries. I saw a man come off the pitch one afternoon with his ear torn half off. I helped concussed teammates stagger off the field, unable to remember their own names, and suffered one concussion myself — a minor one, but still an injury with the terrifying power to reach back in time and erase my memories from even before the hit. I had one friend, on my college's men's team, who swore he would quit after three concussions, but he only counted the big ones. Once, I saw him pick himself up after a collision and line up alongside the wrong team. And then, finally, I watched that young man break his neck under the floodlights on a cold night in northern England. I was haunted by the question of my own potential regrets.
In the end, I quit the sport not by choice, but because I became an itinerant freelance writer, lived out of a suitcase for a year and a half, and eventually moved to the Yukon Territory in northern Canada, where there was no rugby to play. The question lingered, though. Here, people paddled whitewater rapids and tumbled off mountain bikes and ventured into the mountainous backcountry on skis and snowmobiles. Every year, boaters drowned or died of exposure, skiers were buried in avalanches, and hikers and mountaineers were rescued, or not reached in time. I bought a can of bear spray, learned to ice climb, capsized a canoe in an icy rapid for the first time. I faced a new set of rewards and a new set of risks. I wondered about the price my friends and I would be willing to pay to "do what we love."
by Eva Holland, SB Nation | Read more:
Image: Eva Holland
