"So, you're dizzy. What happened?", said the doctor as he walked in.
"Rugby game yesterday", I said. I felt wrong. "Got my head rocked. And my foot crushed for the third game in a row".
He checked me over.
"You have a concussion", he began. "And it looks like your foot's been stomped on a few times in the same place. Seems like damage to the tissue and cartilage and probably circulation. If that area isn't getting blood, it'll turn necrotic. I'm sending you in for a test. You'll probably need surgery".
He picked up my file and began flipping through it. I stared at the floor, glum, my head down. The doctor began reading out loud as he flipped through my file.
"Torn rotator cuff........(paper scuffling)......meniscus tear......(flip to new page)......emergency room admission for possible fractured pelvis...you couldn't walk for two weeks......(scuffle scuffle)....broken finger.......(flip).....split open your eyebrow......now a concussion and damaged foot........and that's only going back a year. And all from rugby".
I still stared at the floor. I didn't know what to say.
He finally said, "How old are you?"
"Forty-four".
"You married?"
"Divorced a few years ago. Single".
He put the file down and paused. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, "Maybe it's time for you to get a girlfriend".
But I didn't want a girlfriend. I mean, I kinda did, but I didn't. What I really wanted was to just keep playing. I wanted to stay in the addictive netherworld of endless battle, endless glory, endless camaraderie and challenge and thrills, endless road trips and highlight-reel passes, endless jokes and scoring and tackling, endless everything fun and awesome. It was a world that made perfect primal, intuitive sense. And I was getting better and better as a player. I just wanted to keep playing. But I couldn't.
Follow-up visits to a neurologist (for my concussion), and a physiatrist and surgeon (for my foot), confirmed my playing career was on hold. I would spend most of the next few months in bed trying to rest off the concussion. At night, I dreamt vivid dreams of playing. When I awoke, I worried I'd never be able to play again. I just wanted to play.
I wasn't the first rugby man to feel this way. In fact, the first group of those guys had preceded me by almost two centuries. One in particular had proved more responsible for the sudden 19th century growth of rugby than anyone else.
_____________________________
Most modern readers will find the semi-autobiographical 1857 novel Tom Brown's Schooldays a difficult read. For one thing, it's more of a sermon than a proper story. For another, its author—Rugby School alumnus Thomas Hughes—wrote long before Hemingway (followed by Strunk & White) definitively depurpled English prose. As a result, the book teems with convoluted sentences, abundant Latinate and passive verbs, melodramatic modifiers, and highflown allusions.
But Victorian readers—accustomed as they were to that sort of thing—loved it. After only a year, Tom Brown's Schooldays had sold 16,000 copies. It was a dazzling tally for a new author in that era. (By way of comparison, literary superstar Charles Dickens' new novel, Great Expectations, sold 15,000 in its initial print run just three years later). And it concerns us here because the book sold the game of rugby, along with Rugby Headmaster Arnold's views on Christian education and obligation, to the world.
The plot, such as it is, is simple enough. After a young student named Tom Brown arrives at Warwickshire's Rugby School, a few older students—led by one Harry Flashman— begin to bully him. The powerless Tom feels he has no choice but to endure the harassment. But eventually, Tom and a friend stand up to Flashman. They defeat him in a physical confrontation, after which the school's social dynamics change in Tom's favor.
The now-popular Tom thereafter develops a cheeky attitude of his own. Thankfully, however, Headmaster Arnold heads off the boy's errant turn. He disciplines Tom, but then entrusts him with a special assignment: mentoring a frail young student named Arthur.
Touched by Headmaster Arnold's faith in him, Tom rises to this new responsibility. He befriends the vulnerable Arthur. When Arthur falls gravely ill, Tom helps him recover. And when bullies approach Arthur, Tom protects him.
The devout Arthur in turn inspires Tom to begin praying, develop Christian faith, and refrain from cheating on his schoolwork. Each boy grows as a result of their friendship. Along the way, Tom gains confidence and learns lessons from playing the game of rugby.
By the end of the novel, the potent mix of Dr. Arnold's inspirational leadership, Arthur's Christian faith, and Rugby School's mind-body-soul holism have transformed the originally unruddered, potentially troublesome Tom Brown into the worthy leader of all Rugby School students. His vitality now shaped and directed toward noble ends, he finds himself on track to become a true English gentleman. Albeit in his own ways, he will become warrior, scholar, athlete, Christian exemplar, father, husband, and more. Along with his schoolmates, he will also become a co-builder of the beneficent British empire, the greatest civilizing influence on earth.
If Tom Brown's Schooldays had achieved nothing else, it could still lay claim to definitively establishing a new fiction genre called the school story. (As such, it paved the way for subsequent school novels like Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Harry Potter, and movies like Dead Poet's Society).
But Hughes' book achieved much more than that. It compellingly evangelized Arnold's notion of ideal Christian manhood, and by extension, ideal Christian civilization. Further, it portrayed Britain as closest to that ideal Christian civilization, and implied that to the extent British education adopted Arnold's methods, Britain would grow even greater. It implied that any nation adopting Arnoldian educational principles would, like Britain, find itself on the path to fulfilling its divine potential. And along the way, it promoted rugby as the great athletic distillation of all these ideas. "This is worth living for", Hughes writes in his novel, referring to a school rugby match. "The whole sum of school-boy existence gathered up into one straining, struggling half-hour, a half-hour worth a year of common life". (Hughes himself spent his whole life pining to re-experience his time at Rugby School).
British thinkers, educators, and politicians took note. Intrigued by Hughes' claims, the British government formed the Clarendon Commission a few years later to investigate the nation's educational system. After examining Harrow, Eton, Winchester, and other schools, the commission concurred with Thomas Hughes: Of all the schools, Rugby best balanced between academics, Christian teaching, character formation, and sports. The Commission declared that Rugby School was a "national institution...a place of education and a source of influence for the whole kingdom...it instructs everywhere, is known everywhere, and exercises an influence everywhere".
It was now official: Rugby School provided the example every other school should follow. And follow they did, as did similar schools around the world. In the years following publication of Hughes's book, almost all these schools would come to adopt rugby as their school's official ball game. And this, in turn, produced thousands of rugby-mad alumni eager to keep playing long after graduating from school.
And so it was that by the end of the 1800s, throughout the British Empire and beyond, rugby-playing schools and amateur rugby clubs had come to dot the globe: from New Zealand to Scotland, South Africa to France, Canada to Ireland, Australia to Hong Kong, and more. But each club, no matter where it was, embodied the same unusual suite of allegiances and dispositions first fostered by the innovative Headmaster Arnold years earlier. The original creation of that culture is itself a remarkable story.
More next time.
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